When did you first write about Miss Dennis?

I wrote a column about Miss Dennis in 1986. I wasn't writing regular columns at the time. I was a reporter. I wrote one every month. I wrote about her. It was a very well-received column and I got a lot of letters from people. The spine of the essay was really in that column.

After writing the column, why did you choose to write an essay?

I maintain that essays are just much more complete. They give you a chance to vent, come back to the central theme and digress. The column is not as spacious. I wrote columns regularly for about five years that were 20 inches. Now, columnists have been cut back to 17-1/2 inches. That's the average length of a column nowadays.

Have you been thinking about Miss Dennis for some time?

She would come up in columns that I wrote. I did actually mention her name in passing in a column I did on the influence of teachers on well-known writers. Anne Tyler and Reynolds Price, who are two of my favorite writers, both had the same teacher who influenced them. They both went to Duke. They had both grown up in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area.

In this column, I very quickly, in passing, mentioned one of Miss Dennis' idiosyncratic approaches to teaching writing. I never got her out of my mind for some reason.

What portions of this essay, in your opinion, are the strongest?

It's an unanswerable question to me. I like the essay. It's a total piece. There are not parts to it. It's a whole, a seamless endeavor. For me, it really works. I'm not saying it's a good piece of writing or a bad piece of writing. I see it as a very seamless piece of writing that has a kind of wholeness and purity about it.

How would you describe this essay?

Stream of consciousness rearranged into careful thought. The bottom of my writing is free association. Iím a great little free-associater. I trust my instincts. I haven't always. I trust my instincts of free association to lead me to an interesting kind of leap that will actually have some connection to what has just been going on in the story or what I'm writing.

Has the essay been published previously?

Yes. It ran last year in The Baltimore Sun.

At the beginning of this essay, a novelist turns away from you after learning that you are a graduate of the Miss Dennis School of Writing. Did this encounter play a role in your decision to write the piece?

To some extent it did. I had written a column about this--how people are always trying to know how worthwhile you are to talk to by determining where you went to school, what you do for a living, what kind of car you drive, where you went to college. It's always annoying me. I find it so unproductive. It's just a horrible way to look at life.

How do you work so that you can hear your voice?

There are two voices. One is more analogous to a musical voice. That is the actual sound of the words. I am not comparing myself to great poets. I can hear what I'm writing when I write it. I can hear a word that doesn't fit in or seems dissonant to me. I absolutely have to have the right word or it's like a bad note. There is a rhythm in sentences. I can tell when a sentence is too long. The second voice is your sense of self. Who is the person speaking to the reader? What is that voice about? You are trying to reach that voice in the most direct way, to try to strip away all the stuff around it that we all build up to conceal who we are and to try to get that direct essence. It goes back to poetry, which is so distilled and refined down to its essence.

If I had to describe my voice, even in my newspaper writing, I would say my voice tends to look at people with a child's eye. If I'm any good at reporting, it's because I want to know why. I can't stand it if I don't know why. If I think of a question that I haven't gotten answered, it bugs the hell out of me. That's very much like a child. You may never use the answer to that question. I wind up with hundreds of pages of notes that never get used.

You want a speaking voice and a voice that has some soul to it, which is a different thing. I think people who read the Miss Dennis essay will have some sense of what kind of person I am. It won't be perfect and it won't be all-inclusive. What they will see in there, if they choose to, is some very real unguarded aspect of me. That's the voice.

Do you recall any differences between the original column and your essay? What did you put in or leave out?

I don't really recall. I just rearranged it a little bit. I expanded a lot. I think, in the original column, I did not have the whole bit in there about my father. I knew I hadn't finished my column. I knew that column was really a warm-up for what I wanted to talk about, which was my father. He still does hover in my stories.

What kind of reaction did you get to your essay last year?

After the essay ran, I got a letter from another person who was a student of hers. I didn't know this other person. She said, "I was one of the lucky ones, too." That was really wonderful for me to get this letter.

How well did you know Miss Dennis?

I can't tell you how shocked I was when I saw her smoking with this silver cigarette holder. A tiny flashbulb went off and I thought, "Maybe I don't know her as well as I thought I did." I thought she was very smart but I thought she was very down home. She read The New Yorker and The Atlantic. This woman might have been a lot more sophisticated than I thought. I didn't know anything about her. I don't know if she wrote at home. Some people are great teachers but not great writers.

How did you go about structuring your essay?

I think structure is always a problem. There's always more than one way to structure a story. People who get locked into this "finding the perfect structure" . . . . There's more than one good structure for a story. It's got to feel right to you. The hard part is the beginning. Once I can get a good 25 inches in a long story, I'm on my way. Then I don't have so much of a problem. But in this essay, the structure just came together. I don't even remember structuring it.