Fact, Fiction, and the Importance of Truth
Jennifer Jahrling Forese Writer-in-Residence will help students find and express their own personal truths
Journalism is in crisis. People don’t trust the news. Reporting is biased.
Those statements are all true, depending on your perspective—and therein lies the rub. Depending on your perspective.
“We are in a truth crisis right now. It has caused political mayhem in the country, as people rely on different sources of information and so many of them unvetted,” said Professor of English and Creative Writing Program Director Adrian Blevins. “Without truth, you have no critical thinking and no bearing on reality. You are not an educated person if you cannot tell the difference between the truth and a lie. What is true and how you know it’s true is really important to us.”
To help sort the difference between fact and fiction and to encourage students to write about their own personal truths, Colby has selected Anne Elizabeth Moore as the fifth Jennifer Jahrling Forese Writer-in-Residence. Moore joins the Department of English for the spring semester.
An award-winning writer of creative nonfiction, Moore will teach a class intended to inspire students to write factually and with personality about things that are important to them. The goal, she said, is to help students identify what they are interested in writing about and then encourage them to explore the topic with their own unique voice, based on their research, in whatever format makes sense.
”Without truth, you have no critical thinking and no bearing on reality.”
Professor of English Adrian Blevins
“A lot of my work takes the notion of creative nonfiction and really plays with it. I do a lot of genre-shifting,” said Moore, noting that she has used comics, which are supposed to be funny, as a platform for investigative journalism into human trafficking. “The idea behind the class is to push even the notion of creative nonfiction and also explore what we cannot push: how facts are established.”
Cultural critic, journalist, humorist
Moore will host her first reading from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Feb. 13 in Studio 1 of the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts. During her residency, she will design and lead a community project called “Are You Haunted?” involving discussions about ghosts, feelings, memories, annoyances, and paranormal and normal experiences. As part of the residency, she also will focus on two new writing projects, one fiction and one creative nonfiction.
Moore is a cultural critic, journalist, and humorist, who works in a range of text, visual, and audio formats. She writes books and essays, creates comics and visual art, and has an unusual “true-ish crime” podcast in which she investigates her own murder in advance.
Blevins described Moore as a “superstar” who is not afraid to take on difficult topics and whose work across media and formats has earned numerous awards and honors.
Gentrifier: A Memoir was an NPR Best Book. Her book on comics creator Julie Doucet won a Will Eisner Comics Industry Award. Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and named Best Book by the Chicago Public Library.
My Inevitable Murder, her podcast, was nominated for a PressGazette Future of Media Award for Best Podcast and shortlisted for two Women’s International Podcast Awards. Her comics journalism collection Threadbare: Clothes, Sex & Trafficking made a list for Best Investigative Reporting on Sex Work. Cambodian Grrrl received a Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism.
A visual artist, Moore has exhibited in the Whitney Biennial in New York and has had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
There’s more: She has been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts Media Arts Award, a U.N. Press Fellowship, a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, two Fulbright scholarships, and a Yaddo residency.
A robust residency
Colby established the Jennifer Jahrling Forese Writer-in-Residence Program in Creative Writing to build on its strengths in the literary arts and humanities. The residency is the vision of Trustee Jamie Forese and Jennifer Forese, parents of graduates from the Classes of 2016 and 2018.
Each year, the Creative Writing Program looks for a writer who complements the work of faculty, Blevins said. To date, visiting fellows have been a novelist, poet, screenwriter, and graphic novelist.
Moore was excited that graphic novelist Nicole Georges was last year’s writing fellow. She looked into the details of the residency and Colby, was impressed with the creative writing faculty—“they’re kind of amazing,” she said—and decided to apply.
She is eager for her time with students and the community, and she was thrilled to see a community project as part of the fellowship requirement. And besides, she had never been to Maine. “Since I was a child, I felt I would go to Maine and it would be significant.”
A sriracha crisis
Moore lives in a small community in the Catskills of New York. She relocated there before the pandemic to finish a writing project and stayed during the lockdown.
Since moving there, she has become locally known for making and selling a popular hot sauce. She began her hot sauce journey 15 years ago while living in Chicago, encouraged by friends who raved about it. Later, she said, “there was a sriracha crisis in Detroit when I lived there. Nobody could get it, so I just started making it for friends. They told me, ‘This is really good. I am not going to buy hot sauce again.’”
When she moved to the Catskills, she kept it going, encouraged by her community. In 2023, she formalized the business, naming it Tinkertown Provisions. She has a budget and keeps a balance sheet, but it’s more about building community than running a business. A portion of proceeds benefit a feminist art-making space that she is affiliated with in Rhode Island. Another portion benefits cats, in shelters and otherwise.
She is putting the hot sauce business on hold during her semester at Colby. But her community-building work continues.
“The idea behind the class is to push even the notion of creative nonfiction and also explore what we cannot push: how facts are established.”
Anne Elizabeth Moore
Her course will help students navigate the gray area between fact and fiction. There can be no cohesive community if people can’t agree on what is real and what is not, she said.
“I am not one to suggest there are available solutions to the problems that are emerging today, but it is pretty easy to get back and instill the basic ideas that make people want to practice journalism in a big way,” she said. “If we really are clear about what facts are, then my sense is that journalism won’t go the way of the dinosaurs. It might look and feel different, but it’s not going away.”
