The Wilderness Between

I think that Environmental and Nature Writing has been terribly important and constructive toward my writing. Already in my fiction and other work, I find a deeper sensitivity and connection between landscape and mood and character. I let myself linger a little longer in those moments of setting and description, allowing for a moment of reflection and detail before moving on to action and character.

This class also reminded me of the importance of specifics. Specific plants and animals and textures and colors. Knowing the name of a thing gives it power. It lends this power to the writing as well. I think this also has to do with metaphor. Metaphor is so incredibly effective and creates its own type of specificity. Nature Writing has really allowed me to work on the craft of metaphor.

Metaphor allows for the imprecision of language and communication to become more precise. It creates certain subconscious connections that convey so much more than just the subject itself. Some of the most memorable ones that I’ve written for me have been in my essay. Like the thunderheads over the prairie. I described them in my midterm as “convening like bullfrogs, swelling their chests to claim their territory.” And then in a draft of my final as “bullying thunderheads that flashed as they jostled one another like jocks before a big game.” The bullfrogs convey a much different image than the jocks, and the second description also gives a better sense of imminent threat. Or at least some ill will. I am really glad that I got this chance to hone my language.

I also feel that nonfiction writing has allowed reflection in my pieces that I don’t normally get to take. While I realize that I may not be quite reflective enough to succeed at nonfiction, I feel that this freedom to linger creates some very powerful moments. Moments that I would not have found if I had simply rushed on to the next scene.

Of course, I also learned a lot about the environment that I didn’t know about. Again, specifics. And a lot of the discussions we had (what is nature? Etc) really challenged what I thought about certain topics. I really enjoyed the class trips that we took as well. It was nice to get into nature. For similar reasons, even though it got to be a little much at times, I really enjoyed the nature blogs. I liked being forced to stop and really look at the nature around me. I liked watching autumn happen. I liked the few moments of quiet introspection that made me think, but didn’t feed into my neuroses like worry.

Overall, I thought this course was well put together. It had a nice balance of writing and reading, talking and doing. While I wasn’t crazy about all of the readings, I think that there was something for everyone in the wide spread of nature writing. I’m even recommending Ed Abbey to my father who is a geologist! Most importantly, though I wasn’t converted to nonfiction, I see the important lessons this style of writing can teach me in general. And I enjoy it.

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s experiences are truly moving in “A Place to Stand.” I found myself quite frustrated with the breaks in the sections that we read. While I am not a big non-fiction fan, I was completely captured by his narrative. I wanted to read all of it, know all of it, and be moved by all of it. His use of language is truly amazing. I kept trying to read his work like a writer, but ended up just reading. I had to stop myself multiple times to look at his craft a little closer.

While his world is completely different than my own, I could relate to everything he said. That is craft. It felt like I was there with him, watching his mother’s affair from under the floorboards of his house. I rode in the car with his drunk father, trying to sleep in the seat under a jacket. I was in prison, watching someone take over a space I had carefully created for myself (we’ve all had bad roommates). There is something so immediate about his language, so raw and vivid, that it completely passes through the analytical part of the mind and into the experiential.

I think part of this has to do with how seamlessly he enters and leaves scene. It never gets too clunky or awkward. Too, the language, while elaborate, is very natural. It isn’t overwrought or careless. It is precise and well-measured. The psychologist in me wonders how he processes and uses language since he learned to read at such a late age. It isn’t as if he just learned the language though; he’d spoken it all his life. So it’s odd because there is such a strangeness with something that had been so familiar.

His poetry itself is so vulnerable and rich. It was interesting to read it after having read “A Place to Stand” because it was like the guts of the experiences he had put in the book. I thought that the book had been so complete and well rounded, but the poetry is raw with emotions and images. The poem VI in “Martin & Meditations on the South Valley” which seemed to me to be about his mother was heart-breaking. The final lines “and your voices strained with the tragedy/ that you had lived a fairytale--/ Then he shot you and himself.” were devastating. I tried to see if this was, in fact, what had happened to his mother. If she had really been murdered because of the similarities in the stories, but I couldn’t find any confirmation.

I like how his poetry really struggles with these two worlds he had been trapped between as a child. We see glimpses of that in his story, I’m sure there is more of this in the pieces we didn’t see, but he never fully addresses it until he works on his poetry. And while he struggles with this white, “civilized” side, and this Mexican, wild side, I didn’t really see why he was considered a nature poet until I read, “Black Mesa Poems.” “Roots” was one of my favorite poems in that collection.

I’ve heard so much about Pittsburgh being such a healthy and green city. Even when I tried to google for environmental issues or articles, most of them were praising Pittsburgh for all of the work they’d done reversing the harm done by the steel mills and lack of sewer plant for most of the twentieth century. However, once I started looking for more specific things, like air quality, little problems started to come out of the woodwork.

I was very surprised to hear that Pittsburgh was ranked number two for worst air pollution out of the country. In fact, the only city that performed worse than Pittsburgh on the American Lung Association’s list in 2007 was Los Angeles, which is down right smoggy. The air looked so clear here that I couldn’t believe the air was so unhealthy and downright dangerous.

This wasn’t the first time either for such a ranking. In 2003, the Surface Transportation Policy Project ranked Pittsbugh sixth on its list of the worst air quality, and then bumped it up to number two by 2005. The local news station even did an in-depth report on the subject, which won awards.

To be fair, a good portion of this pollution (40%) is caused by emissions from cars and other forms of transportation. However, apparently, many organizations in the area still burn coal for fuel, including three of the five largest sources of sulfur-dioxide in the country, all local power plants. When sulfur-dioxide mixes with ammonia already in the air, it turns in to a deadly, super fine compound named PM2.5. Though it’s not visible like the smog and smoke used to be over Pittsburgh in its steel mill days. Actually, it’s even more dangerous because of this fact.

The chemical, PM2.5, is so small that it bypasses the hairs in the nose that are supposed to stop such pollution from making its way into the body. It also slides pass the trachea, and nestles its way into the lower lung where it causes lung disease, asthma, and allergies. In fact, over ten percent of Pittsburghers suffer from asthma which is higher than the national average.

Too, these super fine particles can even work their way fro your lungs to your bloodstream where they then affect your heart. The damage that the PM2.5 particles can cause is devastating. It has been linked to much higher rates of lung disease, heart disease, and cancer because of how effective it is at entering the body.

I think this is a terribly disturbing problem for the people of Pittsburgh because there is this false sense of security. The city has already done so much to make itself more sustainable, but it’s still dangerously polluted, even though you can’t tell so without special equipment. To make matters worse, the owners of the power plants are refusing to put special scrubbers and cleaners in their equipment to clean the air before it is released. They say that the cost of installing such devices would cause their customers more harm than good because of the extra money they would have to pay for service. I guess saving money is worth more than our health.

I love Wyoming. I really feel like Gretel Ehrlich captured the feeling of the place really well—and the people. It made me miss the plains. Since I am also writing my final on Montana, it was really interesting to compare how she described that part of the country. I think our differences come because I was mainly in Montana for the summer, whereas she was in Wyoming for winter. The season and time of year completely change how you relate to a place, or how a place feels.

For example, I’ve been to Colorado Springs twice. Once in winter to ski, the other to go to the Garden of the Gods in summer. In the winter, my experience was completely dominated by the large quantities of snow that they receive there. And the fact that I don’t like skiing. But in the summer, the prominent colors I would use to describe my time there would be red and orange—the color of the rock in the garden.

I found that Ehrlich really captured the people and feel of the place. The isolation, the quiet passion, the space(!). Nothing hurries, there’s nowhere to hurry to. Everything is on Rez time. Even in an emergency, the man took his time to close the door to the cattle pen. People take care of each other in this way.

I think that St. Louis culture has been affected by its place. The people have a small town courtesy even though it is a large city. It is hard to forget our history as a Midwest town. The plains and farm land that stretch out just beyond the suburbs stand as a permanent reminder. The Arch, too, is a symbol of our frontier heritage. However, there is also a conflicting feeling from the east, the stuffy pride of a historical city.

Unlike Boston, New York, or Chicago, St. Louis’s time as a center of culture and society has dissipated. However, as St. Louis citizens, we still carry that big city, eastern pride. We have semblances of a culture all our own, museums, art, and history. We even have old money. But people aren’t afraid to look each other in the eye. We smile at strangers, instead of cutting through midday traffic with our heads down.

We pride ourselves on being a Christian city, on our name. There are always bake sales, fundraisers, and marathons. Despite the isolation of the suburbs, people are always looking for ways to help out. Just look at our baseball team. We are proud of good sportsmanship.

Nine Mile Run was a very interesting and valuable experience for me. I had done my fair share of complaining about it—it was early, and the morning after a big Halloween party, and raining. However, I actually really enjoyed myself. It was nice to get down in the earth like that, standing out in the elements. It was also so much fun to bond and work with other people in the class that I hadn’t really talked to before outside of class. Definitely worth while even if I now have a sniffle.

I plant it

as if it were a piece of my mother

I really enjoyed reading this packet and book of nature themed poetry. It was interesting to me the ways in which the authors approached the subjects. Just as in essays, they could rant, reminisce of their own memories in nature, connect their personal experiences with nature, reflect on the beauty and complexity they see around them. However, I still enjoyed the same sort of tactic that I like in essays: relating nature back to the self/ personal, meaningful experiences.

I think some of the best examples of this were in The Journals of Scheherazade. Particularly the one poem, “No Tomatoes”, is so tender and heart-felt. The details of the speaker’s care of the tomatoes, her failure to stimulate either the plants or her marriage. It is so heart-breaking. The image of “masturbating/ each flower with a Q-tip” or “walking around at night like a thief/ with a flashlight”. And I’m completely swept by the admission at the end:

But there is nothing

like desire here, nothing

like a warm tomato picked almost

overripe off the vine, so red

you could cry, so full of juice

and flavor that salt and pepper

seem heresy.

No, there are no tomatoes here, no one to tell

me why, and I don’t know

what kind of interference

it will take

to want each other again.

The poem starts with the tomato plants, comes to the couple, then back to the tomatoes, and the last line reveals the couple again. Yet it is very sneaky, seeming seamless. The last line especially. “Each other”

I think these poems really made me think again about how we as humans relate to the world, and some of these poems even dealt with that directly. Like “For A Coming Extinction,” which was also one of my favorites. It speaks with bitterness and sarcasm about how we are destroying the world, wiping out whole species. And it is so moving. Actually, when I say that I mostly mean the first half. I wish the poem had ended at that first page, after two stanzas. It loses its momentum after that I think.

And “Walk in Tick Season” made me almost even like ticks. I think this is a good example of a poem that celebrates nature, but doesn’t get too purple or glittery. An example of a poem that fails is “A Blessing”. I really dislike this poem. I had seen it before in a beginning poetry class and it made me want to gag. Bleh.

I don’t like “A Blessing” because first of all, it’s a poem about ponies with eyes that “darken with kindness”. The ponies themselves “can hardly contain their happiness” and “love each other”. It’s like My Little Ponies with rainbows and sunshine everywhere. I will admit to a good detail: “And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear/ That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.” This moment is so sensual.

The line that eludes me in this poem that I dislike so much is “There is no loneliness like theirs.” It is put right after telling us that they love each other. It is simply stated. It is a quiet moment that I want to hold on to and explore. I don’t know what he means, nor does he try to explain or dwell here. Instead, he moves on to eating grass contentedly. Everything so happy and god damned content again. I don’t like it. I don’t trust it.

If nature poems have taught me anything, it’s to mistrust that front of happiness and beauty. Hummingbirds and tomatoes are sex. Wisteria is death. A tick, a vulture, and torn and mutilated fish are beautiful.

Mary Oliver’s Blue Iris was a very refreshing read after so many essays. I am not a poet myself, but I really enjoyed this collection. Her writing was excellent. It really captured the feel of these moments and sensations. Her work really reminded me of haiku. The essence or the feel of the work captures the “zen” of haiku, its gentleness and reflection. Too, her essays make you reconsider the thing itself as the poem goes on. Like “Touch Me Nots” or “Rice,” at the end of the poem, she comes back to the thing, and it has changed.

On the other hand, I admire her for not simply relying on the haiku, which is the traditional form (as far as I, the fiction writer, know) of combining poetry and nature. But there are still those passages that steal my breath. In “Touch Me Nots”: “a little raccoon inside/ praying,/ as it felt, over and over,/ the mesh of its capture”.

This image really stuck with me. The vulnerability it invokes, the helplessness. I think she gets this by using “little”, “praying”, and the repetition of “over and over”. It’s lovely.

I think my favorite poems though were “Roses”, “Some Questions You Might Ask”, and “Black Oaks”. But even as I list them, I can’t help but remember the one about sunflowers. Or the one about…

I won’t discuss all of them here, but since “Roses” keeps coming back to me, I’ll look a little deeper.

The look on her face in a dream

Stayed with me all day

Like a promise I had failed.

Not that I had made any—

Not that I could remember—

But she was looking into the north

Where nothing lives but white clouds

Of crying birds, like bits of snow.

And the grass on which she was standing,

And the roses thick on the fences

Were soft and bright, able to renew themselves

As a woman, finally, cannot do.

First, I love that it starts with a dream. It makes the peaceful, sort of foggy details that come even better. Really, it is the third stanza that makes it. Oliver makes us look north, and then breaks, “where nothing lives”. Beautiful. Then white. Clouds of birds, snow. Gorgeous. And then I really love how the story comes back around to the woman and the promise. The last line really rings with such finality. Probably because of that word. Final. And Cannot.

I’m not sure that my poetry is quite up to par to be able to ramble off even a draft of a poem right now. However, I can share my personal experience with roses, and we can pretend that it is crafted well enough to be a lyrical essay.

When my mother moved into her own house after the divorce, she began to take gardening very seriously. She went to the gardening store at the end of the street every weekend to pick up some new bud, or seed. After some time, I prevailed upon her to try roses. I was probably twelve and fancied myself to be like Belle from “Beauty and the Beast,” and so I wanted roses. I thought that this would be my break into gardening, and I was determined to grow beautiful red roses.

My mother bought two bushes for me and, catching my excitement, helped me plant them. Romantics, both of us, we planned to coax them over the dilapidated shed in our backyard. However, the bushes were not what I expected. They looked more like gnarled fingers pinching at the ground rather than the beautiful plants I had seen in books. My mother and I took extra care of the plants. Every afternoon, once my mom came home from work, we would survey the bushes, trying to read their signs.

However, despite all of our care and our desire, the bushes withered and died in front of us. We watched as the few leaves that had come attached, became brown and brittle. The petals of the few buds that had initially taken shape wilted and withered. Instead of a lesson on gardening and life, the bushes became an instruction on death.

I really fond Paul Theroux’s essay, “Lighting Out,” to be extremely well written and organized. The way he captures Cairo in his interactions with the civilians is amazing. Personally, it took me back to Greece where I had a similar experience with cabdrivers and the general local tourism.

I really enjoyed the use of the phrase “inshallah” throughout the essay. I liked how it rounded the piece, and changed meaning for the author as the story progressed.

However, I’m not sure that I would have called this piece “nature writing.” This seems to me to be more about place in general than the other pieces we have focused on so far. Even in the desert, he focuses more on the Sphinx and historical aspects rather than the land itself. In the city, he focuses on the people. Too, his discussion of Africa seems entirely focused on culture, history, and people and not so much the land itself. He wasn’t worried about erosion, or the struggles farmers have with the ever growing desert. Theroux focuses on war, famine, and disease instead.

I’m sure that there is much more reflection on nature later in the book, but this particular chapter, while well crafted and fascinating, seemed more people based.

Then again, as we’ve often discussed in class, how can you separate nature from people and still have human readers become invested? The people of Africa as well seem particularly tied to their country. For example, we rarely discuss the individual nations of Africa. In Western news and media at least, we only talk about the whole continent. And with all of the disease, corruption, and general suffering, the people are stuck.

Perhaps this is a particular case where the people become the place, and the place becomes the people. It is impossible to separate one from another. Cowboys make the West. Farmers make the mid-West. Old money and big business makes the East. Movie stars make Los Angeles.

I think that in class, we have discussed a lot about twining people and place to make place more palatable and relatable to people. We have talked about it as a tool. But how about more simply, place is people; people is place?

In Theroux’s essay, we see the cab drivers and the desert. Forget wars, famine, rampant AIDs, and focus on the land. The desert itself is harsh and inhospitable, and the Nile River Valley only flourishes after the flood. To get through the more lean times, any survivor would learn to take advantage of the good times to get through the bad. To do what they could to survive.

I think we see this even now in the cab drivers as they smile while swindling you. These are desperate times for Africa as a whole, and the drivers have simply found some of the most effective ways of taking what they can. 1) Most important is friendliness because otherwise no one will want to do business with you. 2) Foreigners don’t know how things work or how much things cost, so adding a little extra (especially because they have so much) won’t be a problem. And 3) If you are persistent enough, or tell them about your eleven children and their hungry bellies, the foreign customer will more likely give in and even feel good about giving you their money.

Janisse Ray’s “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood” is a fascinating exploration of a family and their environment. This book really captures for me the theme of this MFA writing program about how crucial environment is to a story and a character. All of the elements of this book, each description and story, comes back to the family and reveals another facet.

One of my favorite sections of the book was the chapter titled, “Built by Fire.” In this section, Ray personifies the lightning and the longleaf pines, turning the constant battle between the two as a kind of myth. The greedy lightning has claimed the land below and will destroy anything that tries to claim it. The innocent pine finds the ground to be fertile, and thus, the battle begins. Every few years, the lightning strikes down the pesky pines, only to have them grow back even stronger and smarter. Slowly, the pines build natural defenses against the lightning’s attacks until one day, fire is no longer much of a threat.

In this way, Janisse Ray’s family has survived in an otherwise flat land where poverty and mental illness ran rampant in their family. Like the pines, they dug their roots deep. Despite the lightning strikes of hallucination and depression, the familes always grew back even stronger, more solid. The grandfather, Charlie’s, mental illness ripped his family apart, but by the time, bipolar disorder struck Ray’s father, the family was able to cope with it in a much less destructive way.

Too, the second generation had learned from the generation before. Ray’s father forbade Charlie from cursing or physically punishing Janisse and her siblings. We can see that his mental illness veered away from the violence of his fathers in the chapter of “Native Genius.” As Ray explains, the savage and trickery of the wildness in her grandfather had resurfaced in her father, but in a much more constructive manner. Her father used the intellect his own father used for cruel jokes to reconstruct and build machines. Even in the throws of madness, he used what wit he had to protect his family, not harm them.

When I write my essay for this class, I want it to be as involved as this book is. The closest thing we’ve read like it in this class so far has to be the essay called “Buckeye,” where the author uses the land to remember, characterize, and even to come to forgive his father. I think Ray uses this book much in the same way. She is making a sort of peace with her childhood in the junkyard and her own “Southerness.”

I imagine that if I wrote an essay on growing up in Texas, I would want it to be something like this. However, I’m not sure that I can. I only spent five years there, and I’m not sure that I know it well enough to reconcile the stereotypes that I know of Texas now as a fiercely liberal woman who made it through the Bush administration and the few glancing memories of a young child.

I very much emphasize with Janisse Ray and her struggle with her Southerness in this way, though I know it is in no way as deeply ingrained in me. I think her book walks that tenuous line of loving (at least most of) the memories she has, while feeling shame for the place at the same time. A shame that is a gut reaction. A shame that no matter how much you tell yourself you don’t feel, you keep finding yourself of the defensive.

“Progress has come to the Arches at last, after a million years of neglect. Industrial Tourism has arrived.” (55)

At last, a nature writer with some bite. Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire was a blast to read. It reminded me so much of one of my favorite fiction writers, Kurt Vonnegut. His style (without quoting from my presentation too much) is a tenuously balanced mixture of fact, romanticism, philosophy, and biting wit and humor. And after my latest trip to the Rocky Mountain National Park, “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks” hit especially hard. Abbey likes to keep the reader guessing at what he will do or say next.

One of the most shocking moments is when he kills the rabbit in “Cliffrose and Bayonets.” With the same dispassion Oates displayed, killing the ants with her fingers, one by one, Abbey kills the rabbit with a rock. As a nature writer (even if he did not want to have such a title) and crusader for the natural and the wild, it is odd to us that he could needlessly kill a living thing. Abbey knows this, and despite his apparent innocence at the end, he spends quite a few paragraphs rationalizing his deeds. He also has no interest in ever killing again as he says, “The experiment was a complete success; it will never be necessary to perform it again” (42).

I think this scene is crucial to much of the idea that he is trying to convey throughout the book: a picture of modern man living in the wild. Like Thoreau, he has decided to seclude himself in the wild for a few seasons or years. Abbey scoffs at tourists and their automobiles, their cushy campsites. He explores secluded and forbidden areas of the Arches. He drinks river water when he runs out of beer in “Down the River.” He (very resourcefully) uses a gopher snake to rid him of the rattlers instead of killing the rattlesnakes. However, he does not truly live off of the wildness. Abbey eats beans and bacon for much of the book, which, last I heard, were not natural to the Arches.

Abbey kills the rabbit because he must know that he is really a part of this whole wilderness, even if he eats beans and finds shelter in a trailer. Abbey kills the rabbit, because he needs to know that he can survive out there, not as a sportsman or scientist, but as a part of the natural world. He says: “No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world. I have entered into this one. We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey” (41-42).

My favorite part of Abbey’s book has to be in “Water” when Abbey’s friend, Newcomb, gets stuck in the quicksand. You can’t help but feel terrible for poor Newcomb, who could only cry out in long lonesome wails, sure that the quicksand would be the end of him. Abbey was no help either with his wit and amusement at his friend’s distress. I was very glad when Abbey pulled him to the solid ground.

If I take anything I’ve learned from Abbey, I think it will be his sarcasm.

I must say that I agree whole-heartedly with Joyce Carol Oates on the subject of nature in her essay "Against Nature."

What is nature? Whatever it is, I feel my response will only be "glamorized" and "romanticized". Or perhaps, feeling particularly scientific or bitter, I would lean towards my evolutionary psychology background and tell you that I for one am glad that the baby antelope on the National Geographic channell was eaten because it is survival of the fittest.

When I think of how to define nature, the first thing that pops into my head is the word "ecosystem." Nature is terribly complex and busy. It is beautiful and ugly, shocking and banal, but all of these things fit together, balanced precariously. Sometimes the scale is tipped in a certain direction, but more often than not, if left to its own devices, nature will right things again with comets or ice ages.

To put it simply, and in the context of our society, nature is "outside." To put it in a philosophical setting, nature is. It is a force like gravity or time. Honestly, I'm not even really sure what is included in "nature." Is it biology? Is it mircobiology? Is it rocks? Is it weather? If it is weather, does it extend to outer space and other planets where temperature and positioning play a crucial role in denying these rocks the same green, leafy life that we normally associate with the word "nature"?

To me, nature is all of these things, and the result of all of these things. Anything not constructed by man. However, I am reconsidering this last clause.

Before this class, I would have said that my wild places are in South Dakota and Wyoming, places where humans live miles apart, where you can drive for hours without seeing a single person, where the landscape is beautiful and harsh. But none of my wild places seem particularly wild now, and after reading Oate's essay, I must agree that "Nature, as it is understood in the usual slapdash way, [is] as human...experience". Hiking and camping were nature to me before. These were the means by which I met "nature" and "wildness".

At this point, wildness, to me, is simply an unkempt space where nature is allowed to take hold as it will. The grass is not trimmed, the trees are uncut, the leaves do not get raked, and the wildlife is allowed to fend for itself as it has for thousands of year. I realize how limited this definition is, how tame. But there are very few places that I can think of that are truly allowed to thrive and flourish as they are.

On my recent trip to Montana, Estes Park, and the Rocky Mountain National Park, I was surprised by how many roadways there were in the “wild”. Even the national parks cut their grass, place gravel for paths and aluminum cans for trash. They cut trees to make room for more cabins and telephone poles, and the "wild" animals wear collars and tags so that their populations can be controlled.

One of the most depressing moments in my recent memory was finding a herd of elk, proud and majestic with antlers as a crown, eating from the dumpster outside of the cabin area.

We were supposed to be in one of the most beautiful wild places left in our country, but it was too late. These nature trails and mountain hikes that allowed us city dwellers a glimpse into the wild, tamed it. It shaped it, and often, just to allow more humans to wander saftely and take pictures to hang on their walls.

What happened to that darker side, the dangerous side that is crucial to my definition of wildness? Of nature? The big, bad wolf has left our forests.

I'm hoping this class will help me become more comfortable in nature. I also think that it is already challenging my beliefs about nature, which is always a good thing. Finally, I hope this class will help sharpen my creative non-fiction. I've never taken a non-fiction class before.