Good creative nonfiction craft books or articles?

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Writing Life Stories by Bill Roorbach is excellent. While its primary focus is memoir, it also deals with personal essays and other narrative forms.

Your Life As Story by Tristine Rainer is also about memoir writing primarily. However, it has a good section about how to organize your material, which would be equally applicable to other forms of narrative nonfiction.

Hope that's the sort of thing you were looking for.

If it's not, and what you want is more ruminative, try The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy Sayers.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

This isn't a book or an article, but their is a piece of outstanding creative nonfiction in the winter issue of Ploughshares called Unsaid by Gretchen Henderson. I think reading good stuff can help you write good stuff. The how-to books can only offer so much.

I highly recommend William Zinsser's On Writing Well. There's a reason it's been perpetually in print for more than three decades now. It's a genuinely warm book that'll get you excited about writing nonfiction, rather than casting doubt on your ability, as I find happens with some "how to" guides.

I took a CNF class last year and we used "Tell it Slant" by Miller and Paolo which I thought was pretty decent for an instructional book. It has some good ideas for practice essays in each chapter, and even if you just do a couple you may find it helpful. I found myself suddenly writing about things I had never considered writing about before. We also used "Short Takes"

http://www.amazon.com/Short-Takes-Encounters-Contemporary-Nonfiction/dp/0393326004/

Which I found the best instruction of all. By reading it carefully you can learn for yourself what works and what doesn't, at least for you. I still pull it out regularly.