Students enrolled in Creative Nonfiction Writing: XFic (ENGL 3353) will spend a semester on a deeply investigated project. XFic is multimedia and multidisciplinary, so your “final” can be a longform feature magazine-style piece, a series of profiles, a wonky film or media analysis, or even digital or data visualization–whatever your medium and field of choice. This spring semester, XFic is diving into ‘The American Lawn Project.’ For this special single-topic issue, in partnership with Environmental Innovations Initiative, XFic wants students to help us collaboratively interrogate The American Lawn from as many angles as possible! Is writing not exactly your thing? We’ve got you covered! Students can also choose to work on the XFic Instagram or podcast for the semester. Or work with the data visual team at RDDS (who are very psyched to meet you!). Whatever your medium, each story will partner a student with faculty whose research is highlighted in the issue.

Why ‘The American Lawn Project?’ Turf is a major contributor to the biodiversity crisis. Scientists say if we could magically “get rid” of lawns overnight, we would halt the biodiversity crisis in its John Deere tracks. The mind-blowing fact is that grass, as in your lawn, and all the inert green that once you begin to notice it you may start to feel red-pilled, makes up the largest irrigated crop in the USA. Forty million acres (3 X corn). Grass is the most normalized feature in our lives, but what if we were to defamiliarize it with unconventional reporting? What if a group of both graduate and undergraduates collaborated across the disciplines to really dig below the surface? The chemistry of pesticides. Water consumption. Alternative uses of property. But, also, what about the history of fancy lawns and feudal wealth, and how did that become a symbol of the American Dream? When did pushing around a fossil-fuel spouting guillotine on wheels become conflated with masculine identity? Why do all of the “mating rituals” in Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, all take place over a lawnmower? How did the status of such a modest weed get popularized through film, advertisements, and fashion?

These are the questions we want to ask in this issue of XFic. That the lawn has tendrils in every niche of our cultural ecosystem should not be a surprise, but it should be fun to tackle together! This sustained obsessive approach, we think at XFic, gives us an innovative edge that demands as much creative play as critical depth.

For the Creative Writing Program, this is a bit of a journalistic experiment. There’s a lot of skepticism about traditional media’s ability to move the needle. But given sufficient time to explore all the grassy “facets” of this one topic, can sustained attention and creative defamiliarization lead to measurable impact in the real world? Take XFic and prove it can!