Breaking News! Second Edition of Tell it Slant

It's here! The brand new, revised, updated, 2nd Edition of Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction.

Which, lucky for you, means an opportunity for another giveaway!

You can enter to receive a free signed copy of this edition by leaving a comment below or on my Facebook page by Feb. 29 (leap year: take a chance!). I'll choose one winner at random on my birthday, March 1 (I love giving away presents on my birthday.)

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I thought you might be interested in the collaborative process that led to this most recent incarnation of the textbook.

In 2002, just a couple of years after I joined the faculty at Western Washington University, my colleague Suzanne Paola and I realized together that no really comprehensive textbooks existed for creative nonfiction writing. Great anthologies, yes. Writing instruction, no. So, being who we are, we said: "let's write it."

We really didn't know each other well at the time, which many people said would be a recipe for disaster. But we worked so well together that the book got written in a year, and a deep friendship developed too.  We each had different areas of expertise to bring to the endeavor, and we both loved good food as a fuel for writing.

This is the first edition of the textbook, which included an anthology. It quickly became a favorite for many teachers of creative nonfiction, so we decided to revise it to create a trade edition as well, geared to the general public. A year later this book was born: without the anthology and with some new material.

Last year, we heard from one of our readers that the textbook edition had gone out of print. "Really?" we exclaimed. "No one told us." But our agent checked and it was true. McGraw-Hill, for reasons that remain mysterious, allowed the textbook edition to go out of print, leaving many creative nonfiction teachers stranded. We received many messages pleading for something to take its place.

Since the trade edition was still quite popular (and remained in print), we decided to update and revise it to reflect new trends in creative nonfiction, and to create resources so the book could easily be adapted to the classroom. 

We added a chapter devoted to publishing, and we bolstered existing chapters with sections on blogging, the radio essay, hypermedia, multimedia, ethnographic research and current controversies in creative nonfiction. We moved things around a bit. We wrote a new Preface. We included two essays of our own as sample readings in the book, and the publisher is creating a website where we'll have extra readings and sample syllabi for using the book for both creative nonfiction and composition courses.

We're very excited about this new edition, and we'll be showing it off at the AWP conference in Chicago, March 1-3. If you're there, come by the Bellingham Review table in the Book Fair to say hello! We'll have sample syllabi and other goodies to give away.