As Donna Ward indicates in her editorial, the latest issue of Indigo is dedicated partly to the generalist category of creative non-fiction. Ward’s editorial, structured around an anecdote concerning Helen Garner, flirts with this ‘new’ genre, employing techniques of fiction to convey factual events. But her assertion that in reading Garner we are ‘Distracted by whether or not her fiction is fact, [and] we forget that her work challenges because all of it is born of her life experience’ muddies the genre waters instead of illuminating how creative non-fiction might be usefully distinguished from fiction and other forms of (not-so-creative?) non-fiction.
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