Becoming Butterfly

As I am writing this blog post, a butterfly lands quietly on the window of my car. At first I didn't notice it, but it became harder to ignore as it flapped its wings ever so gracefully, oblivious to the fact that I am watching it. I became excited because I absolutely love butterflies and what they represent. I love how they are originally caterpillars and then transform into butterflies. My favorite saying is "Just when the ccaterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly."

In my Creative Nonfiction class, we have been assigned the task of writing different forms of creative nonfiction--memoirs, essays and more. In "Keeping it Real", Lee Gutkind, the godfather of creative nonfiction, writes about the different ways to make creative nonfiction beautiful. You can use facts, the backdoor approach, reserch--whatever necessary to tell the truth, to tell a story.

This butterfly landing on my car has a story, and as a writer of creative nonfiction, I have the assignment and responsibility of telling stories like it. I know that the butterfly cannot literally speak to me, but in other ways, it is indeed telling me a story, creating its own memoir in these moments that it shared the same space with me. And it is my job to listen, to take heed to it, to write, to observe, to feel. I get it now. Creative nonfiction isn't a made-up story genre for journalists who are tired of the inverted pyramid. Its for writers who find something that they are interested in, learn it, essentially become it, and tell the story of it.