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

A) These Haitian pieces began in a fairly tortured way, as an effort to fulfill commercial magazine assignments I had taken on, partly to pay my expenses there, and partly to air some truth about the country, its culture and its current political situation. The task presented real difficulty since I found my personal attachment to the subject was so great that I was very unwilling to adapt (distort) the stories to conform to the expectations of the Stateside slick magazine market.  It was also very difficult at first to write up the material in a way that seemed just, since my usual linear ways of proceeding seemed to be inapplicable.

Q) 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?

A) As for surprises, ballooning of the length was a big one.  "Sa'm Pedi" ought to have been about 20 some pages long and went to 65. "Action de Grace" exploded to over 100 pages.  When I got to "Namn nan Boutey" I had accepted that I was inadvertantly writing a book, so I first did a short version for the magazine assigment and then expanded it from the
inside to my own satisfaction.

Finding a form for the material was difficult and I don't think I hit on it till "Action de Grace."  The solution came from a sculpture I saw in the studio of Patrick Vilaire, which portrayed a woman suspended in a webwork of wire.  Each intersection of the wires was meant to be marked with a brass bead.  This image connected with my nascent belief that Haitian thinking, Haitian culture, the whole Haitian experience really, is absolutely nonlinear. At all levels of Haitian culture it is the intersections, crossroads, that are important.  The lines between them are not.

In writing "Action de Grace" and "Namn nan Boutey," I tried to make each modular subsection function like a Haitian crossroads, or kalfou, where one or more ideas would connect.  These vertices could potentially be arranged in many different orders, and I did not begin to put them in order until most of the "Action de Grace" sections were already written.  So I came to a nonlinear method of work, since the linear approach had been a very frustrating failure.

Q) If you write in other genres (e.g., poetry or fiction), how does your experience writing in creative nonfiction depend on or depart from your other writing?

A) I'm mainly a fiction writer.  This writing about Haiti is my most extended foray into nonfiction (other than literary journalism of some kind). I use the same descriptive tactics I would use in fiction, without making any thing up.  In terms of the pattern of the narrative, the facts obviously cannot be fudged but can be arranged extrachronologically to alter the
emphasis and the total effect of combination... this too is a fictional device.

Q) 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?

A)  think the term "creative nonfiction" is a new term for an old phenomenon. Back when,  Norman Mailer and Truman Capote tried to get everyone to call it the "nonfiction novel."  The term "New Journalism" embraced nonfiction writers as diverse (and creative, to be sure) as Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. John McPhee taught a course at Princeton in the 70s called "The Literature of Fact."  Hemingway's Death In The Afternoon  and Green Hills of Africa  could certainly be called "creative nonfiction."  I'm sure you could find the genre in other centuries if you looked.

What's different about today's "creative nonfiction" has to do with a shift in the academy, and also with the pressure of market forces.  The genre is moving out of journalism programs toward creative writing programs, and is thus being academically institutionalized in a different way.  For the past few years I've heard literary agents saying that nonfiction sells a good deal better than fiction.... at a time when the creative programs have produced a large oversupply of trained fiction writers.  I suspect the growth of creative nonfiction in the academy is a response to these factors.

Q) What advice might you offer to young people interested in writing?

A) Don't quit your day job.