What pleases you most about the way your essay turned out? Are there ways in which you feel it fell short of your original goal?

I'm particularly satisfied with the formal coherence of my essay, and its economy of means. From my standpoint, it has a distinct trajectory, reaching across several unpredictable territories and finding an unexpected landing with an open-endedness that I enjoy. Also, there's no excess; every bit of what's there feels necessary to me. In that sense, it's a more spare prose than much of what I write.

How did your essay develop, both in your initial thinking about it and in the revision process? What happened in the writing of it that you didn't expect would happen?

This essay/story is autobiographical, and exact in all its facts. It was written in something very close to a garret - a small room in a pension in Amsterdam, a fourth floor walk up, under the eaves of the house, with a sloping outer wall - on my laptop, an antique Tandy 102 with 32 pages worth of total memory. I'd managed to piggyback a few days' stay in Amsterdam onto the festival in Breda that is the story's concluding locale. My intuition, to which I try to pay close attention, told me that if I gave up an evening's strolling around to sit at the room's tiny desk and set this narrative down, I wouldn't regret it.

I had no idea what would come out - the experience on which the story is based (at least its concluding episode) was only days old, I assumed undigested. So I had no expectations, just curiosity. It came out pretty much complete in the first draft, though not exactly in the final order. It felt like writing several stories at once: the imagined genesis of the image, its history in my hands, its disappearance, a paragraph of one, a sentence of another. I just switched from mode to mode as they came, then cut and pasted the chunks where they belonged when it felt the tale had been told. Few revisions were needed, just a bit of fine tuning, a connective sentence here, a different word there. Not for months did I recognize that it owes a structural debt (and, perhaps, an echo of tone) to a wonderful story by Spencer Holst, "On Hope," that I often use in my seminars and workshops. So I've dedicated it to him.

How does your experience writing in creative nonfiction depend upon or depart from your work in other genres (poetry, fiction, playwriting, literary criticism)?

My living is made writing about photography, as a journalist, critic, historian, and theoretician of lens imagery. I've come back in recent years to writing poetry and fiction, which I'd left aside for several decades. I consider the writing I do professionally to have a significant creative component, not only in the use of language but also in structure, tone, levels of discourse, creation of a narrator's voice, etc. However, when you're writing about something outside yourself that other people will also experience, an objective correlative of your subject, your credibility depends to some extent on its grounding in an accurate description of that subject. Some link to the verifiable, the factual, is inherent in the situation: writer and reader responding to something they can point to and check themselves against. In that situation, I feel a deep obligation to what we might call the facts of the case; I can't inaccurately describe a photograph, or a body of work, to suit my fancy or strengthen my point. In the case of this story, I felt no such obligation; had it been necessary, I think I'd cheerfully have taken away or added anything from the actual events on which it's based to make it come out right. Fortunately, it needed no such alteration.

Speculate about creative nonfiction as an emerging genre in American literature? Where do you see it going in the next several years, or even further down the line?

I don't think of creative nonfiction as an "emerging genre." I think St. Augustine and St. Theresa and Swift and Boswell and Ben Franklin and Virginia Woolf and Thurber and Perelman and Terry Southern and Kay Boyle and Mailer and hundreds and hundreds of others have been writing it for centuries. And people used to study such writing, not only for its content but as literature; the educated 19th century person could discuss Voltaire and Montaigne and Marcus Aurelius and other nonfiction prose stylists along with Blake and Milton. That departments of literature stopped teaching those texts some decades ago, and that departments of creative writing (really a post-Korean War phenomenon) disregarded the genre until recently, never stopped anyone from working within it whenever the mood struck, and a few university faculties "discovering" it doesn't confer any useful legitimacy on it, except insofar as it persuades students to take it seriously. More interesting by far as a subject of discourse would be those decades of bias against it really, I think, a bias against those of us who actually write for a living, since so many of those who do write "creative nonfiction" on a daily basis, and a bias against the wide general audience that such writing often finds. But that's another discussion.

What are the specific literary techniques you attempt to use as a creative nonfiction writer? Scenes? Dialogue? Specific detail, etc.?

As you can see, I employ a goodly amount of specific detail; I want my reader to feel grounded, in contact with whatever I'm describing, and detail is essential for that. In other pieces I've used more dialogue; I feel I've an ear for telling, revelatory (even if unconsciously so) phrases, though I can't construct plausible fictional dialogue to save my life. If I ever do write a novel, it'll either have a minimum of dialogue or use things I can remember people actually saying.

What advice do you offer young people interested in writing?

My two bits of advice for aspiring writers of any age:
(1) never, ever, sell your copyright to anything, because
(2) you can sell/publish the same piece of writing more than once. Had anyone in the Creative Writing Dept. at San Francisco State College said those twenty words to me when I was taking a graduate degree there, I'd have been spared much difficulty.