Handle with Care: True Crime, Creative Nonfiction, and Content Warnings

Next week is True Crime week for my Creative Nonfiction students, and this is perhaps our most challenging set of readings and podcasts.

I’m trying to set up the materials to be both trauma-informed and attentive to individual student needs, which I can’t fully anticipate.

There was an acutely tragic Victoria-area murder this winter and a painful trial that ended in a finding of not guilty for reason of mental defect.

And there are several historical crimes and unsolved murders that still get a lot of media attention sometimes with unpredictable timing. These include the murder of Reena Virk, semi-fictionalized in a recent TV series, and the unsolved murder of a young realtor, Lindsay Buziak.

This is a small city, and I don’t know my students’ many connections and sensitivities.

I do try to anticipate that given the violence in our world, many will have a personal connection to crime.

Thus all of the materials are optional, with the exception of a piece by Amanda Knox about the ethics of true crime.

I do want class members to grapple with this, because crime is entertainment, served up for titillation, and true crime is only growing in popularity.

This is not, of course, a new phenomenon. We no longer have public hangings or crime broadsheets (at least in this part of the world). We do have a steady media diet of violent crime repackaged for pleasure, and there are particularly challenging issues to sort out related to a show like Law and Order: SVU. On the one hand, its star has built a solid reputation in anti-violence initiatives; on the other hand, we’re a quarter century into stories of sexual violence that sometimes draw on real-life cases in profoundly re-traumatizing and insensitive ways.

Knox, you’ll recall, was a twenty-year-old American exchange student implicated in a murder treated as a lurid group-sex night gone wrong (which proved to be a complete fabrication, in part brought about through relentless police questioning of Knox when she was without legal representation).

She was soon dubbed “foxy Knoxy” by the media catering to an insatiable public, first found guilty of her housemate’s murder in their Italian college city of Perugia, and then exonerated. Another man was later found responsible, with DNA evidence linking him to the crime.

But Knox and her Italian boyfriend at the time were judged by the Italian police and then by that country’s the justice system to have behaved suspiciously in the wake of the discovery of Meredith Kercher’s body.

And there was Knox’s more general behaviour: a little loud, overt, and “promiscuous” for local tastes.

More recently, Amanda Knox was convicted for slander, because at the time of these events she had suggested another man, a local bar owner, might be culpable. There would have been a prison sentence, but she’d already served it, what with the months she spent in custody for a crime she didn’t commit.

The Italian justice system is . . . interesting.

On this topic: there’s an intriguing Italian series about a late nineteenth-century Italian woman who perseveres in her quest to become a lawyer, The Law According to Lidia Poët. The nudity is casual; the plots are thin; the frocks are gorgeous.

More than almost anyone, then, Amanda Knox, the subject of countless true crime podcasts, films, TV, and print stories, and who is now a journalist, has had reasons to contemplate the ethics of true crime.

I think it’s important that as part of a creative nonfiction course we contemplate challenging course materials. But I don’t think that all class members need to do so all the time, and I try to build in lots of choices, with all difficult and graphic materials accompanied by content warnings. “Trigger warnings” and “snowflakes,” purportedly hyper-sensitive students too fragile for adult content, got a lot of traction in the media for a while.

I haven’t met any.

Intriguingly, I have met a substantial number of students over the years who objected to course content in my classes on various grounds, mostly religious or moral. The first time I taught The Diviners, a young student castigated its protagonist, Morag Gunn, as a “slut” because over the course of her life she’d had a handful of relationships with men. One of my former students recently recalled, with amusement, that my response was . . . lacking. “But it’s only a half dozen or so, over a couple of decades, which is nothing.” I have learned, since then, to be a bit more careful, but in that era I was sleep-deprived, with a toddler who needed to be trekked to daycare on campus and a 9AM class three days a week.

The reason I bring up this anecdote is that, more recently, I taught in a small Catholic college in Vancouver, and I walked in to a silently furious class one afternoon when we were due to discuss Rohinton Mistry’s “Swimming Lessons,” which I’ve taught several times, with no incident. It’s an intriguing example of metafiction, and that’s usually the focus of discussion.

Not this time.

Class members objected to the depiction of sexuality in the story and, specifically, to a reference to pubic hair. They felt the story should never have been published, because it was disgusting.

Context, thus, is everything in teaching. A class of future Catholic elementary school teachers who have been in religious education their whole lives is a very different rhetorical situation than a class of English majors at U of T. A community college course taught online/asynchronously, a first creative writing course for nearly all class members, is also a distinctive teaching occasion, and this is my first time teaching it. In the fall, I’ll spend some additional time re-developing course materials as part of my faculty development months, so that when I teach it again in Winter 2026, I’ll be more informed, and more prepared.

But I don’t know if I’ll include True Crime again. I might, instead, expand our unit on Indigenous Reporting, or build in more weeks that don’t have content readings but do have writing exercises. I tend, in my reading enthusiasms, to assign too many and then invite class members to make their own judicious selections, and that may not be the right approach for this course.

Alternately, I may assign Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts and we could really dig in to the ethics and aesthetics of true crime and the impact on the victim’s family members. Nelson’s brilliant on this: she wrote Jane: A Murder, which is sort-of poetry and sort-of CNF, about the death of her aunt, which took place before Nelson’s own birth; while she was completing the project, she was contacted by a detective who informed her a man was about to go on trial for her aunt’s slaying and several similar murders. Her book is about the experience of this trial, and what it means to grapple so belatedly with a crime in a legal and family setting.

Much will depend on class members’ feedback, both next week and at the end of the course, when I survey them. Students’ voices and choices are important, and they inform my teaching practices in countless ways. But there are often points of disagreement that are challenging to resolve: the text that half the class loves and the other half loathes (I get this with Gatsby, in particular, for some reason). Or the work that most class members complain is too difficult but that a handful of brilliant students really get.

One of my Can Lit students from that interesting Diviners discussion went on to do an M.A. thesis on sexuality, censorship, and women’s writing in Canada. And I suspect that others are still irked about Morag.