The Gleaners

Undergraduate

Gleaning, as depicted here—a biblical allusion—is the practice of collecting leftover grain from a harvested field. The gleaners lived on the remains. I'm fascinated by that idea in relation to creative nonfiction, a form of documentary art—art made of the real stuff of the world, because it’s what’s there. What can we do with what’s there? What can we glean ? There’s another sense of the term gleaning that’s developed over the years, of assembling a story bit by bit from the facts that you can find. A process akin to another documentary art, collage. It’s in this sense that the idea of gleaning will guide us in our study and practice of creative nonfiction, with a nod toward its roots in necessity and necessity’s cousins, bitterness and hope.