Mimi Schwartz is a careful observer and a clear thinker, qualities that allowed her to illuminate the evolution of this piece. The essay arrived in stages. "Part I began as a somewhat annoyed response to Anna Quindlen's piece in the New York Times Book Review" called "How Dark, How Stormy, I Can't Recall." Quindlen's premise was that memory was, at best, capricious and cunning, making memoir too fictional for her comfort. "The line that set me off was that before she wrote 'It was very cold the night my mother died,' she had to check old newspapers for the weather on that date."

Reading this Schwartz thought, "No! That's not right," and began a letter to the editor that she never finished. Quindlen, she realized, "is confusing journalism, in which the facts are essential to the grid of the piece with memoir, in which emotions are central. I still don't agree with Quindlen about the night her mother died because metaphorically it's cold even if it's 95 degrees if you're feeling that way, but who am I to tell this to a well- know writer?"

Two weeks later, fate and a student conspired to invite Schwartz to return to the unfinished letter. The result was a four-page essay called "If Anna Were in my Class," which she gave to her autobiography class and some writer friends. This piece of serious whimsy resulted in ongoing discussions about the line between fiction and memoir, memoir and journalism, and creative nonfiction and fiction. "I was thinking about it and suddenly I had a lot more to say on the subject. I wrote my way into a more complex position." The process took about a year and a 10-page essay emerged.

A lot of Schwartz's work begins this way -- with a reaction to an idea followed by a gestation period. "If I'm writing something with any depth to it, I need to get beyond a stick figure kind of insight, and that takes me a while. Mostly it happens after I begin writing; occasionally--if I've been talking a lot on the subject--it happens before I put a word on paper. But even after that, there has to be discovery. I have to surprise myself by writing."

In teaching this process to others, Schwartz has a generous philosophy. She thinks everyone can write and everybody has a story to tell. "I see myself as providing the creative triggers to help people find their voice. We do a lot of in-class writing and sharing-- run pretty much like a workshop. I really have never had a student that hasn't come up with something interesting. Plus the wonderful thing about teaching autobiography and creative nonfiction is that it is fun!"

Schwartz reads a lot of memoir and mentioned that more women than men operate comfortably in this genre. But after our interview, she kept thinking. She called back to footnote her original remarks, demonstrating how her writing process works. "I wasn't thinking of memoir. There are lots of great memoirs by men," she said more comfortably, now that she had more clearly formulated her thoughts. "I was thinking more of personal essays about family and relationships. More women seem comfortable with this kind of writing although that's been changing with venues like The New York Times  "About Men" and "Lives" columns."

Schwartz used to write fiction, but then her real life took over as subject matter. Her first memoir, "Swimming Above the Black Line," was a story about how her 27-year-old marriage improved as the result of her diagnosis of breast cancer and her husband's heart attack, both occurring within a period of two weeks. It has never been published because it fell between genres-- books published about illness and those about marriage. She is hoping the book that is a continuation of that one, "Thoughts From a Queen-sized Bed," will have a different outcome.

Currently she is on sabbatical and working on a project, "My Father's Village." It is about a tiny village of Christians and Jews in Germany, and what its legacy has to do with her, living an ocean away, a century after her father was born there." It is a story that again made her confront the line between fiction, history, and memoir. She feels the best way to frame her current thinking is that "with fiction you invent and imagine a world; in memoir, the broad outline of facts and the story line are handed to you." You can be sure, Schwartz will keep thinking about this.

Karen Rosica