And such, in turn, has been the currency of most of my works in the genre-in travel and place writing a la Noo Saro-Wiwa and in autotheory enmeshed in lyric essays, Maggie Nelson-style, as well as in my occasional excursions to memoir, ‘psychoscapes,’ and the personal essay. To remake and revisit memories, things you so wish you have done, or undone, or so they say. Reflecting on and ruminating over what has already happened also comes as a Piscean instinct to me, like muscle memory almost.

Or quoting my undergraduate creative writing professor, essayist and fictionist Ma Elena Paulma, I write because “most of the time, we come from middle spaces, where there will always be more than one thing, all at once, a revelation of what is not understood, a rediscovery of what we think has been lost and forgotten, merging and re-emerging the way water shifts through sand” or I write “to be one of many voices, to be read-is this not why I write?” The retrospective glance comes naturally to the essayist: The past is an Aladdin’s lamp which he or she never tires of rubbing.” “The past is frequently and often lyrically visited by the essayist. Phillip Lopate in what might have been the genre’s first comprehensive anthology The Art of the Personal Essay (Anchor Books, 1994) wrote, I write creative nonfiction and essays to make sense of the past, to tame my inner demons as they claw their way up to my skin, to come into terms with selves I once were. Why do you write CNF, and do you explore other genres in your work? Alton Melvar M Dapanas (them/they) is author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (England: Newcomer Press, 2021), assistant nonfiction editor of London-based Panorama: The Journal of Place & Travel, Iowa-based Atlas & Alice, and editorial reader for Creative Nonfiction magazine. Their piece, ‘Three Holidays’, can be found in EPOCH Issue 03: Roots, available to purchase here.

Artcut 2009 the pirate bay