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 PITTSBURGH, PA, JUNE 6, 2012: Identity theft is often called "the faceless crime," but in a fateful incident behind bars, AC Fraser comes face-to-face with one of her victims.
AC Fraser is the winner of Creative Nonfiction's $1,000 Prize for Best True Crime Essay for "Origami: The Art of Identity Folding," a personal tale of thieving, institutional existence, and the transitory nature of identity. Fraser's narration is unblinking and nonchalant, her insights clear, reflecting the hard exterior and self-awareness one might acquire behind bars:
There is a reason identity theft is called the faceless crime. For the perpetrators, it is impersonal and cold. People's lives are reduced to series of numbers: addresses, birth dates, card limits, overdraft amounts, credit scores. The victim never sees the face of the person who ran up the credit card bill and trashed the credit rating. Even something as violent as robbery or assault has more of a human component.
I never met the rightful owners of the identities I stole. I never had to look into their eyes and answer for what I had done. To me, they were simply information shells to be slipped on and discarded after use.
And yet, right here in my face was a victim demanding a response.
The officer's cheeks and neck turned deeper shades of red and purple. "Have you ripped off so many people that you don't even recognize me?" The officer crossed his arms over his chest and stood glaring, starched uniform heaving under his self-embrace. He took one last look at me and spoke so quietly that I almost missed what he was saying. "I think you know exactly who I am." And then he was gone.
Fraser writes about her time in jail to understand herself better, she says, and to turn what could have become "lost years" into art. With two documents in front of her - a printout of her criminal record and a letter she wrote from jail - Fraser let the details of the incident fall away and looked for the deeper connections in her experience.
Now, Fraser resides in Vancouver, BC, where she instructs yoga and writes. "Origami" is a chapter in a series of essays about her past in Vancouver's drug and crime scene. She will be attending law school at The University of British Columbia in the fall.
The winning True Crime essay was chosen by CNF editors from a competitive pool of nearly 200 contest submissions. Along with four other original essays, "Origami" will be published in Creative Nonfiction #45, to be released in July, 2012. The issue will also feature an Encounter with Erik Larsen; columns by professor and true-crime author Harold Schechter, former sex-worker Shawna Kenney and others; a roundtable discussion about writing about violence; a new Pushing the Boundaries selection; the best of cnfonline; and more.
Edited by Lee Gutkind, Creative Nonfiction has been devoted exclusively to publishing vividly written literary nonfiction since its first issue, in 1994. In March 2010, with the publication of issue #38, the journal re-launched as a quarterly magazine with an updated look, larger size, and expanded content. Known today as "the voice of the genre," Creative Nonfiction is an essential resource for anyone with an artistic, professional or critical stake in the genre - or for anyone who simply enjoys true stories, well told.
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About the Creative Nonfiction Foundation
The Creative Nonfiction Foundation pursues educational and publishing initiatives in the genre of literary nonfiction. Its objectives are to provide a venue, the magazine Creative Nonfiction, for high quality nonfiction prose (memoir, literary journalism, personal essay); to serve as the singular strongest voice of the genre, defining the ethics and parameters of the field; and to broaden the genre's impact in the literary arena by providing an array of educational services and publishing activities. For more information and to subscribe, please visit www.creativenonfiction.org.
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