Kathryn Rhett's "Maternity" tells the story of the birth of her daughter, Cade, and her daughter's life-threatening illness as a newborn. The essay itself had the most unobtrusive of births: Rhett began keeping notes about her daughter and the illness "before I forgot the facts and feelings," she says.

"This piece accurately describes my experience. This memoir felt necessary to write. Also, it was disturbing to write because even though the events had already occurred, I didn't know what I would have to deal with next as I wrote, what truth I would have to try to articulate.

"I started when she was six months old, writing a little bit every morning. I had no expectation of writing anything long, or working on craft."

But soon the writing took on a life of its own. And Rhett discovered a hitherto unknown purpose to those instinctual jottings in her notebook: "After a couple of months, I was surprised to find that I hadn't stopped writing, and that this traumatic event had created a peculiar pressure on me."

The writing somehow relieved that pressure. Rhett is not the first writer to describe the feeling of emotional control over chaotic events that can be gained by writing them down.

Rhett undertook the revision of the initial notes in stages. When she had 200 pages, she began to revise, shaping the book manuscript into chapters. "Maternity," which covers her stay on the maternity ward, is the book's second chapter.

At this time, she also began reading the medical records from her and her daughter's hospital stays, which gave her a wealth of new material, much of which now appears in "Maternity."

"I realized that [the records] represented a whole separate drama, and that the workings of the hospital, the observations of the medical staff, and the chronicle of Cade's decline and recovery were all emotionally important to me. It felt awkward to try to insert the medical record information, but I wanted to enlarge the perspective somehow."

After she had incorporated the new material into the essay, she says, "The last step was to edit the writing for clarity and precision.

The essay was then finished; but nothing, as writers like to say, is ever finished, and Rhett is among them: "I still see words and sentence structures that are repeated too often."