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Lee Gutkind says that 15 years ago, it was almost unfathomable to think a literary journal would specialize in creative nonfiction. Now the man who is called the godfather of the genre sees his stepchildren everywhere, in newspapers and magazines, documentary films and even, remotely, in reality television.

"Everyone thinks it's a new thing," Gutkind says. "But it's been around for a long time."

Gutkind will host the second 412: Creative Nonfiction Festival at various locations in the Pittsburgh area starting Monday. The theme of this year's event is "Crossing Borders: Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction." Featured guests include writer Michael Ondaatje, author of "The English Patient," who will speak at 8 p.m. Thursday at David Lawrence Hall at the University of Pittsburgh; and poet and memoirst Mary Karr, the author of "The Liar's Club."

The festival runs through Nov. 12.

When Gutkind started the literary journal Creative Nonfiction, it was the first publication to specialize in true stories that use "scenes, dialogue, close, detailed descriptions and other techniques usually employed by poets and fiction writers," according to the publication's Web site, www.creativenonfiction.org.

Creative nonfiction has not always been accepted as a valid form. Gutkind earned the derogatory sobriquet "godfather of creative nonfiction" in a 1997 Vanity Fair article penned by James Wolcott that derided the genre as self-indulgent.

Recently, however, creative nonfiction seems to be everywhere. Gutkind points to writers such as Susan Orlean, the author of "The Orchid Thief," which was made into the movie "Adaptation," and surgeon Atul Gawande and their work in The New Yorker as examples of the form, and adds that creative nonfiction is seeping into mainstream newspapers.

"What's made it more acceptable is that the lines between the genres have gradually begun to fade," Gutkind says, "and one of the main reasons this has happened has little to do with journalism, I think, and a lot to do with the fact that fiction writers and poets have crossed over into this creative nonfiction realm. They didn't do it when journalism was the word for it, but I think now poets and fiction writers feel they can be literary and artful in their own work but deal with the literature of fact, as well."

Natalie Goldberg, a writer, poet and painter who lives in New Mexico, agrees that recently, creative nonfiction seems to have received more attention. But the author of books including "The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk and My Unlikely Path to Truth" and "Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within" thinks all writing should aspire to be creative.

"Of course, everybody wants to write well and integrate all of life, and not just make it bald-faced facts. That's boring," Goldberg says. "You name it now, but what has the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, what have all of them been doing forever? ... To me, it's just a completely natural thing, like breathing in and breathing out."

Karr's "The Liar's Club," published in 1995, is an example of a poet using creative nonfiction. The memoir, which relates her life growing up in an east Texas oil town, was praised for its inventiveness and use of language. As a child, Karr says she was "sort of saved by memoir in some ways," reading about the life of Helen Keller, then writers such Pablo Neruda, the late Chilean poet and essayist whose works helped teach her to how to write.

Karr turned to poetry, she says, because "I don't think you choose a genre as much as you're doomed to it." But "The Liars Club" gave her the opportunity to tell stories that she knew by heart and also had emotional resonance.

"I kind of lack imagination in a way," she says. "So it's hard for me to think of characters more interesting than the ones on the planet. My imagination flags at the thought of having to do better than God did. ... And the key to writing a good memoir is voice.

"Really, the events of the book are irrelevant, to some extent. It's not the person with the hardest life, it's not the person with the strangest life; it's the person who can make their life familiar rather than strange."

That aspect of the familiar is part of the charm of the movie "The March of the Penguins." Gutkind thinks documentary filmmakers -- and, to a lesser degree, reality-television producers -- use aspects of creative nonfiction to tell stories because they have no other choice in a world where there are so many options.

"Everyone is barraged by information," Gutkind says. "Creative nonfiction gives writers an opportunity to present the information in a compelling, story-oriented way so people will want to read what it is you are telling them."

Pioneer of the genre

In 1959, four members of a rural Kansas family were brutally murdered by Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. Six years later, Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" was published, an account of the crime that went far beyond Jack Webb's "Just the facts, ma'am" modus operandi on the TV show "Dragnet."

Now, with the release of the movie "Capote," starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, interest has been rekindled in Capote's unprecedented approach to crime writing.

"This was something really new," says Lee Gutkind, who will host the 412: Creative Nonfiction Literary Festival taking place Monday through Saturday at local venues. "That this novelist with a personality like Capote's decided to pick one murder of many murders and embed himself in the case and in the lives of the two people who were villains, the bad guys, and turn them into human beings. It was something that at the time really shocked people."

"In Cold Blood" often is touted as one of the first examples of creative nonfiction, a movement that Gutkind has championed in his literary journal of the same name. Widely praised when it was published, it has become one of the first successful uses of creative nonfiction.

"I think it's one of the great models," says Mary Karr, a poet and author of the memoir "The Liar's Club." "And it's the beginning of our corruption, isn't it?"

Karr, who has seen the movie, says she was impressed by Hoffman's portrayal of Capote and his moral complexity, how he was affected by his contact with the killers.

"It looked to me as if he felt ruined by using the seductive technique he had to use to have a relationship," particularly with Perry Smith, one of the killers, to get the material, she says. "... You can think of a million people who could have written that book, and how mediocre it would have been. But Capote made it a damn great read."

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