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

I feel quite bold in saying - in public - that I am basically pleased by the way "Daddy's Loss" now reads. I like the flow of time and words in the story, and the understated intensity. In choosing to focus on a specific aspect of my relationship with my father - his reactions to his pain and loss of his hand - the piece conveys as best I can the grandeur of my father and the richly tangled inheritance of his use of experiences.

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?

After my parent's deaths, I felt compelled to attempt to understand the psychological inheritances of my family. I wanted to know more of who they were as persons apart from me, yet also more of who I am as a part of them. My father's imposed rule of not talking about the loss of his hand was a significant shaping aspect; I intend to trace the family inheritance of not talking about loss and grief. It's no coincidence that I am a psychotherapist, talking about the forbidden.

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

I feel relief writing creative nonfiction. It is like writing psychotherapy to me, in the effort to reveal history as it exists in my experience while allowing the freedom to imagine what I don't know as "fact" but fits as experience. In exploratory nonfiction, it is not necessary to try to squeeze and push an experience into a short story format.

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

Creative nonfiction is legitimizing as crafted literature our efforts to explore more complex layers of our lives. My two thoughts on the future of the genre: It makes such reasonable sense as a natural means of creative reflection how could it not continue to flourish? The other is that "nonfiction" seems a misnaming. In working with couples, I am often reminded that there is rarely a truly shared single experience of an event ... so what makes a recording a nonfiction? Clock time comes closest to being the only nonfiction; the rest is absorbed through the creative filter of personal experience.

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

I write in scenes: with each sweep through the scene I add details of place and observed person, texture, thought and reflection. I attempt to take out details that distract. The more confidence I gain in my writing, the more I feel free to express what I see.

What advice do you offer young people interested in writing?

From Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life," page 78:

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."