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?

What pleases me most is the way in which the essay finds its own form. It is vital to me that a piece of writing somehow forge its own path - that the subject and style and truth of the journey be the forces which dictate the structure. In an essay called "Contemporary Prose Styles," Annie Dillard writes, among countless other stunning things, that fine writing "is at once an exploratory craft and the planet it attains."

As far as goals ... new goals seemed to arise with the writing of each passage - new ideas to be explored, new demands to be met, new terrain to plod through.

The only time I had the distinct feeling that I might be abandoning a goal was when I renounced nature to follow my instinct toward humanity (toward language, human behavior, dialogue ...). I assured myself, then, and believe now, that I was acting and writing truthfully; that the debate and the decision are at the very heart of the essay, and I was not abandoning a goal but searching out some sort of resolution.

Still, I have always wondered what might have resulted had I stayed - gone further into if further had beckoned - nothing.

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?

I believe this question is best answered by turning to the essay itself, because the issue of starting and developing a narrative is so integral to it. Perhaps the only thing I didn't expect was how well all of the different elements (memory, dialogue, action, references, the freedom with grammar and tenses ...) would work together - would build in meaning and resonance - would seem fluid, organic even.

What I attribute this to, mostly, is how genuinely needy I was (and still am) of the writing process. A teacher (writer, editor) recently wrote to me that my kind of writing might be called "the literature of exaltation," and offered the following meditation on the process:

"Sometimes I think that writing is best thought of as a religious act; that the writer at work is like someone in prayer. And in this realm I think the categories of 'failure' and 'success' are irrelevant. The religious person prays not because he hopes that it will bring him some reward, but because of the beauty and the sacredness of the act of reverence and of the object of reverence; and in the same way, a writer writes because of the beauty and the sacredness of his objects - art and life - and not because of the rewards it will bring. The act is the reward."

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

I seem always to be working in different genres at the same time, which may explain why so little of it is finished. I have in progress a novel, a screenplay, a journal, and a memoir whose dominant concern is the experience of trying to write fiction.

The common goal of these works is to allow the subject of each dictate the voice and style. But working in creative nonfiction has shown me the value and necessity of certain things, regardless of the realm I'm working in. Keen observation is one (ideally to the point of transcendent experience); subservience to details; lyricism, manipulation of syntax and punctuation ... essentially the devotion to prose.

Writing a screenplay, for example, requires writing simultaneously for several players - director, actor, production designer, costumer, etc. And although there are certain standards in form which indicate time, place, camera angle, action, dialogue ... the writer finds ways within the basic structure to convey the unique vision of the film, its tone, its pace ... and ways to provide actors with unique details and insights about their characters. In my experience, using different prose styles within the same script - working with punctuation, rhythms, details - is how I have found these ways.

My basic conviction is that the more deeply personal and honest the work is, the more it will have resonance for other people. And so in any form, if the writer can sublimate herself completely within the object of observation, it is probably a good idea.

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?

Shortly after writing "Out of Nothing," a renewed correspondence ensued with my teacher (mentor, friend). We discovered that while I had been writing the essay, he himself had been seized with a vision for a nonfiction book about/to/for another writer, Silone: "It was a flash I had while reading Louise Erdrich's 'Love Medicine.' I can't really describe how powerful and illuminating it was ... It would include autobiography, poems, meditations, various bits to/about Silone; perhaps some kind of testament..."

We discovered also that not only had we embarked simultaneously on the common exploratory craft of creative nonfiction, but that in the years since we'd communicated, we had come to embrace, with equal passion, some of the same books, namely "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard, "A Chorus of Stones" by Susan Griffin, and "The Gift" by Lewis Hyde.

"Is there something in the air," my teacher wrote, "something about the time, that makes the personal essay so appealing?"

As I write this, the November/December '95 issue of Poets & Writers hits the stands, featuring an article called "The Return of the Essay" by Kathleen Hirsch, who reports that "...the essay is returning from an ignoble exile, one it has endured for nearly half a century, to full citizenship again in the republic of letters."

The article is a profile of Robert Atwan, best known as the founder and editor of the annual Best American Essays, and "probably as close as we come to a national sage on the genre."

Says Atwan: "The essay still is the form of prose. It always has been. It's where prose shines."

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

Perhaps the most important discovery for me through writing creative nonfiction has been finding ways to combine scenes and images and different elements of writing without explicitly connecting them. Sometimes it means nothing more than putting a space between paragraphs, sometimes adding a certain symbol; it may mean italics, or bold face, perhaps a change of tense, a new voice ...

As much as possible, I want the prose to be the subject - the way an actor becomes another personality; the way an athlete becomes the movement. The selection of rhythms in a sentence, or of punctuation, spacing, letter case, font ... all of it is about serving the subject, becoming so natural as to disappear.

What advice do you offer young people interested in writing?

The only advice that comes readily to mind to offer people who are young in their writing lives is: Do whatever you have to do to sustain the place you need to be when you write. Every writer has a different state - sometimes it is elevated, sometimes descended; in any case it is invariably outside the normal scheme of things (namely Time). Every writer has different means of getting there and staying there.

For myself, I rely mostly on books. Reading other writers, slipping down into other idioms, seeing the play of language on a page ... this is the surest source of inspiration for me.

In "The Writing Life" (which I would recommend as a good beginning, middle and end for any writer seeking affirmation and any reader seeking an incredible read), Annie Dillard recalls writing a difficult, highly charged prose book: "On a break, I usually read Conrad Aiken's poetry aloud. It was pure sound, unencumbered by sense. If I ever caught a poem's sense by accident, I could never use that poem again ... Some days I read part of any poetry anthology's index of first lines. The parallels sounded strong and suggestive. They could set me off, perhaps."

We turn to different things to satisfy different needs. The memoir I'm working on has a high-speed, breathless idiom, and it dances rather spontaneously in and out of time and sentiment. While there are several books that I use for research, I have come to rely on one, "The Words" by Jean Paul Sartre, to really get me into it each time (and more often than not, into it is not the place I want to be). It is hard for me to imagine anyone writing "The Words" nowadays, it is so flighty, imaginative, long-winded, hysterical. Sometimes I read it just to convince myself that it is my sole responsibility, my role as a writer, to compose something in its spirit, to keep it alive.

In any case, Sartre never fails to get me where I need to go. And, being dead, he tends not to interrupt me once I'm there.