The Slashpile Inventory
An Interview
with author David Oates

CNF: What pleases you about the way your essay turned out? Are there ways in which it fell short of your original goals?

Oates: It was fun to see if a story could be told this way.

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?

Oates: Almost ten years earlier, I had tried writing this piece as straight fiction. It didn't work. Fictionalizing it safely removed me from it, but deadened the emotional content. The material presented me with difficult questions of distance vs. closeness, and emotionalism vs. control, since it concerns events I experienced with quite intense pain, at a time in my life when questions of identity, spiritualilty and sexuality seemed completely unresolvable. With such material, the threat of melodrama was always hovering; I did not want to over-write it or get caught in self-pity. So I cast about for some other way to tell the story. Writing it in this odd inventory-list format, but in first person nonfiction, turned out to give me just the mix I needed: cool, even playful distance, yet full (or full enough) expression of emotion.

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

Oates: I employed some fairly original nonfiction approaches in my recent book Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature, mixing personal narrative with culture-criticism and scholarship and some purely imaginative passages. But "The Slashpile Inventory" goes noticeably further in experimenting with form. I have published just a little fiction (though I have a few unpublished novels lying about), and a considerable amount of poetry. This piece probably draws on all three genres in about equal measure.

CNF: Can you speculate about creative nonfiction as an emerging genre in American literature? Where do you see it going?

Oates: As the above answer implies (and as the story itself says!) creative nonfiction is enjoying a surge of attention—probably because it allows such freedom of form and content. Virtually any kind of writing can be adapted to nonfiction purposes. Even an inventory list.

CNF: What advice do you offer new writers?

Oates: Read everything. Write the sort of thing you wish you could find to read. Write a lot and don't stop writing. Whatever you're working on is an experiment...and it should be let go of immediately (upon finishing) so you can try something else, or try the same thing in a different way. Let go of the ego that says, "Oooh, this is perfect, nobody may criticize..." Instead, just say, "Okay, I tried that; now I'll try this."