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Author’s Note

The subtitle of this book—On the American Real and Surreal—marks an important distinction. Some of the essays herein are based entirely on fact: carefully reported and researched, they stand as nonfiction. Others are works of fiction. Some are a mix of the two. To avoid confusion, I have noted below the genres of each work in the collection.

“Lonely in America,” “Manhattanville, Part One,” “Manhattanville, Part Two,” “The Personal,” and “When The Sea Comes for Us” should be considered nonfiction as they are works of reportage and/or memoir.

“Cleveland,” “Multiply/Divide,” “Cowboy Horizon,” “In Search of the Face,” and “Norway” are fictional scenarios that, in some cases, are based on characters and events from history and/or the present.

“Chicago Radio” and “Post-logical Notes on Self-Election” are lyric essays—a form that blends poetry and prose, memoir and reportage, actual and imagined events—with the goal of making an argument.

I make the above categorizations because I think they are important. But I also make them with a bit of pause, because the border between nonfiction and fiction—while seemingly clear as black and white—is often porous enough to render the distinction irrelevant. Take, as a hypothetical example, the writer who pens a memoir about a life with her parents, but leaves out the complicated relationship with her siblings, omitting for the reader a complete understanding of her family dynamic. Her memoir is “nonfiction.” But that doesn’t make it true. Conversely many works of fiction, precisely because they take liberties with fact, can depict a world that is better designed than our own to reveal truth. One could make a similar case about the distinction between the surreal and the real.

These works are my attempt to address such nuances as they unfold place by place, argument by argument, and story by story.

Wendy S. Walters

December 2014

New York, NY