"Love, War, and Deer Hunting," a dense and rich essay, weaves many weighty philosophical, sociocultural and psychological issues into its fabric. In this single piece we find a story of coming of age, masculine rights of passage, the influence of culture on personality, the psychological mechanisms of denial and rationalization, the unity of life, the issue of personal responsibility, and a fundamental struggle of the human condition--finding a balance between losing and maintaining control. The struggle for writer John Hales was the classic writers dilemma: Where to begin?

We decided to begin where John Hales began when he wrote it: in the middle of the essay where he brings his girlfriend to see the deer he has just killed. "I started wondering why I would bring my girlfriend over to see this deer hanging in the garage and what both she and I were thinking. I started writing around this and one thing led to another. He still feels uncertain about the beginning. "First paragraphs are murder. I felt I needed to begin with something that explained what was going to come to hold it together a little bit. A lot of my revision was about how to revise the beginning."

The essay was not accepted for a while and he attributed this to its length. "I thought it was too long and have a revised version which is 10 pages shorter. I went through hell trying to cut it. I know its huge and unwieldy but the harder I tried to cut it, the worse the essay became." To shorten the piece, Hales considered cutting the scene in which he tells the story about bringing his girlfriend to see his kill to one of his classes in which the women students reminded him that his girlfriend's response was "her job" too.

Hales wrote the essay on a six-month sabbatical from his teaching job in Fresno, California, while tucked away in the mountains in his cabin . He was writing a book about American ideas about landscape that he had collected while he had worked as a surveyor during the summer months. When work on this book bogged down or he needed a break, he worked "on the side" on this essay, the fundamental structure of which took a few weeks to write.

Hales completed his graduate degree 12 years ago and, until quite recently, his writing had been primarily academic and scholarly. When he realized that he was more drawn to reading nonfiction, writers such as John McPhee and Rick Bass, he turned to writing in this genre. "I felt a little shady at first but I'm doing a much better job of articulating my insights in nonfiction than I was in my scholarly work."

Karen Rosica