Roundtable 2: Disciplinary training instills in scholars approaches and rubrics concerning the structure, voice, and argumentation of historical writing, as well as what counts as evidence and as robust modes of engaging it. Yet disciplines have problematic genealogies stretching into centuries in which fewer people counted as thinkers or even as human. While there has been much critical and methodological innovation in recent decades, communicating these findings and changes to readers beyond the academy has fallen behind. The historian as storyteller needs to unsettle academic orthodoxies, not only to connect with broader audiences but also to access a wider range of truths. What might historical narrative look like - in form and style - untethered from conventions and centered on recuperating experiences and narratives whose traces are orthogonal to forms of evidence typically considered in academic scholarship?

Panelists discuss how attention to the art of the craft can help bridge this gap. Techniques discussed will include narrative structure, content choice, and ethics (selecting and organizing material; questions of empathy; recovering voices whose words don't survive in unmediated forms). The speakers reflect on how creative nonfiction is not merely accessible to non-specialists, but also allows scholars reveal to types of truth typically excluded by the profession, such as personal experience and memory. Put another way, the narrative and stylistic freedoms afforded by creative nonfiction enable scholars to put historical participants, evidence, and narrative effectiveness first, and to build a more inclusive historical toolbox.