Q) What pleases you about the way your essay turned out?  Are there any ways in which you feel it fell short of your original goal?

A) A friend asked to quote my essay in a talk she gave.  She has high standards,  so I was pleased that my essay touched her. She said it is so difficult when a person realizes a parent is dying.  The essay presents only a small part of my experience with my father, whom I loved very much and miss terribly, and I hope it is clear that there is much more that could be said.

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

A) The essay began as just a few paragraphs, and expanded over a period of two
years. I didn't sit down to write an essay in this case, but just to say a few things about Dad.

Q)  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?

A)  Creative nonfiction is like poetry in that it is mine, without censorship. Journalism has become less satisfying for me, because I want to process the information through my own experience and comment on it, put my own spin on it.

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)  I see creative nonfiction growing in leaps and bounds, memoirs everywhere. And they are interesting.  The ladies in my book group are crazy about memoirs: Terry Tempest Williams,  Jill Ker Conway,  Janet Frame,  Dennis Covington,  etc.  I think the fact that so many nobodies are engaged with memoir and getting their lives on paper is related to the fact that our world is changing so rapidly.  We want to tell what it has been like for us, because it is no longer that way.  I am delighted when I find a person whose story has been like mine -- in landscape,  experience or emotion.  I love Phyllis Barber's "How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir"  and Ed Geary's "Goodbye to Poplarhaven" because they are about places and people I've known.  I've grieved about the loss of my childhood home, and Geary has shown me how he documents and celebrates what he was.

I think we'll see more nature writing, as natural environments disappear and
extinction accelerates.  I hope we continue to get a new crop, but I worry that perhaps writers are doomed to extinction as experience with and interest in natural environments diminishes.  I met a college student the other day who grew up in Los Angeles and had never, ever seen a frog.  It hadn't ruined her life.

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

A) I try to make my writing simple and clear, but I like to put in an unusual word once in a while so my readers won't think I'm too simple.  I write scenes and dialogue,  and make a few comments, but don't explicate too much.  Sometimes I brainstorm,  and write down all the items I can think of on a particular topic I'm interested in, and try to imagine how they could work together.

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

A)  I would advise students to turn off the TV, and observe.  Everything.  I would advise them to take notes about their experiences and their feelings about them, and save the notes somewhere.  I would advise them to write poems to capture moments and detail.  I would advise them to save letters and photographs, and to ask nosy questions of everyone  (why? why? why?)  and listen to their parents' and grandparents' stories and write them down.  I would advise them to work in as many different settings as possible, and see as much as they can while their eyes are still good.