A) This essay was the final piece in my original Master's Thesis and what makes me feel best about it is that it articulates not only my love for writing,  but my love for language itself.  It's about a very personal relationship with language.  As someone who spent half her life supporting a heroin habit as a streetwalker, I get told all the time that I'm the exception to the rule and I know it's intended as a compliment but it bothers me terribly.  This essay demonstrates in a very real way what's wrong with the rule.  And this probably sounds enormously egotistical -- but this is one piece that didn't fall short for me personally in any way.

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) I knew that it would be the last piece in my thesis and because there are a variety of dialects in the collection -- from the harshest street voice to the completely standard English -- I wanted the reader to understand that journey.  I thought about all the ways that letters -- not epistles but letters of the alphabet -- had affected my 'reinvention' from the micro applications like playing Scrabble and taking spelling tests in jail to the macro -- putting letters together to make words to make essays.  And then I attempted to map that journey -- in what I think of as my native tongue.  The largest surprise -- perhaps the most significant discovery of my education -- came at the end,  in the single line that I've discovered something. I can say gonna and hermeneutics in the same sentence and if it doesn't sound authentic -- the problem is with the way the world listens and not the way I speak.  The surprise was, of course,  that finally I believed that.

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)  My nonfiction is not a great deal different than my fiction.  I rely a great deal on scenes and dialogue in the way that fiction does.  It departs in that there are moments where this particular genre allows me to step out of the narrative and -- when it works-- become reflexive.  It allows me to put the big spin on personal experience in a way that fiction doesn't. It allows it in a more direct way.  No matter what I write -- the initial motivation to put fingers to keyboard always grows from a strong belief in something. Entertaining my audience is the secondary goal.  In my first year of grad school the second years voted me the person most likely to lead the revolution and I think that's as great of a nutshell description of me and my writing that I've ever heard.

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)  Fascinating question.  As we have truly become a global community and access to information is immediate -- the public gets dulled.  There aren't any stories left to tell.  But -- we can recycle the old ones by putting personal spin on them.  James Welch's "Killing Custer"  comes to mind.  When I was a young girl it was I Never Promised You a Rose Garden .  Now it s Girl Interrupted .  It's much the same reason we've become so fascinated as a nation with 'reality' TV. We've seen all the fake stuff.  We're bored.  Witness the Princess Di phenomenon.  Every academic I know has totally dissed those of us who sat glued to our TVs -- but it was her having been willing to share her personal story with us that created that environment.  There's nothing new you can say about the British royalty unless you're going to give a personal perspective. I'm not sure where the genre will go -- but it has all the potential to turn into the talk TV of literature if the people who write about it don't stop focusing so exclusively on the female confessional elements of it -- Harrison,  Karr,  etc.  It's obviously enormously important for those kinds of narratives to finally get a hearing -- but the genre has the potential for so much more.  I taught a class last year called The Revolutionary Tradition in African American Literature -- and the list of books was 90% nonfiction.  I've never seen that occur in another lit class.  Right now I see Creative Nonfiction in many ways as a source of healing -- both public and private.  I'd like to see it become a source of change -- both public and private.

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 think I kind of answered that in question 3. But I guess for my current work -- the two things that emerge as most significant have to do with treatment of time and my treatment of language.  I can't pin down dates or memories -- I call it drug time.  There are almost no temporal indicators in my current work -- no real way for the audience to pin it down.  And that's very important to understanding what that kind of life was like.  I've experimented with my use of language throughout.  There are pieces where I play with altering spellings and places where I use grammar to mark difference.  There are pieces where the dialect is included in the narrative structure and pieces where it's only in the dialogue.  Hopefully -- in aggregate -- it demonstrates a journey taken with language as well as a journey taken through drugs and the streets.

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

A) To read.  Read and write.  I taught freshman comp for two years and I always point out that Olympic athletes don't just walk into a gym one day and discover they're capable of winning the gold.  It takes training and practice.  I encourage them to read and to respond to what they read.  Engage both the voices that intrigue them and the voices that anger them.  I tell them to speak up and claim their space in the world of words -- it's free and it belongs to everybody.