By Robert Rebein

These days we take for granted that creative nonfiction has earned its place within the pantheon of writing genres. But that hasn’t always been the case. As recently as the early 1990s, the so-called “fourth genre” was so little regarded that there were virtually no anthologies, textbooks, or journals devoted to it. That began to change in the mid-to-late ’90s, when, in the space of five years, an influential textbook, Robert Root and Michael Steinberg’s The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, was published, and the journals Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, and Fourth Genre each launched in quick succession.

It’s difficult to overestimate the role these journals played in elevating creative nonfiction to its current position vis-a-vis poetry, fiction, and drama. One sign of this ascension appears in the title to Joey Franklin and Patrick Madden’s introduction to Fourth Genre: Twenty-Five Essays from Our First Twenty-Five Years (Michigan State University Press, 2025), which boldly declares, “Fourth Genre? More Like First Genre!” Such boldness would have been difficult for founding editor Michael Steinberg to imagine, let alone express, when he prepared the first issue of Fourth Genre for publication in the winter of 1998, but judging by the contents of this retrospective anthology, it doesn’t feel out of place.

Fourth Genre: Twenty-Five Essays from Our First Twenty-Five Years includes selections from all four of the journal’s editorial eras: Steinberg and David Cooper (1999–2008), Marcia Aldrich (2009–2011), Laura Julier (2012–2019), and Joey Franklin and Patrick Madden (2019–present). For reasons that Franklin and Madden do not articulate in their introduction, the essays chosen for the anthology are presented in somewhat random order, neither alphabetically nor by era, and this seems to be a conscious decision on the editors’ part. In fact, nowhere in the anthology is a date of original publication given for any of the selections. The context of Sean Enfield’s essay “The Revolution Will Be Revised,” about a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas in which five police officers were killed, is clear enough even without a reference to when it was published, especially since, in so many ways, we still inhabit that time. But that’s not the case with all the essays. I spent the first half of Debra Gwartney’s harrowing “Tent: A Memoir,” about a time two of Gwartney’s teenage daughters were living on the street, wondering why she
didn’t just try to text or call them or track their locations, only to discover, after some online sleuthing, that the essay was first published in 2001, long before the days of teens carrying cell phones.

While many readers will be frustrated by the lack of dates, others may delight in the absence of overt editorial control. Perhaps choosing the essays that made it into the anthology is control enough. Or maybe Franklin and Madden want readers to experience their selections randomly, bouncing from one essay to another the way one bounces from one conversation to another at a large social gathering.

Organization aside, the essays themselves are often stunning and, taken together, tell the story of a journal that, in addition to publishing the work of established writers like Michael Martone, Barbara Hurd, and Ander Monson, has consistently championed the work of younger and less well-known writers like Enfield, Negesti Kaudo, and Nichole LeFebvre. The best of these essays combine a compelling persona or author/narrator with a fine handling of structure and storytelling, a persistent interest in questions of identity, and a willingness to court complexity rather than being satisfied with received answers or truths.

A wonderful example of this is “My Men” by Sonya Huber, first published in 2002, while Huber was a student in the MFA program at Ohio State. The essay is a masterpiece of portrait/self-portrait in which Huber recounts in vivid detail a series of relationships, both personal and familial, she had with working-class men while she was simultaneously coming to terms with her own working-class roots.

                Frank was a tall, sweet, foul-mouthed rebel from a poor coal town in northern England
                with bleached-blonde hair, and I almost married him so he could get his green card.
                Then I met Ian, a socialist organizer with an eight-year-old son. Ian had been a
                carpenter for years, and loved about himself his ability to get into fights, to beat the shit
                out of someone if they needed it. He borrowed gas money from me on our first date.

The essay concludes with Huber’s meeting of “blue-collar, steel-toe” Donny, a tattooed carpenter/skateboarder she ultimately takes home to meet her parents. And yet, that’s not really the end, because in her afterword, Huber writes searchingly about how, in the twenty-plus years since she published the essay, its “meaning has changed drastically” for her, as the relationship she “centered and idealized became very difficult.” The honesty of both the original portrait and Huber’s later thoughts about it showcase an important truth about memoir writing: the meaning of our lives, especially when viewed in retrospect, is never static. Instead, it evolves and changes as we evolve.

Another essay that stands out both for its humble brilliance as well as the author’s relative obscurity at the time of its original publication is Melani Martinez’s “The Molino,” which explores the author’s conflicted feelings about a tamale making business her family operated in Tucson for many years. Martinez pulls no punches in her descriptions of what it was like to work in an unairconditioned tamale kitchen: “Other than the corn, everything was black and filmed with yesterday’s fat that no amount of soap could loosen. It was hot, it was steamy, and for us there was no greater hell.” And yet when the time comes for Martinez’s father to sell the business that had been in her family for four generations, Martinez finds herself reduced to tears. Both facts exist in the same thought, the same essay. This place is hell; it will kill me if I let it. And: This place is part of me, part of my identity; its loss is like losing an arm or a leg.

In her afterword, Martinez relates how reading a draft of the essay aloud for her classmates and instructor during her last semester as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona showed her “what it really meant to be a writer. I was frightened and confused by so much of it, but I was taking the first steps. I was on a path to share a story I knew was worth telling.”

“Yummy” by Ira Sukrungruang, first published in 2017, is another essay that combines a singular voice with a search for an authentic identity. The essay takes the form of a memoir about a day in middle school when Sukrungruang, whose parents were from Thailand, is cornered on the playground by a charismatic classmate and told, “Your people eat dogs.” Stunned, young Ira says nothing back to the boy. He doesn’t even insist that he’s Thai, not Chinese, as the boy claims. Instead, he waits until he’s back home and tentatively asks his mother, “Do Thai people eat dogs?” Her answer—We don’t, but some do—creates a second head spinning moment in the essay in which young Ira is unable to accept what he’s hearing. Only later, looking back at that version of himself who was given the nickname “Dog Eater” by his classmates, is Sukrungruang able to approach the
complexities contained in his mother’s answer and the fact that “his world was an American one.”

These are just a few of the essays that stand out in this wonderful collection. Others include Martone’s segmented essay “Racing in Place: 33 Hoosier Haiku” (2000); Joe Bonomo’s “Occasional Prayer” (2010) and Patrick Mainelli’s “But We Loved It All the Same” (2014), both of which take the form of analytical meditations; Cara Stoddard’s “Overlay”(2023), which mixes memoir, portrait, and reportage; and Barbara Sjoholm’s “The Natural History of My Begonia” (2004), which traces the life of a single house plant across decades in the author’s life.

With a few exceptions, most of the essays mentioned above were published in the first half of Fourth Genre’s quarter-century run as a literary magazine. Why is that? One possibility is that my own taste as a writer and reader of creative nonfiction simply aligns more closely with that of Michael Steinberg and Marcia Aldrich than with that of later editorial regimes. Another might have to do with the fact that these older works have had the opportunity to stand the test of time in a way that the more recent essays in the collection have not, or that the newer pieces, many of them excellent in their own way, feel less important simply because they are too familiar, creating in the reader’s mind a kind of reverse recency bias. Or that the way that identity is figured in the earlier pieces—as something elusive and continually in process rather than something hard and somehow fixed—simply works better in a genre that, as Michael Steinberg wrote in his editor’s note to the inaugural issue of the magazine, “is more closely connected to the spirit of Montaigne’s work than it is to matters of subject, reportage, and/or scholarly research.”

Taken as a whole, Fourth Genre: Twenty-Five Essays from Our First Twenty Five Years provides readers with a rewarding experience. Both general readers and students of creative writing will benefit from the book’s scope and variety. The older essays offer timeless examples of the craft, while the newer ones challenge received notions of what an essay is and how it should work, creating a juxtaposition that is half the pleasure of reading any essay collection, whether it be the work of a single author or, in this case, that of twenty-five different authors spanning twenty-five years of the same publication.

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Robert Rebein is the author of four books, including two award-winning essay collections, Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City (2013) and Headlights on the Prairie: Essays on Home (2017), and a novel, The Last Rancher (2024). His essay “Welcome to the Hotel Sabra” won the 2020 Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Rebein teaches at Indiana University in Indianapolis.