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 wanted to capture some of the feeling of how small the individual youth is against the vast size of the "juvenile justice system," and also I wanted to show how baffled and unthinking a youth may be about what he has done, in the case of a serious crime--because he does not really understand the adult world, the value of life, the irreparable damage of violent crime. And of course, coming from a life of violent, reckless, abusive behavior toward children, he is trapped by his own formation as a child where no one valued his life. I'm pleased if I managed to capture any of this.

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 have visited the juvenile court in Chicago several times, as I work slowly on a novel that has to do with a boy held there in the "juvenile detention center." I wrote this creative nonfiction piece as a way of saying something in a very short space about the place itself and the people in it, without using a narrative or developed characters. As I revised, I tried to sharpen each sentence so that every detail would be clear and meaningful, and so that the ideas and feelings on my mind would be conveyed in those details, without my having to say anything at all in my own voice.

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

Because I write both poetry and fiction, I am used to taking as much care as I can with every sentence, and I have a good feeling for what each genre can do, what it's good for. I think every kind of writing I do helps me do all the others, by keeping me aware of what the possibilities of the genres are. In every case, I try to revise carefully and patiently, to take advantage of the particular strengths of each genre--in poetry, writing word by word, image by image, and taking big steps from each word to the next; in fiction, following the path of an unfolding narrative and the momentum of a voice; in nonfiction, trying to represent the world accurately and at the same time trying to explore my own thinking about the world; and in every case, trying to answer, for myself, the question of why I am writing what I am writing--in other words, seeking to understand my own responses to the world, so that I can strengthen my artistic choices, as I work.

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?

In a sense, creative nonfiction has been around a long time already, if you look back to something like Chekhov's account of visiting a prison island, or Boswell's accounts of his conversations and trips with Samuel Johnson, or Montaigne's essays-I use these examples just in order to step back quickly across the centuries. So much of our own world, our own historical moment, remains unrecorded, outside writing, that there must be a lot of writing yet to do--more and more--about the reality of our experience.

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?

I suppose that I could use any technique from other genres in which I write, when I write non-fiction, although I have not explored this fully. Serious non-fiction seems closer to fiction than it is to poetry, on the one hand, or casual journalism, on the other. It shouldn't lie --either in the positive way in which poetry lies by compressing and intensifying the effects of language and the life of feeling, or in the negative sense in which almost everything printed by the mass media, especially what is politically motivated, lies by misrepresenting or falsifying reality and experience.

What advice might you offer young people interested in writing?

You must read and read, and learn to read as writers read, under-standing what the writer is doing--just as a would-be stand-up comic (to take a simple example) not only may laugh at the jokes s/he hears but also takes note of how the jokes are constructed, why they work, and how they are delivered. Or as a young musician would listen not only to a performance in order to enjoy it, but also in order to understand how it was done, and how it produced the effect that it did on the listeners. And of course, you have to write a lot--much more than you may want to. Study, practice, performance--it's not much different from other callings, especially in the arts. The study can some-times be done in school--but sometimes it can't. In school, from high school to graduate school, you need a teacher who will teach you how to read as a writer, not how to do this trick or that. You need to under-stand what a career is not only in professional terms but also in artistic ones.