How cooperation sparks creative adaptation and creates a stronger literary ecosystem
If you learned about Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory in school, most likely it was presented as a straightforward explanation for how species have evolved to become what they are today. Individuals with different traits competed, and the strongest traits became dominant over time.
Likewise, in the introductory class to creative nonfiction I took as an undergraduate in the mid-aughts, the evolution of the genre was presented as a simple one: memoirists had mated with traditional journalists, and they’d had a 1960s love child whose name at birth was New Journalism. It was a new species that broke the old boundaries and filled a niche in the ecology. The genre was presented, more or less, as a fully evolved form. It was grounded in research, fact, and reportage, was written in a personal voice, and used the creative tools of fiction—setting, characters, scenes, and dialogue. All of these traits had emerged as the fittest for the job of creative nonfiction. We read Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Joan Didion.
