I conceived this essay as a prose response to a suite of images made by the Cuban-American photographer Julio Mitchel while riding the Staten Island Ferry.  Mitchel,  who lives in Brooklyn,  New York,  found in the ferry and its passengers a provocative metaphor and useful proscenium for his exploration of the human condition, and created a powerful tone poem centered around them.  Since I've lived on Staten Island for several decades, I'm familiar with the ferry as an environment,  which made me immediately responsive to his vision of it.  That resulted in this attempt to create something that could serve as a parallel or counterpoint to Mitchel's photographs,  yet also function as an autonomous prose work in its own right.

A few phrases in the text refer obliquely to specific images in Mitchel's series, but the text is not about the photographs -- more after them,  as a painter might say.  I don't think the reader needs to know the photographs to understand this piece of writing.  Yet,  because I felt beholden in many ways to Mitchel's images as the springboards for my own ruminations,  I sensed some obligation to match the dark,  brooding tone of his work -- periodically to speak,  as it were,  in the voice of the photographs.  At the same time,  I wanted my own voice to come through clearly.  I think I achieved that;  at least, I did so to my own satisfaction. What I saw as,  alternately, a dialogue and a tension between my own vision and Mitchel's, and between visual and verbal images, in some ways shaped this text in the making.  I'm not sure that anyone else can tell that that's going on in the writing,  but it functioned as an active issue in my own consciousness during the writing of this prose poem.

The italicized passages -- brief synopses of things I'd witnessed on the ferry or had happen to me there -- asserted themselves insistently and unexpectedly during the writing process.  At first I simply noted them down and filed them away;  then I decided to experiment with them by allowing them into the text, one at a time,  experimenting with them in different positions and in varying relations to each other.  Eventually they became a structural element, a pacing device and a way of moving the reader back and forth in time -- in a certain way akin to Mitchel's photographs,  which seem simple but are in fact densely packed with insight and feeling.

For all those reasons,  this text evolved very slowly, almost painfully.  It took months to complete it to my own satisfaction.  The adjustment of rhythms and tones proved the central problem,  and I found I needed to let it sit at various stages -- sometimes for weeks -- so that I could come back to it with some critical distance and hear it with fresh ears.

My living is made primarily by writing about photography, as a journalist,  critic,  historian,  and theoretician of lens imagery.  I've come back in recent years to writing poetry and fiction, which I'd left aside for several decades.  I consider the writing I do professionally to have a significant creative component, not only in the use of language but also in structure, tone, levels of discourse, creation of a narrator's voice,  etc.  However,  when you're writing about something outside yourself that other people will also experience, an objective correlative of your subject,  your credibility depends to some extent on its grounding in an accurate description of that subject.  Some link to the verifiable, the factual, is inherent in the situation: writer and reader responding to something they can point to and check themselves against.  In that situation,  I feel a deep obligation to what we might call the facts of the case; I can't inaccurately describe a photograph, or a body of work, to suit my fancy or strengthen my point.  In fiction and poetry -- and even in creative nonfiction,  to some extent -- I feel more liberty in that regard.  For example,  one can take a minor aspect of an event, something incidental to it, even irrelevant, and make it the central issue of one's response.

As you can see, I employ a goodly amount of specific detail; I want my reader to feel grounded, in contact with whatever I'm describing, and detail is essential for that.  In other pieces, I've used more dialogue.  This text contains only a few fragments of dialogue.  But, since it functions as a monologue regularly interrupted by memories (the italicized passages), I think that additional voices in the prose would only confuse matters.

I don't think of creative nonfiction as an emerging genre.  I think St. Augustine and St. Theresa and Swift and Boswell and Ben Franklin and Virginia Woolf and Thurber and Perelman and Terry Southern and Kay Boyle and Mailer and hundreds and hundreds of others have been writing it for centuries.  And people used to study such writing, not only for its content but as literature;  the educated 19th-century person could discuss Voltaire and Montaigne and Marcus Aurelius and other nonfiction prose stylists along with Blake and Milton.  That departments of literature stopped teaching those texts some decades ago, and that departments of creative writing (really a post-Korean War phenomenon)  disregarded the genre until recently, never stopped anyone from working within it whenever the mood struck, and a few university faculties discovering it doesn't confer any useful legitimacy on it, except insofar as it persuades students to take it seriously.  More interesting by far as a subject of discourse would be those decades of bias against it -- really,  I think,  a bias against those of us who actually write for a living, since so many of those who do write creative nonfiction on a daily basis, and a bias against the wide general audience that such writing often finds.  But that's another discussion.

My two bits of advice for aspiring writers of any age:
(1) never, ever, sell your copyright to anything, because
(2) you can sell/publish the same piece of writing more than once.  Had anyone in the Creative Writing Dept. at San Francisco State College said those twenty words to me when I was taking a graduate degree there,  I'd have been spared much difficulty.