Argument for Sonja Livingston’s Inclusion in the Literary...

The literary canon is those works considered by scholars, critics, and teachers to be the most important to read and study, which collectively constitute the â€Å"masterpieces† of literature. (Meyer 2175) In the past there has been much debate on whether non-fiction should be considered for inclusion in the canon, but non-fiction writers being considered part of the canon is not unheard of, and is already a reality – George Orwell, Henry David Thoreau, Ernest Hemingway- all had a significant body of non-fictional work and are well respected, well established members. Sonja Livingston’s work is part of a genre called creative non-fiction. As stated in his article for The Writer, Lee Gutkind states, â€Å"Creative nonfiction-also called new†¦show more content†¦Sonja Livingston is a talented and unique young writer who uses an unusual structure in her work. Structure is the form that an author’s writing takes; how the sentences are formed and how they are placed together to create the work. In Ghostbread, her award-winning novel, Ms. Livingstone uses a freeform chapter structure that, while roughly in chronological order, is not necessarily linear. In chapter 3, Ms. Livingston speaks of her father, â€Å"I had no father† (6), and then in chapter 4 she speaks of a childhood friend, â€Å"My favorite person should have been Carol Johnson.† (7) Through the course of the book, Ms. Livingston chronicles her life from birth to age 18, but it is not a strict telling; she meanders and explores events as they are remembered, not bound by a rigid timeline. The structure of her work is unconventional and through that unconventional structure she gives the reader an experience that is more like poetry than a conventional novel. Towards the end of Ghostbread, Ms. Livingston contemplates the effect that her miscarriage and the revelation of her sexual activity will have on her relationship with her mother with this passage, â€Å"Sex. Pregnancy. Men. What were they to her? Failure? Freedom? Power? Paths she followed, but did not prescribe. At least not aloud.† (212). The use of partial sentences and imagery are elements commonly associated with poetry and it gives