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

My first, second and third response to this question about goals is "What goals?" "Radio Wars" is part of a set of pieces, memoirs, yes, but something other than memoirs. Like all the pieces in this set, "Radio Wars" revisits events in my life which, for lack of a better word, haunt me. I revisit these events to try to make sense of them, to understand what happened and why, to take them up and examine them closely until I can put them down and find that they no longer haunt me. Part of that process almost always involves a stage of anger, perhaps self-pity-that part of me who is still 8 or 11 and who still lurks on the peripheries of her adults' lives. My foremost goal is to get beyond that stage of anger and self-pity, to exorcise it both from my connection to the event and from my written representation of the event. Some essence of something tragic might, even must at times, remain, but I hope it reaches for universality and I hope it is balanced by humor and good will.

This particular essay challenged me in that respect more than some because the older sister I write about and I to this day are somewhat estranged, politely so, but sadly incommunicative even when we talk. For "Radio Wars," this fact challenged my integrity: At times, I would give in to an urge to soften my recounting, perhaps to make her a gift of a happy resolution when there really was no resolution. I don't think she put the ceramic items back together. There is a slim chance, but doing so would not have been her way. But I am not completely sure she did not, so I leave that possibility open-but in a way that I hope alerts readers to my own doubts. Could I have found out for sure? Probably, but I chose not to because that slim chance is part of the power of this event for me.

How did your essay develop, both in your initial thinking about it and in the revision process? What happened in writing that you didn't expect would happen?

I wish I could say something profound, but I just start writing and write until I can't write anymore. Then I run away from it, and then I go back and start at the beginning and write through again, changing, adding usually, adjusting. Then I run away again. Then I start at the beginning and write through it again. And I keep this rotation up (with lots of spontaneous, mental, spot rewriting while I'm driving and walking) until I get to the end of the piece. Then I read it aloud, listening to hear if the voice and rhythm and pace are actually what I was hearing while I wrote. Then I fix it until I am sick of it, at which point I give it to two readers I trust, both of whom ask good questions and are good at talking about writing. Then I push myself beyond the "sick of it" stage and finish it. Ususally, I have at least five pieces-of various sorts-in draft mode at once, usually at about the same place in drafting. So when I run away from one, I often go to another. I guess I need to say, too, that by the time I start to write, I have done a tremendous amount of fretting about a story. I start writing when something in my thinking has jolted my thoughts to a different level.

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?

I write primarily in two genres-I write nonfiction of the creative or literary sort, and I write about the teaching of writing, mostly primary research-based articles that examine teacher-student discourse, both ethnolinguistically. I don't know that they are interdependent in any way except that both give me different kinds of joy, and I tend to be writing both or in a dry spell of writing neither. Both involve storytelling, and both involve an ethical agenda with that storytelling. I have to tell the truth, and I have to do so in ways which allow, perhaps insist, that readers travel along in the story with me and discover what it means with me, perhaps discovering something different from what I discover. However, with the nonfiction, I write first for myself. I never have a clear reader in mind because I frankly don't know who reads this stuff-someone can put it down if she or he wants. I really am my own reader, particularly with the set of stories I am finishing up now. They are my memories, my ghosts. I am writing as an exorcist, getting these stories out so I can look at them, laugh some, and get on with my life. A few of the stories are about events which have affected the direction of my life without asking. Do I write as therapy, then? Of course. I'm not ashamed of that. Perhaps part of the therapy, though, is finding readers who relate, and thus affirm for me that my events are shared in essence and thus, I don't know, normal?

With my academic work, my audience is very clear-teachers, sometimes their students, definitely my own graduate students, definitely my fellow compositionists. I have strong and substantive concepts about teaching writing. I think we still, for all the field's work the last 35 years, have a long way to go. I think I have some workable maps on my drawing table. I write to call attention to what's not working and to enter into discussions of what we can do to make it work. I have huge agendas and thus am perhaps more direct and assertive. If these two genres depart in any other way, it is that the nonfiction brings me more pleasure than the scholarship, so when I am tired, I tend to write more nonfiction and less scholarship.

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?

Long live nonfiction, the telling of real stories, the recording of the lives of real people. I think what people choose to write is always an artifact of their times. What I see in our current time is people telling their stories and others' stories, publishing life with a candidness and universality that makes those stories resonant for others. I am thinking of "Shot in the Heart," "Days of Obligation," "An Unquiet Mind," "A Match to the Heart," anything by John McPhee, "Refuge," "The Four-Cornered Falcon," and so on and so on.

Perhaps nonfiction re-emerged because we live in an age of fast and often ungraceful communication. Creative nonfiction is a sort of socio-historic genre, even a cultural artifact. I believe the genre will finally come to find equal footing with other creative forms in ways it has not in the past. I believe, too, that if we look at how the ends of centuries send people rushing to various sources to find truth in one form or another, the writers of creative nonfiction are taking up that same search in their own way.

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?

Recently, I have found myself rejecting as myth an assertion I hear too often that the line between nonfiction and fiction is blurred and gray. I don't believe that for a moment. Now I find myself rejecting such classifying of techniques. In your questions you replace "poetic" or "fictive" techniques with "literary," and I appreciate that, but the fact is-the devices we think of under any of those classifications are simply things people do with language, some very well, to make language work for them. I write a lot in the present tense because I want a here and now effect, the vitality of events happening rather than events having happened. Is this literary, fictive, or poetic? I don't know. I hear people telling stories this way all the time.

So here I am, standing on the corner of Harvie and Floyd, waiting to cross, and this car stops. The driver asks me, "How do I get to DC from here," and I am suddenly blank. Well, not blank, but only catching fragments. That's not how people drive places, I think. They use maps to drive long distances. And doesn't everyone know that DC is a clean sweep straight up 95? So I tell him, "Just take 95 north." And he says, "OK, so how do I get to 95?" And then I realize that this man is really a kid still, maybe only 16. I hadn't noticed before, perhaps because he is big and bearded. "God," I say, "Let me think." I just get on 95 by rote; I don't think about how to get on it. And I begin a painful process of bringing to consciousness something I never think about, and as I do, I realize the extent to which I travel by landmarks and some built-in map. Maybe all people don't use maps to get places. Maybe I don't really.

This happened yesterday. I use first person here, as I did at dinner last night, because what I want to front here is not the event itself but the train of thought it set me on. Is that literary? Fictive? Poetic? I don't think so. I think devices are up for situational grabs-whatever works best, and if a lot of people agree it's "best" or even "good," then perhaps it becomes literary. Language came before literary.

Now, I am very aware of certain things I do with language: pacing, rhythm, metaphor, and levels of meaning and sound. As I write, I become even more aware of things language has done with me. I don't think in terms of technique. I polish the gems that I discover as I crack open stones to get at their contents. I work with what stands out to me as I rewrite.

What advice might you offer young people interested in writing?

This is all going to be cliche, I'm sure. Read a lot and variously (vary in subject and genre and era). Carry a small notepad and take notes. Listen hard, look hard, listen and look over and over when you have the chance. And write regularly. Develop a habit of writing. And I guess, too, don't turn your back on humility. No one deserves any special treatment because he or she is a writer, even when he or she is a good or great writer. Writing is, at its best, a very giving and loving enterprise.