Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies

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Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies

The purpose of Assay is to publish the best in critical scholarship of creative nonfiction to stimulate the conversation concerning this genre.

Post: Karen Babine and Jay Kibble Find us at www.assayjournal.com. The purpose of Assay is to publish the best in critical scholarship of creative nonfiction, to provide a space for work that elevates the genre in an academic setting. While there is no shortage of craft pieces and craft texts, the focus of nonfiction analysis has been on the art of the genre. Critical scholarship that studies nonf

iction as literature, not simply art, is lacking in our genre. Our purpose is to facilitate all facets of that conversation, to be a resource for writers, scholars, readers, and teachers of nonfiction. Our online format makes research materials more accessible to scholars, but it also utilizes the available technology to expand the discussion. In addition to the written expression of nonfiction criticism, Assay provides the space for both written and video interviews with writers, as well as providing for more informal discussions of reading and teaching in the genre.

16/10/2025

The final article in Assay 12.1, Jeff Porter’s essay “The History and Poetics of the Essay” traces how the essay’s shape has morphed across eras and how its tension between freedom and constraint makes it uniquely suited to exploring both the intellectual and the intimate. Porter argues that the essay is never stable, but always in process: a form alive to metamorphosis and the questions we haven’t yet asked.

“In a way, all thought is experimental and remains so until it can be fixed in a sentence. We are all essayists for a brief moment. Roland Barthes suggested that the essay may have preceded the concept of genre in the way it emulates the genesis of thinking. If there is something that fundamental about the essay to the play of the human mind, as Montaigne insisted also, one wonders why it took so long for the form to evolve. Why wasn’t there a bronze-age essay, for instance, something written by the hero in retirement (surely Nestor would have had something to say after the burning of Troy) or perhaps set down by the stay-at-home wife, the caretaker of the oikos, a meditation on crushing olives or weaving while awaiting the warrior’s return? Given the wanderings of Odysseus, his irrepressible digressiveness and curiosity, not to mention his fondness for the personal anecdote, the Odyssey might have been that Ur-essay. It could at least have contained essay-like intervals—’On Cyclopes’ or ‘Of Listening’—enlivened by shrewd reflections on the credulity of men and the cleverness of fish.”

Read it here or visit the link in our bio:
https://www.assayjournal.com/jeff-porter-the-history-and-poetics-of-the-essay-assay-121.html

Photo by Robin the Bird on Unsplash

15/10/2025

Our second Pedagogy piece in Assay 12.1, Jessica Handler’s essay “On Teaching Adrienne Rich” reflects on the possibilities and challenges of teaching a poet and activist whose work centers on power, identity, and resistance. Handler explores how layering personal response, political awareness, and craft discussion can help students engage Rich not just as a literary icon but as a living interlocutor.

“We are in a world right now that’s trading on lies. I often find that my students either don’t know or don’t care where their information comes from. I understand this. Lately, I need entire days free of the news. As I write this, I recognize the urge to put startle quotes around the word ‘news.’ Our dignity as human beings and as allies to other human beings feels fragmented under the weight of what I perceive as a rising sea of dishonesty and demoralization from what many of us have long understood as leadership spaces. But I teach her work because, as Rich wrote in her letter to the NEA, which I will address in a moment: ‘I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.’”

Read it here or visit the link in our bio:
https://www.assayjournal.com/jessica-handler-on-teaching-adrienne-rich-assay-121.html

Photo by Robin the Bird on Unsplash

11/10/2025

The leaves are falling, and so are excuses not to submit! 🍂
Assay is open for submissions! Send us your best work in nonfiction studies, pedagogy, or reviews this season.

We are looking for:
🍄Academic scholarship on nonfiction texts, techniques, and authors
🍄Informal discussions of craft elements, book reviews, or nonfiction authors
🍄Formal and informal pedagogy that addresses all levels of students
🍄Brief analytical pedagogy for In The Classroom Blog
🍄Nonfiction Syllabi

View our full submission guidelines and submit your work here: https://www.assayjournal.com/submit.html

Or visit the link in our bio!

Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

10/10/2025

Booth Literary Journal is currently accepting submissions until midnight on November 30th. Check out some of their guidelines below and visit their website to submit your work.

Booth is a literary journal housed at Butler University. Their staff is composed of students, faculty, and alumni from the MFA program. MFA students and alumni execute approximately 98% of Booth. Copy editing, web design, print issues, t-shirts and merch, and so on.

Submission Guidelines:
💡Booth seeks poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, lists, and audio files. Especially the last four. They want more of those.
💡Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please withdraw your submission if it is accepted elsewhere
💡Single submissions at a time unless you are submitting poetry or flash (see website for more)
💡Submissions are considered for both the online and print publications
💡Creative Nonfiction: up to 7,500 words
💡$3 reading fee

Read their complete guidelines and submit here:
https://booth.submittable.com/submit

09/10/2025

Our second Pedagogy piece in Assay 12.1 is Kathryn Nuernberger’s essay “Research as Ritual.” In it, Nuernberger reconceives research as an embodied, daily practice, a ritual of inquiry that draws from archives, dreams, walks, and the spaces between known and unknown. She invites writers to transform the act of searching into a generative process itself, where discovery comes through attentive ritual rather than just argument.

“And so revision becomes part of the ritual too. With each poem or essay I learn again that I must surround the beautiful gleaming fact that called out to me with myself. I write in my hungers and fears. I add a line wondering whether we all die for nothing, or worse, for something that I am completely missing. I come to understand my list of the ways a narwhal’s tusk has been used is tied to the mystery of my long nights nursing this brand-new child who, I realize as milk trickles out of me, will someday watch me die, or, God forbid, something worse. I cannot stop listing the somethings worse as the baby suckles. The narwhal’s tusk is a tooth. Queen Elizabeth wielded one as a scepter. They migrate as far into the arctic ice as they can go, looking for perfectly silent waters.”

Read it here or visit the link in our bio:
https://www.assayjournal.com/kathryn-nuernberger-research-as-ritual-assay-121.html

Photo by Robin the Bird on Unsplash

08/10/2025

In Assay 12.1, Megan Connolly’s essay “A Team in the Face of the World: Dogs as Narrative Agents in Memoirs about Life After Loss” explores how animal companions become more than supporting characters, they take on agency, presence, and emotional gravitas. Connolly examines how dogs can shape grief narratives, anchor memory, and reframe human loss through their silent witness to life’s ruptures.

“My first dogs, Rory and Tig, arrived in my life while I was in the middle of a long-term relationship with an abusive partner. I never could have predicted that the necessity of caring for them would often be the sole reason for getting out of bed, for stepping outside, for taking a walk. Even through the haze of deep depression, I’d watch them explore the neighborhood on our outings: Tig tucking his head and tail low and charging in focused pursuit after geese; Rory sensing movement under the grass and, reminiscent of a fox, leaping in the air and then striking the earth with both forepaws. Our walks became a kind of meditation, and as my mind quieted, my bodily senses rose up: I could breathe with rare ease, feel my shoulders drop, my mind clear. Seeing them delight in the world around us and sensing their happiness that we were outdoors together, were reminders of why I might want to continue living.”

Read it here or visit the link in our bio:
https://www.assayjournal.com/megan-connolly-a-team-in-the-face-of-the-world-dogs-as-narrative-agents-in-memoirs-about-life-after-loss-assay-121.html

Photo by Robin the Bird on Unsplash

07/10/2025

In issue 12.1 of Assay, Amy Garrett Brown’s pedagogy focused essay “Teaching the Researched Family-Profile Essay as Meaningful, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Counterstory” makes a powerful case for bringing identity, history, and purpose into the classroom. Brown shows how the family-profile essay, when reimagined through culturally sustaining frameworks, can amplify marginalized voices, unsettle taken-for-granted narratives, and help students claim authority over their own stories.

“I set out with a goal to help my students become critical researchers with skills to analyze texts and utilize academic sources, but also to find value in their own stories and histories, to share these stories with each other as valuable information, to value their stories and to help them value each other’s stories. Many of these students’ stories are counterstories. As students share their writing, interviews, research, reflections and memories many of the students reveal their minoritized status, the journeys of their family members who have fought hard to make a place for themselves and their family despite the racism and xenophobia they experienced, and the importance of their stories. While this may not be the case for every student in the classroom, the importance of proving the equal importance of each story helps lead to justice in the classroom as we make a space where every story is valued.”

Read it here or visit the link in our bio:
https://www.assayjournal.com/amy-garrett-brown-teaching-the-researched-family-profile-essay-as-8203meaningful-culturally-sustaining-pedagogy-and-counterstory-assay-121.html

Photo by Robin the Bird on Unsplash

06/10/2025

The first conversation piece in Assay 12.1 is Desirae Matherly’s “In Defense of Navel Gazing.” In it, Matherly pushes back against the critique of introspective writing, arguing that self-reflection (when done with care) can be a vital site for literary risk, curiosity, and insight. She reframes the so-called “navel-gaze” as a practice of deep attention and sustained inquiry.

“Navel-gazing as a criticism is most often applied to works that focus merely on the self and do not look out from it. There are many splendid writers through the centuries who have been able to write about the self without a charge of navel-gazing. My own guess is that this word has become a catchall term for any bad writing about the self, even indirectly, as when an academic falls too deeply into scholarly obsession. When people apply the term to their own writing, it has the cast of an embarrassed admission for writing about the self at all. Perhaps the problem that navel-gazing describes is more closely linked to questions about chronology in memoir, and the unfortunate predominance of linear narrative in places where it simply isn’t interesting. We all figure ourselves to have separate beginnings from that first obvious one charted as “birth,” and much bad writing is a catalog of those serial realizations—our awakenings, separations, losses, and humiliations.”

Read it here or visit the link in our bio:
https://www.assayjournal.com/desirae-matherly-in-defense-of-navel-gazing-assay-121.html

Photo by Robin the Bird on Unsplash

05/10/2025

This Syllabus Sunday we are highlighting a Nonfiction Pedagogy course from the Assay syllabi bank. Seminar in Composition and Creative Writing Pedagogy by Dr. Julia Platt.

Description:
This course is designed for MFA students who wish to teach composition and/or creative writing at the undergraduate level. It provides an introduction to the basics of pedagogical theory while foregrounding praxis. Special attention will be given to exploring the intersections between composition and creative writing, and the challenges of teaching writing effectively in online and hybrid spaces. Students who successfully complete this course will have the beginnings of a basic teaching portfolio that reflects an understanding of current issues and practices in undergraduate writing pedagogy.

Required Texts:
📚Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing by Irene L. Clark
📚Teaching Creative Writing to Undergraduates by Stephanie Vanderslice and Kelly Ritter
📚Teaching Writing Online: How and Why by Scott Warnock

Read the full syllabus here:
https://www.assayjournal.com/uploads/2/8/2/4/28246027/engl5153_su2014.pdf

Photo by Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash

04/10/2025

Don’t forget about Assay this fall! We’re coming up on the perfect weather to stay indoors with a hot beverage and submit to literary journals. We hope to see your submission in our inbox!

We are looking for:
🍎Academic scholarship on nonfiction texts, techniques, and authors
🍎Informal discussions of craft elements, book reviews, or nonfiction authors
🍎Formal and informal pedagogy that addresses all levels of students
🍎Brief analytical pedagogy for In The Classroom Blog
🍎Nonfiction Syllabi

View our full submission guidelines and submit your work here: https://www.assayjournal.com/submit.html

Or visit the link in our bio!

Photo by Kerstin Wrba on Unsplash

03/10/2025

Barely South Review is accepting submissions for one more month until November 1st! Check out some of their guidelines below and visit their website to submit your work.

Barely South Review is an online biannual publication staffed by students of the MFA program at Old Dominion University.

Submission Guidelines
🌿BSR seeks original, unpublished works of nonfiction, poetry, short fiction, and art
🌿Along with your submission, please provide a brief cover letter and bio
🌿Simultaneous submissions are accepted
🌿Nonfiction submissions must be 12 point Times New Roman font, double-spaced, with one-inch margins. Include the word count on the first page. Please avoid any nonstandard formatting or alternative fonts.
🌿Creative Nonfiction: One essay (

02/10/2025

In this first essay of Assay 12.1, Amy Bonnaffons offers “Bodies of Text: On the Lyric Essay,” a meditation on the form’s intimate structures. She examines how lyric essays’ use of white space, shifts in voice, and associative leaps invite readers into the text, not as passive observers but as participants in meaning-making. This piece sets a tone of quiet rigor and formal curiosity for the new issue.

“And yet, when a writer sits down to write something, she must consider form. Some writers ascribe an anthropomorphic agency to their own writing, investing it with a desire to take a particular shape; they claim to postpone thoughts of form until after the writing has stewed long enough in formal indeterminacy to “know what it wants to be,” or that they’ll begin writing in one form and another form will “take over.” Perhaps it’s possible to sit down and enter some blank formless state of receptivity and accept whatever the muse provides. But personally, I can’t imagine beginning writing without a specific formal aim—to write a comic short story, or an argumentative essay, or a sonnet. Things often change as I write, but beginning the process is difficult enough without being able to envision the shape I’m approximating, the container I’m trying to fill.”

Read it here or visit the link in our bio:
https://www.assayjournal.com/amy-bonnaffons-bodies-of-text-on-the-lyric-essay-assay-121.html

Photo by Robin the Bird on Unsplash

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