John D'Agata is a poet. He is a journalist poet. He is a passionate journalist poet. He calls himself "a bit of a crank." He loves syntax; he loves facts; and he follows them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he allows them to lead him. Mostly, he has wonder.

He freelances and starts projects because they sound interesting. That's how "Round Trip" serendipitously began. Three years ago, he had gone to Las Vegas to write about a little known fact he had discovered in the "corner of some paper" about a light, the brightest beam of light in the world. "For some reason, I just needed to see it. So I was just finishing college. I had no money and I just drove out there." The people at the hotel were hoarding information about the light and were reluctant to give him information. "So, I lied. I said I was a physics student in graduate school and was doing a research paper on light. So I had to sign a waver and ultimately they brought me to the guy who was in charge of it."

The essay wasn't going well. D'Agata was bored, "in a slump. My interviews weren't good. I was broke." So he decided to go on a tour. He noticed the "kind of crazy one-way guy" first in the tour office area and made sure he stood next to him in line because he was certain he could use him for interesting lines in some future, as yet unknown way. Once on the bus he found Isaac and his family. After having been at the dam he began to think that it might be "a whole lot less interesting story than the tour." In part, this realization had to do with Joan Didion.

D'Agata was "in love with the Joan Didion essay on the Hoover Dam and the particular world that built it." His original essay was a mess because of that. "There was nothing but head-nodding to Didion and in that way, it didn't really need to exist. It had already been so perfectly done. I had drafted a version of an essay that focused on the dam,but it was written as a tribute to Didion. It was dreadful for that reason. It was all Didion, Didion,

Didion. After a few of those, I realized that the true idea in the essay -- the one hidden beneath Didion's throne -- the idea that wonders, and the idea of wonders, is beautifully entwined with the creative process -- made it impossible, even blasphemous, to allow anything other than my own voice and eye and experience on the bus and at the dam to write the essay. This is my naïve writer discovering this -- that it's still my perspective that counts. I can still have my own angle on something and make it matter. I finally discovered that the most interesting information in these revisions was coming from the tour portion."

D'Agata's description of the wonder and roundedness of this learning process also relates to the content and title of the piece. He is describing things cyclical. D'Agata finds this throughout the syntax and content of the piece, especially in the character of the bus driver. "He spoke in complete circles. 'On the right side of the bus is the Flaming and on the left side is.' It's the kind of sentence you can miss half of and still completely understand. Also, he was such an old world figure, some figure from the past who drove this big ancient cylinder of a bus and was polite to pedestrians, a trait unheard of in Vegas. He was a man from that era, the era that was able to surround itself with slippery enough things, chrome and streamlined cars, that they could slip right into the future."

The suggestion that the characters seemed so terribly stuck, fixed in caricature, so antithetical to the idea of roundedness, pleased D'Agata. It was also the reason that they never actually arrive at the dam. The story comes close but "we never see it and we certainly never return from the trip. So in that way, it's like this straight arrow shooting off toward whatever the future holds for these people."

D'Agata only took notes in the second half of the trip on the way home when people were sleeping. Most of the quotes are actually from his memory including the huge quote from Isaac. The quotes from Antipiter of Sidon are a blend of the actual quote and D'Agata's language, but really came from Isaac's mother and her own wonder. So wonder became a part of the story "not just for the characters but it became important for me because I was like Isaac's mom in my awe of Joan Didion."

The whole essay was a process of his finding his own legitimacy. "This essay isn't my favorite artistically, but it is my favorite emotionally. It is my own private Ars Poetica. I learned in it that the essay could be completely about process rather than product. It was an essay in which one thing inspired the next -- a progression of thought. I kept wanting to know."

D'Agata described himself as "looking for what other peoples' visions of the holy is in places where you can't find it. There is something very sacred when you watch a person dedicate his life to something that might be laughable to others." He is currently writing a "giant essay" about this now. It's split up into individual essays and is about the 144 halls of fame in the U.S. -- the tiny halls of fame, not the large ones; ones like the hall of fame of marbles, the hall of fame of shuffle board and the hall of fame of Barbies. He got obsessed with them..

Karen Rosica