Looking at Aaron
An Interview
with author Hilda Raz

CNF: What pleases you about the way your essay turned out? Are there ways in which it fell short of your original goals?
 
Raz: “Looking at Aaron” is one essay in a book manuscript-in-progress, What Becomes You. My collaborator, Aaron Link, is both a writer and a participant in the experiences the book documents. We’re parent and child, both adults, and friends as well as collaborators. But our job isn’t easy, as you might guess.

We’re pleased to know this essay will be published in Creative Nonfiction, one of our favorite journals in America. As it stands, “Looking at Aaron” is the center of my part of the manuscript.

CNF: How did the essay develop, both in your initial thinking about it and in the revision process? What happened in the writing that you didn't expect would happen?

Raz: During a faculty development leave from the University of Nebraska, where I teach and edit Prairie Schooner, I spent an extended holiday with Aaron. “Looking at Aaron” is the second essay of three made from a long prose piece written over three months. The first essay, called “Stock,” has been published in Fourth Genre (Vol. 6, number 2, Fall 2004). The third, “Guest House,” is on my computer right now.

Understanding transformation is very difficult. Discovering the natural breaks in the long narrative was pretty easy. To revise I cut, compressed, and rewrote to serve both the narrative threads of the book and the central tropes in each essay. A dense prose layering seemed to tell our story more clearly than a straight narrative might have done. The rewriting was learning to drive a team of six horses.

But the revision over time helped me to understand the experience better and then to say it better and more clearly.

CNF: How does your experience writing creative nonfiction depend upon or depart from your work in other genres?

Raz: I’m a poet and used to writing the short line. (Line breaks and traditional prosody serve the most outrageous and scary materials.) So I’m pretty used to free association and long hours at the computer. My most recent book of poetry, Trans (Wesleyan UP), uses these same materials. But the essays need a wider arc. So I write prose as a poet and revise as a critic/professor.

CNF: What advice do you offer new writers?

Raz: Read a lot, especially literary journals. Write to imitate what you like to read. Submit your work to the literary journals you like to read. Keep writing and reading. Pay careful attention.

Find a group of writers to work with. Go to graduate school in creative writing.