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?

This essay seems to have come unbidden, really: I can't remember much about the writing of this except that I sat down and finished it in about two weeks. The piece, originally 45 or so pages, came at the end of a book of essays I'd been working on for about a year, all of them about my father, my brothers, and my sons; prior to writing this one, each essay had been around 12 to 15 pages long, and I only now realize that each of those pieces were merely circling this large one, swirling around it, making vague stabs now and again at this story: how we all have made it thus far. That sense of the essay's springing forth of its own is what pleases me most: the sense this came from me, but didn't come of my own will, but of its own.

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?

As you can see from its present length, about 25-or-so manuscript pages, the revisions have sharpened the focus, honed it down more to the relationship between my father and myself. This shorter revision is for the purpose of appearing in Creative Nonfiction, and stands alone pretty well, I think. But I have kept that longer version in the book itself, "Fathers, Sons and Brothers," as the book has a larger focus that includes Brad and Tim and Dad and my own sons, Zeb and Jake.

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

I write fiction, for the most part, and found the writing of nonfiction quite liberating: gone was all the worry over what would happen next and why. Now all I had to worry over was getting down as precisely as possible what already had happened, the story already come and gone. I merely had to write down what I'd already known about characters I'd lived with my entire life.

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?

I can't really guess where creative nonfiction as a genre is going, as it seems to me it hasn't ever quite disappeared and won't. Just as the short story goes through a "renaissance" every 15 years or so, so, I believe goes creative nonfiction: it wasn't too long ago that Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and Annie Dillard and Joan Didion et al were dictating the direction of American letters. Now here we are again. And this is good: creative nonfiction isn't anything new, nor is it anything that will die.

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

I find in writing nonfiction that pace, narrative, character development and visuals are just as important as in fiction: you have to have a vivid story told vividly with vivid characters throughout, all this accomplished with genuine dialogue, scenes, details, body language. What else is there?

What advice do you offer young people interested in writing?

My advice is to pay attention to your life, whether you intend to write of it or not. But don't make the mistake I made early on in believing that observing life for the sake of writing of it supersedes participating in that life: I knew I'd gone over the edge when one night while my wife and I were having a heated argument (a fight, really), I stopped and wondered of myself, "What would he say next?" At that point I'd kind of checked out of my life for the sake of observing it. Wrong. Live the life, while paying attention to it.