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?

Well, it's always easier to speak about failures. I would have liked to have viewed him in action - that is, while he was interviewing a subject for one of his stories. I wish that I had pushed him further on the reasons for choosing nonfiction over fiction. I'm relatively pleased that I got some sense of McPhee's playfulness and humor ... and his meticulous artistry.

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 had always envisioned the essay on McPhee as part of a chapter in a book I was writing at the time - "A Place That's Known" - a collection of essays about place and memory. In terms of the chapter I was writing on the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, McPhee held a central place, as a sort of spiritual guide. In another respect, "A Place That's Known" is about the search for father and the related search for voice. McPhee's voice was one that I had heard and admired for a long time. His work seemed to me to fit perfectly into the landscapes that I was describing. I was pleasantly surprised that he wasn't reclusive or uncommunicative. He has a reputation for shying away from publicity - but I found out that he doesn't hide himself from genuine conversation.

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

I've written and published some poetry, but it's been over a decade. I started out in college and graduate school writing fiction, and I've come full circle. I recently finished a memoir about growing up in the Bronx ("Rest in Peace"), and the experience was so close to writing fiction that I decided to begin working on a novel that I've considered for a while. Writing memoir is writing nonfiction - you do your best to stay grounded in the facts - but it is a process of remembering and that process seems to offer many of the same difficulties and pleasures that imagining does. I guess it all depends upon how much trust we have in memory, even when it's jostled by research. In writing more journalistic forms of nonfiction, I would say the pleasure and the challenge come from finding a way to be creative without deviating from what your reporting and research has shown you.

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 one of the most exciting forms available to young writers. Writers like Mitchell, Ross, Capote, Kramer, McPhee, Talese, Kidder and Didion have shown that factual writing can be literature, that it can go beyound fact in its emotional and philosophical resonances but it always has a special claim on its readers - it happened. We seem to be seeing more and more innovative nonfiction. I'm not sure why. I have no apocalyptic theories to offer, but it might have something to do with the information age we live in - and our desire to see some of that information shaped into human form. And what form has more humanity to it than literature?

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

All of them (scenic telling, symbolism, dialogue, foreshadowing, characterization, etc.) - except making things up. But, as Richard Preston showed in "The Hot Zone," even creative "speculation" is fine as long as it rises from the facts and the writer informs the reader that the speculative line has been crossed.