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

I think I'm most tickled about having joined in a feminist strategy, writing from the body, or out of the self, are ways they have suggested we speak of it. I thought why shouldn't I do that, why let them have all the fun, and why not with Frost. It seemed then a parallel question to consider the effect, let us say, of being "versed in country things." Of course I also fell short. Every time I reread this I sense areas to probe further. But one thing about essays, eventually, rather than straining to make one perfect, it seems best to begin another.

How did your essay develop, both in your initial thinking about it and in the revision process? What happened in writing that you didnít expect would happen?

One surprise was the passage about dreaming of childbirth in a furrow. When I read this first to a departmental colloquium I was aware, as I approached that passage, of the roomís becoming very still, of having discovered a dramatic tension. I had long remembered that dream, but had never before approached it in writing. Something seems to come together at that point, at least I think it does.

If you write in other genres (poetry, fiction, playwriting, literary criticism, etc.) how does your experience writing in creative nonfiction depend upon or depart from your other kinds of writing?

My essays are all variants of the same process. I write a lot in notebooks, I make lists, write down strings of phrases. When the phrases run toward sentences and the sentences begin to suggest paragraphs I move to the computer. The computer assists in extending my start, seeing how far I can take it and what more gets drawn in. I'm always going back to the beginning, reading through, making small changes along the way, inserting new thoughts, and finally taking the whole a step or two further. So it goes, over and over, till I reach what seems an end. Temporary as that may be, it serves.

Give some of your reflections 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?

If you take the essay to be a less formal, somewhat more personally expressed article, we find the essay, or creative nonfiction, all over. Scientists want to write out their sense of adventure and involvement with their research, not just write up reports. Scholars in all fields write increasingly from a more personal point of view and find ways of valorizing that work as professional. Derrida invades philosophy with the essay. It stakes its claim everywhere. It does this I think because the personal is part of all truth, which is what makes truth provisional, and so in fact more truthful. The personal element may play a much smaller part in some areas of thought than in others, but at least we seem to be more generally comfortable these days with the assumption that it is there. Of course if you think of the essay in relation to other literary genres rather than in relation to modes and fields of scholarship, we find something else. Within the narrower range of writing that we think of as literary, the genres are all crossed, transgressed, blurred. Each takes advantage of the others. Nothing, for example, has added to the essay more than the general relaxation of form in free verse. Then thereís the prose poem. The longer either becomes, the more it seems just as easily an essay. The more cryptic and elliptical the essay, the more, maybe, a prose poem.


What are the specific literary techniques you attempt to use as a creative nonfiction writer? For example, do you attempt to write in scenes? Do you employ dialogue? Specificity of detail? How and why?

One of the things I did in this piece, aside from trying to give more descriptive and occasionally lyrical texture to certain scenes was, in others, to locate a tone of voice that was tongue-in-cheek, even parodic. The identification of Frost with Menard cannot be made wholly in earnest. There is a sweet truth to it, but one that is also wry, which is to say twisted. So a kind of playfulness lies in the heart of this essay. Then at the heart of that are a couple of passages directly imitative of Borges--a reckless attempt for sure.

What advice might you offer young people interested in writing?

Advice for younger writers: Read a lot, develop a patience about re-reading your own work, listen to it closely, listen for what more it may suggest to you, for what you havenít got right yet, for what you can improve. Detail is crucial, but so is nuance.