Writing trade-list narrative and creative non-fiction involves swapping between the telescope and the microscope at regular intervals. On the one hand, general readers are not looking for the narrow focus and intra-disciplinary debates of an academic monograph. On the other hand, it is through rich, evocative examples of lives, deeds, and dilemmas that these readers can best appreciate what the past can tell us, how, and why we should care.

What opportunities do genres of trade-list narrative/creative history, memoir, and biography offer for telling stories at very large (environmental, multi-century) and very small (biographical, microhistorical) scales? How might scholars navigate the challenges involved? And to what extent are modes of selection, structure, and voice that are atypical in academic writing more effective ways to gain insight and prompt empathy, curiosity and connection?

This roundtable, the first of two linked sessions, will examine these questions through the genres of biography, memoir, and creative non-fiction. Leah Redmond Chang’s presentation shows how writing early modern women’s history necessitates the microscopic analysis of anecdotal and behind-the-scenes examples, but how, through storytelling, these sources also lend themselves to large-scale re-tellings of the past. Martha S. Jones’s presentation reveals how memoir-writing enables authors to access truths about the past and about the human condition that traditional history-writing does not. Lilia Topouzova reflects on how creative non-fiction allows her to make apparent the nuances of oral history encounters in documentary film-making in ways the lie beyond the purview of academic convention. Tamara J. Walker explores the distinctive potential of group biography, highlighting how individuals can represent particular phenomena, places, and times while also revealing broader cultural patterns that transcend them.