To all those reading my work in my project Emails Unsent to Other Men, thank you. It means a lot to me, and I hope my writing has been useful.
I am committed to this project long term, but it can also be more emotionally draining than some kinds of writing, particularly when I am addressing a person I know. Writing directly to a person requires a sort of emotional performance to gain the right headspace to address them.
I am also interested in writing other things, too, so I am branching out here by rebranding my Substack “The Speculative Nonfictionist” and starting new projects alongside Emails Unsent to Other Men.
These emails are already speculative nonfiction in the sense that they will always keep one foot in the realm of the imagination and aren't intended or delivered as private messages, though they may also be read that way. All epistolary literature intended as literature and also addressed to a real person can be seen as speculative nonfiction, even if labeled a novel.
Robin Hemley and Leila Philip over at their journal, named Speculative Nonfiction, have an insightful manifesto on the genre. They introduce and it define it this way:
To take the matter further, must an essay, as a subset of nonfiction, entertain ‘thing-ness’ or the empirical world at all? Or is the truth of an essay sometimes the speculative endeavor itself, a literary engagement not with things or facts, but with “a tidal wave of strange imaginings?” A “Speculative Essay” concerns itself with the figurative over the literal, ambiguity over knowing, meditation over reportage.
I aim to write other pieces in this very open and fruitful yet relatively unknown and under-formalized genre that blends fiction with nonfiction. In my view, speculative nonfiction is what most creative nonfiction is, and some fiction and even history too. Things like the lyric essay, new/gonzo journalism like Hunter S. Thompson’s, and a certain kind of political/ philosophical treatise (like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Machiavelli's The Prince) would fall as subgenres under speculative nonfiction.
Texts like the Bible are categorically speculative nonfiction, too, at least when they are believed to be true or hold some material truth (such as the apostle Paul truly writing some of the letters attributed to him), despite the general lack of factual evidence.
On some level, you might even argue all nonfiction is speculative—did the Big Bang happen literally as scientists say, or are there elements of narrative, that human tool of the mind? We weren't there, after all, and what’s more telling: maybe our tools implicitly organize the data we interpret into stories we call objective facts, but ulimately cannot fully prove.
Speculative nonfiction, then, is overtly concerned with the limits and structures of truth.
At its roots, poetry, the originally oral and therefore collectively shaped literature, inherently grapples with the idea that much of fact is built with, through, or by speculation. Poems are neither nonfiction nor fiction, at least when a person speaks them aloud and their words “become flesh.” That's why my first post tomorrow in a new series here will be a poem. But there will be other kinds of speculative nonfiction to come.
This new series will take inspiration from the concept of egregores: non-physical entities that, when collectively believed in and/or created within art or ritual, exist as thought-forms that have impact on societies through their impact on human psyches. Satan, Gaia, greek gods and entities like Zeus or Pan, guardian angels, or even Slenderman, to use a contemporary example.
Egregores are something I think most people can intuitively resonate with—who hasn't realized that the more mental energy you expend on an idea, and the more people believe in it, the more real it becomes?
It is a helpful concept to guide explorations in the realm of speculative nonfiction, a genre defined most by what its title implies: the imagining of what could be true, even if it ultimately leads to or is birthed from what is false.
Thanks again for reading, and for your continued support.
I’m very interested to see this come out. I feel like I very recently saw someone on Substack critiquing the idea of egregores, but I find it interesting nonetheless.
Before Substack, I’d never heard the term.