I love to write fiction, but I prefer to write nonfiction. Actually, I tend to prefer to be writing the other genre, the one I'm not writing. When dealing with fact, I wish I could just make things up. When writing from imagination, I wish I could rely on facts rather than on something hard to conjure up in my riot of other conjurations.

"Thanksgiving: The Pilgrims' First Year in America" is an example of creative nonfiction, a.k.a. literary nonfiction. As such, it tries to reflect a truth that goes beyond known facts. After all, are known, verifiable facts the entirety of the truth? Or can imagination reach something closer to the truth? Sticking to known facts may be committing deception by omission.

It's a fine line to walk. What writer of nonfiction has never wished to just make up something to fill in a gap between documents? Wouldn't it be nice (for the writer) to be able to just generate some dialogue to spice up a description and add life to a human situation?

In "Thanksgiving," I often resort to conjecture, but only under two conditions. One is that the conjuration must have been highly likely to have happened. For example, we have no document attesting to whether the Pilgrims watched the Mayflower sail east after the horrific winter of 1620-21. But how could they not have watched it sail away, leaving them with no way to return to England?

The other condition was that I would always leave an indicator of conjecture. I would use a phrase like, "they must have..." or "how could they resist [doing something]," or "they probably...."

I wanted the reader to be aware what I was doing, so this is what I wrote in the Foreword:

"This book is nonfiction.I like to think of it as “a true story.” I have stuck to the facts as best we have discerned them, and we have tried to reflect the truth.

"Truth, however, is an elusive, if not impossible, ideal. The truth isn’t so much in the objective data as in the human experience. To say that the Mayflower crossed the Atlantic in sixty-six days and that people got seasick would be a lie of omission, a belittling of an experience beyond the imagination of modern people. The two writers who related the crossing were guilty of that same omission, but their spare descriptions hardly mean the passengers experienced the trip as no more traumatic than an extended church service.

"In our attempt to reflect the truth of the Pilgrim experience in that first year in America, I had to walk a fine line between fact and imagination. The facts alone would deny the bigger truth, but imagination necessarily explores the unknown and inevitably stumbles into places that just don’t exist. In general, therefore, I stuck with the facts and left imagination to the reader.

Now and then, however, I apply a little conjecture, suggesting a scene within the scope of probability. These passages are either tagged with a qualifier, such as “probably” or “may have” or “no doubt,” or are obviously imaginary descriptions of what we can be pretty sure happened. The occasional quotations from the Geneva Bible, appearing here in italics, were not uttered at the moments being described in this narrative. Rather, they are inserted as illustrations of the kinds of religious thoughts and prayers that typically filled the minds of these devout people."
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You can download an excerpt from the book at NLLibrarium.com/thanksgiving .