The North Carolina Writers’ Network’s annual Fall Conference remains the one must-attend event for writers — especially aspiring writers — throughout the state. And the good news is that there’s still time to register for this year’s conference, which takes place November 20-22 in Wrightsville Beach.

For several years I served on the NCWN’s board and worked twice as the conference chairperson, so I know the kind of work that goes into planning these events. But more importantly, I’ve also been an attendee at the conference, so I can also attest to the myriad benefits and pleasures of the program: the chance to learn from established masters in the field; the opportunity to meet, mingle and network with other writers; a weekend immersed in ideas about craft; and — heck — a beach getaway in the off-season ain’t bad either!

Cassandra King

Friday night’s keynote speaker is bestselling novelist Cassandra King, author of Queen of Broken Hearts, The Same Sweet Girls, and the forthcoming Bridal Falls. Other headliners include Marianne Gingher (interviewed here) leading a Saturday lunch reading by contributors to Long Story Short —  Anthony Abbott, Wendy Brenner, Philip Gerard, and Peter Makuck — and then Gerard again with a musical performance on Saturday evening. Click here for a full list of conference faculty and presenters.

The registration deadline is November 12, so don’t miss out!

I’m pleased today to host an interview between two great writers — and to present this interview as the first post of my recently redesigned site. Here, Tara Laskowski, the Kathy Fish Fellow at SmokeLong Quaterly, talks to Jessica Anthony, author of the highly praised novel The Convalescent. The two writers were classmates in the MFA program at George Mason University, and Anthony returns to Mason on Wednesday, September 23, for an alumni reading as part of the 2009 Fall for the Book Festival. Tara introduces the novel — and the interview — here:

Jessica Anthony’s debut novel, The Convalescent, hit the shelves earlier this summer to rave reviews. (Check out this one at the San Francisco Chronicle.) Anthony was the winner of McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award and graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. As McSweeney’s proudly writes on their web site about The Convalescent: “It is the story of a small, bearded man selling meat out of a bus parked next to a stream in suburban Virginia . . . and also, somehow, the story of 10,000 years of Hungarian history.”

I’ve been a big fan of Jessica Anthony’s work ever since we shared a fiction workshop class in grad school, and I can see why Barnes & Noble chose the book as a recommended summer reading pick, part of their “Discover Great New Writers” series. It’s a sharp, smart book that’s as weird and charming as its main character.

Tara Laskowski: In many writing classes, professors will say, “Write what you know.” You obviously haven’t stuck by that rule with this novel. What are the challenges of that, and what are the benefits?

Jessica Anthony

Jessica Anthony: When I started writing fiction, I often struggled with real life and invention. I felt bogged down by all sorts of things: whether I was being unfair to a person I knew; how I could use something interesting that happened to my advantage—but as soon as I let go of writing what I “knew,” as soon as I began aiming for pure unadulterated invention, the boundaries suddenly disappeared. There was no need to sort out what in my life was useful to fiction because it was suddenly all useless. It was a very freeing, happy feeling not to have to rely on experience to tell a story. So I don’t see much benefit for ‘writing what you know,’ whether in fiction or non-fiction. I have never had much interest in heavily autobiographical fiction, because I always found myself asking: “Why isn’t this an essay?” And what do we know of anything, really? If you have a character who has lost a parent and you have also lost a parent, you and your character experience that loss in wildly different ways (usually for the story to work, the further you are from your own experience the better, otherwise you may suffer defending the weaknesses in your story with that embarrassing insistence: “But it actually HAPPENED that way…”). If you are an essayist, memoirist, journalist, or fiction writer, it seems to me that you’re probably better served by writing what you learn, observe, or investigate. Reading what a writer has sought out in truth and fiction is far more interesting than reading what a writer knows.

How did you first get the idea of The Convalescent? Did it start with Rovar, or somewhere else?

I think this question is sort of linked to the one above. I usually begin writing with voice, and it’s very abstract. I wrote poetry before writing fiction, and I have always loved the musicality and innate rhythms of language. The prosody. That’s where voice lives. Take the opening to Lolita, for example:

Lolita: light of my life. Fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The opening to this novel is pure music — it also, as we learn, is the voice of Humbert…. But all of this is a roundabout way of saying that I begin with voice, and learn about the idea of a story as I go. For the novel, I began with a merging of the voices of Mersault from The Stranger and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. I loved the short sentences. Then I was walking through the Seven Corners mall while living in northern Virginia, and passed a McDonald’s. There on the wall was a picture of a schoolbus that said “MEAT BUS.” I started writing, and thought about something Alan Cheuse once said about character, how we all must know the full history of our characters lives and where they came from. I doubt he meant to travel back to the Ninth Century, but that’s where the investigation of Rovar took me. I recalled an afternoon walking around Budapest with a Hungarian man, Tibor, who said, “Hungarians have no history, they have only myth.” From there, the kernel for the real story began. So I think these two questions are linked because our life experience does matter—perhaps I would not have taken such an interest in Hungary had I never visited the country—but experience should never be used as an excuse for a lack of guts or imagination.

As a first time novelist trying to break into the publishing industry, what was the hardest part of the process?

At some point, in order for anyone else to want to read your story, you have to realize that writing fiction is not a demonstration of one’s ego; it’s the obliteration of it. You just have to write better sentences. Learning that was the hardest part for me. People want to publish great stories, but you have to fiercely try and give them one. It’s like what Hemingway said about how all fiction writers must have built in bullshit detectors. You know when you’re doing something well, and when you’re cheating. As soon as I started being honest with myself about writing, it was easier to find audiences…. All that said, the publishing business is a fickle beast. So it helps to do your research and figure out which magazines, agents, and presses might like your style.

With a polo captain, Carly Simon, a weed named Marjorie, and crazy Virginians popping up all over The Convalescent, we get a lot of quirky, amusing parts of this novel. What was the most fun part of writing this book?

I love this question. I just wrote a blog on Powell’s last week about the importance of fun and experimentation in writing. For me, so much of this book was fun to write, but especially the moments when I began to realize that the history was intertwined with the present. I was writing both narratives separately and never planned on one influencing the other, or vice versa. But when I saw how each could actually tell the other’s story, things really started to snap into place, and I felt like I had found the momentum. I am also a giant nerd. I genuinely loved reading all about the emigration of the Hungarians from the Steppes of Asia. Those are also writerly answers, however—so let me give you a more fun, less writerly answer, which is: “St. Benevolus.” [Editor's note: The name is what the narrator calls his erections — a word which will surely help to triple this interview's traffic.]

What’s next? Do you have another novel in the works, or are you still recovering from the energy sap from this one?

I am working on a new novel. When I handed in the final draft to McSweeney’s last spring, four years after it began, I hopped on a plane and walked across Scotland. Literally. Walking. It’s great way to start over: a hundred miles on foot, coupled with a nice sampling of Scottish whisky. You can’t beat it with a stick. ♦

Meet Anthony on Wednesday, September 23, at the Fall for the Book Festival, where she’ll be reading with fellow novelist O.H. Bennett, author of The Lie, and poet Nancy Pearson, author of Two Minutes of Light (a selection from which is reprinted here).

Check out another interview with Anthony at The Rumpus.

Alexandra Sokoloff’s new novel, The Unseen, takes as its starting point a set of real-life experiments done by Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke University from the late 1920s until the mid-1960s. As explained in the novel, Rhine and his colleagues — including William McDougall, Karl Zener, and Rhine’s wife Louisa — investigated widely into ESP and psychokinesis, and Rhine’s own seminal publications, including Extra-Sensory Perception (1934) and New Frontiers of the Mind (1937), not only helped to popularize the term parapsychology but also brought many of these possibilities to the wider American public for the first time. Seven hundred boxes of original files from the lab were stored at Duke when it closed in 1965 and have only recently been made available to the public.

In Sokoloff’s novel, Laurel MacDonald flees a disastrous engagement in California for a tenure-track position in Duke’s psychology department. When she happens upon those newly released research papers, she thinks she may also have stumbled into a project that will help turn tenure-track into full tenure — and soon discovers a companion in that quest, a handsome professor who’s also been sifting through the files. But surprises await, of course: The charming young professor may well be a devil in disguise; Laurel’s own uncle may have been involved in one of the more disturbing of the Rhine’s experiments; and family skeletons aren’t the only dark secrets that might be discovered in those research papers, potentially a Pandora’s box of trouble for everyone involved.

The News and Observer called The Unseen “a classic haunted house story with a decidedly local flavor” and wrote that “Sokoloff has found a groove” with this third novel, after successes with The Harrowing and The Price. In addition, Sokoloff recently enjoyed a top honor for her short fiction, earning the Best Short Story award at this year’s Thrillerfest for “The Edge of Seventeen.”

Sokoloff’s tour continues this week with a reading at Durham’s Regulator Bookshop on Wednesday, July 22, at 7 p.m., and she’ll also be joining the Mystery Book Club at the Cary Barnes & Noble on Monday, July 27, at 7 p.m. Further out, look for her at the Barnes & Noble at New Hope Commons in Durham on Saturday afternoon, August 29, and on North Carolina Bookwatch later this year. (For complete information, check out Sokoloff’s own website here.) In the meantime, Sokoloff fit in a quick interview below.

Art Taylor: One of your inspirations for The Unseen was the real-life parapsychology lab at Duke University. What are the advantages — and on the other hand, the challenges — of writing a novel that has some basis in documented historical events, rather than working solely from imagination or being inspired by more personal events?

Alexandra Sokoloff: I love working from real life because with everything I write I want the reader to believe that the story could really happen. All of my novels walk a very fine line between reality and the supernatural; part of the whole mystery and spookiness is that question: “Is this really happening, or is it a hoax or a criminal conspiracy, or is it even just all in the main character’s mind?” I like to keep readers guessing! So working from real-life paranormal case studies — how ESP and poltergeist experiences are reported by real people — helps me keep the story believable.

The particular challenge of The Unseen was to use the real-life history of the Rhine experiments and the Duke parapsychology lab in a thriller, without doing anything to dishonor the work that Dr. J.B. Rhine and Dr. Louisa Rhine did, which was not only groundbreaking but I think noble, dedicated to the advancement of human knowledge and potential. But in a thriller, there has to be a dark side, and jeopardy, so I was creating a mystery that never happened, and not-so-pure characters who never existed, but basing it all completely in a factual history. I wrote the Afterword in the book to make sure readers understand what is fact and what is fiction.

While much of the plot concentrates on the supernatural, The Unseen also focuses on family and on the secrets of the past — persistent themes in Southern literature — and throughout the book, Laurel is often offering perspectives on her new home in North Carolina: regional attitudes, customs, manners, fashion, food, etc. She even comments about feeling like she’s trapped in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. What brought you to the South? How has your own time in the region influenced your writing? And beyond the setting itself, would you consider this book a “Southern novel”?

One of you charming Southern men brought me to the South.

Don’t kid yourself, we have family secrets in California, too! I would never dare to call The Unseen a “Southern novel.” I’m not sure I could write a truly Southern novel even if I’d lived here 25 years. My time here has been so short, and the region and the people are so complex. I knew the only chance I had of pulling The Unseen off in any kind of truthful way was to tell it from the point of view of a total transplant like myself, a California fish-out-of-water. So through Laurel MacDonald I was able to tap into my own sense of wonder and alienation about North Carolina and North Carolinians, and draw the Southern characters from the perspective of that outsider character. And that’s a good point of view for a thriller, especially a supernatural thriller, because the character is already disoriented and isolated and off-balance. And of course, it provides some humor.

And as to how living in the region has influenced my writing… I’m not sure I can answer that one yet, although fireflies have something to do with it, but I do know that it’s a very rich environment, while L.A. tends to be a vacuum, albeit a glamorous one. It saps creative energy and you have to go elsewhere to renew, whereas here the lifestyle is more rejuvenating.

Speaking of disoriented: In one scene, Laurel struggles with trying to answer questions for the Paranormal Belief Scale that she and her colleague are going to administer to the students — a scale for determining a subject’s “preestablished paranormal beliefs.” You’ve written about enjoying ghost stories as a child; you’ve written about experimenting with the paranormal as a teenager. How has writing your three books so far impacted any of your own beliefs about psychic phenomena or paranormal goings-on?

The interesting thing about writing ghost stories is that people you meet tell you their own paranormal stories (and oh, do Southerners have ghost stories!). So it’s very much reinforced my belief that psi experiences — like precognitive dreams, and crisis apparitions (having a loved one appear to you at a moment of extreme trauma or death), and telepathy, and the sense of a past experience or personality imprinted on a place — really do happen to people. As the Rhines discovered, there’s too much consistency about the stories not to believe that it really occurs. Not all the time, not to everyone, but it does happen.

You mentioned that L.A. tends to sap creative energy. But I’m curious how your novels were helped by your time as a screenwriter in Hollywood — and before that how your background in theater and dance may have influenced you. Is the act of, say, choreographing a dance ultimately more similar to or different from “choreographing” a scene in your novels? Are there “rules” for screenplay writing that particularly helped you in terms of character and plot when you first sat down to write a book?

All of the arts influence the other arts. Choreography and directing taught me how to bring emotion and shape and dramatic tension to characters and an overall story – and also about the importance of production design and visual imagery. They’re all ways of creating a particular emotional experience for a viewer or reader. My background in dance is especially good for rhythm and pacing. I know when a scene is going on too long; I know how to build emotion and intensity; I know where to cut. I know the biggest artistic sin is boring people!

Theater was fabulous training for film writing, and film writing is fantastic training for novel writing. I grew up with the three-act structure in theater and then applied it to film, and I’ve applied the three-act, eight-sequence filmic structure to novels – I’m sure that was why I was able to sell my first novel right away. I would be very uncomfortable saying there are rules to screenwriting – but there are classic structural elements in drama that have worked for thousands of years, since the very beginning of storytelling, and those can be learned and taught. Those elements are what my Screenwriting Tricks For Authors blog and workshops are about.

Finally: Since your story “The Edge of Seventeen” just won the award for Best Short Story at Thrillerfest — and congratulations there! — are there any more short stories in the works? Or are you just concentrating on the next novel?

Thank you! I love that story. I am in fact working on an anthology of four interconnected novellas with three other amazing new female dark suspense authors: Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, and Rhodi Hawk. I’m very excited about that book. I just finished my fourth novel and am outlining two others, and this is my living – short stories don’t pay the bills! So I would really have to have my arm twisted to write another short piece right now.

Famous last words!

The August 2009 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine hits newsstands today, and with it — I’m proud to say — my story “A Voice From The Past.”

While this story largely recounts a fictional encounter between two former high school classmates, two major aspects of the tale have their roots in real life. As a teenager myself, I attended boarding school at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, VA, and during those years (1983-1986), the tradition of a “rat system” still prevailed. First-year students — generally freshmen, but often sophomores like myself — were called “rats” and had to show respect for older students (the “old boys,” since Episcopal was all-male at that time) and for the school’s faculty, administrators, and their families. Respect meant, for example, that rats held the door for old boys anywhere within 15 feet or so of passing through it and that rats sat in the middle of the long dining hall tables, were served last from the platters of food, and stacked the dishes at the end of the meal. And respect for the school itself was a part of this as well. For instance, Episcopal’s fight songs had to be learned (and learned quickly) and then shouted with great enthusiasm at each football game. Too little enthusiasm was frowned upon, ad flubbing the lines was a terrible error. I knew one student who failed to spell Episcopal correctly and was ever-after ridiculed mercilessly.

The foundation for the system was, I continue to think, a good one. These incoming students — frequently children of some privilege — were taught fundamental lessons in manners and humility, and not only did the group experiences of each new rat class serve to form some form of brotherhood but, because all students before and after went through the same process, it also connected each incoming class with a sense of lasting tradition and shared history.

But as you might expect (especially given the echoes of fraternity life in the above description), the rat system also had its share of hazing. Rats who didn’t show proper respect could expect some form of derision (again, misspelling Episcopal?) and even small brands of punishment. And respect for an old boy was occasionally a fuzzy concept. Did it mean that a rat had to walk out in the snow to Blackford Hall to fetch a can of coke for an upperclassman who didn’t feel like trekking out himself? Well, sure. I did that myself. And as rats, we also did the soap races that I discuss in the story — racing to the shouts and laughter of the old boys who gathered to watch us. It still gives me a surprising and oddly shameful pride to remember that I won those races. 

The head of the hierarchy were the hall monitors — all seniors — and at the top stood four senior monitors and a head monitor. The worst of the punishments that this group could dole out was “send up,” in which an errant rat was summoned from his room in the dark of night to be yelled at for his transgressions or forced to run laps around the football field or worse. The cruel episode that forms the central flashback to “A Voice From The Past” is a true one, at least to the best of my knowledge; my first-year roommate claimed it happened to him. And rumors suggested that worse happened. During my own years at Episcopal, one upstart student supposedly found double-edged razors waiting in his bed. Race was apparently a factor in that instance as well. The rat system was abolished soon after.

On a lighter note, the second true aspect of “A Voice From The Past” is the dream that prompts the reunion of the two central characters and that ultimately determines each twist of the plot. One night I had that dream myself — almost exactly as it’s recounted in the story — about one of the senior monitors from my own first year at Episcopal, a student to whom I’d hardly given even a passing thought in nearly two decades. Why did he appear in my dream? What did the dream mean? I had no idea, but it stuck with me and — a small lesson in craft, I guess — ultimately prompted me to put pen to paper, beginning the story here and then trying to figure out for myself the puzzle of “What next?”

“A Voice From The Past” provides that “what next,” and I hope that anyone who searches it out and picks it up will enjoy reading it.

Throughout the course of his distinguished career, Alan Cheuse has proven himself adept at a variety of forms: the novel, of course, including his latest To Catch the Lightning: A Novel of American Dreaming; the novella, as his collection The Fires attests; short fiction (three collections!); and memoir as well, with the book Fall Out of Heaven. And that’s not to mention his extensive work as both a reviewer for National Public Radio or as an editor with several anthologies of fiction and nonfiction under his belt. With his latest book, A Trance After Breakfast and Other Passages, Cheuse shows himself to be a fine travel writer as well — though pointedly not the kind of travel writer who simply offers a guidebook about select locales; as he argues in the introduction to the new collection, “the best travel writing carries us along on a soul-journey, the sort of trip that may or may not tell you about the best hotels and the good places to eat, but certainly… dramatizes how the heart learns about itself in relation to the world, making the foreign familiar and the familiar slightly foreign.”

The collection’s essay span a variety of styles, structures, and approaches. An article on Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio in Abiquiu, New Mexico seems, for example, a more straightforward essay about a popular tourist attract, while a piece on the San Ysidro Port of Entry follows “one of the busiest border crossings in the world” over the course of a long evening, with the narrator taking the role of “the pilgrim” and taking us behind-the-scenes and then offering alternate perspectives on larger issues through small interludes that discuss drug trafficking or immigration policy, for example. The essay “Thirty-Five Passages Over Water” works backward in time, beginning with a series of Cheuse’s own boat trips and working back as far as his parents’ journeys before his own birth and then even beyond, giving a portrait not just of a family but of a larger history and perhaps of all humankind in the process. And in “Coda: Two Oceans,” Cheuse muses from a very personal perspective on the differences between the Atlantic and the Pacific and the roles that each ocean has played in his own life.

Cheuse will be reading from and discussing the new collection on Saturday, June 13, at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., and then elsewhere over the next two months; for more information, visit www.alancheuse.com. In the meantime, Cheuse answered some questions about the book during a back-and-forth email exchange over the last week — offering insight on his process here and on reading and writing in general.

Art Taylor: What can you tell us about how you made these essays? 

Alan Cheuse

Alan Cheuse: First came the impulse, the desire, to travel as widely as I could, given my duties and responsibilities to fiction work at hand and teaching my courses. My wife had been telling me about Bali for years, and so had piqued my curiousity about this extraordinary place, a Hindu island in the middle of an Indonesian Islamic nation (the largest Islamic nation in the world, in fact). I had been reading about Hinduism for some time, a complex and complicated religion, compared to the rather straight-forward and, gods forgive me, somewhat simplistic western varieties of worship. (It’s a religion as complicated as life, unlike, as I see them, those other worship paths). So when the opportunity came along for an assignment to that special island, I leaped — or flew for twenty-three hours — to the task.

Same thing with New Zealand, an off-the-beaten path destination that turned out to be as magical as the way it is depicted in movies. The geography keeps on giving — mountain ranges, fjords, Montana like plains, Kansas-like farmland in the South Island, New Englandish inland on the North Island, only a few hours drive from the most magnificent beaches on earth. If Bali moved my spirit, New Zealand took my eyes. Everywhere we turned lay an even more astonishingly beautiful land or sea-scape.

But I found magic too in more mundane subjects, too. In my writing about my old home-town. In this regard maybe I can say that all writing is travel writing, whether you venture out for a mile or ten thousand miles. Every step you — or your characters — take carries you along a road toward some horizon. The idea is to discover the proper perspective for depicting each journey, short or long.

The introduction to your new collection is rich with literary references, and literature continues to be important throughout the collection. Are you more likely to travel to places that you’ve previously read about or to read about places to which you’ve traveled or soon plan to travel?

I don’t have a proper answer, except to say both situations have been true in the past, and both will probably occur in the future. I’ve read about Dublin, say, and would like to travel there. I haven’t read much about the Turkish coast but I would were I to travel there.

Speaking of Dublin, you talk about Ulysses in your introduction and it’s clear that you know something about that city through Joyce, despite having never been there: What other novels have captured their “places” so completely that you’ve felt like you know them without laid eyes on them in person?

I’m trying to think — what interesting places do I know only from reading about them?

Australia. I’ve read a number of Australian novels, never been there, though got relatively close when roaming around New Zealand. Iceland—I love the novels of Haldor Laxness, one of the greatest writers of the late twentieth century, and, alas, still greatly unknown to American readers, and he gives you Iceland Iceland Iceland in his wonderful books. And China, yes! I’ve only skirted the border of China when traveling by train on the Russian side of the border down from Khaborosk to Vladivostok. The entire border was marked by barbed wire. I kept thinking to myself, China’s on the other side, China’s on the other side.

Any other novel that has impacted you to the point that you’ve said, “I must go here myself someday”? 

The last novels of my dear late friend James D.Houston invited me to Hawaii. And now that I’ve visited I hope to return soon, and write about it myself.

And then there are the cities of the future that one can visit only in the work of Italo Calvino, or the cities on other planets that you spend time in in the work of, say, Ursula Le Guin. I can only revisit by rereading. Reading is the cheapest, and sometimes the most rewarding, variety of travel.

The essay “Point of Entry” about the border crossing at San Ysidro wears its reportage on its sleeve, with you — as “the pilgrim” — explicitly interviewing people and documenting events within the story we’re reading. Elsewhere, it seems that a place may simply have inspired you to take up a pen later. How many of the places here were visited “on assignment,” so to speak?

Every essay in the book grew out of a magazine assignment. I introduced  “the pilgrim” in the border crossing piece because it seemed appropriate. Though I think every fiction writer is always “on assignment”, whether at home in a room or on the road or at some distant point on the map.

There’s a great stylistic and structural variety among these essays. To what degree do you try to match an essay’s style/structure to the place itself?

I wasn’t trying to do more than find the appropriate voice for each piece. I know they seem varied, but I hope that the intensity of the act of observation remains constant throughout the book, and that looking and being remain closely intertwined.

Speaking of perspectives, I was struck by a line from the opening section of “Thirty-Five Passages Over Water” in which you talk about “The kind of love that comes in youth, when you know nothing and feel that you have an eternity, or later in life when you have almost everything and know that you will lose it.” How do you think the passage of time, the lapse of time, has impacted your perspective on the places you explore here?

Each place, I suppose, fits in to some innate sense I have of events over time — my life’s “narrative” — and my response to each place changes that narrative, one hopes, for the better.

But beyond your own “life’s narrative,” do you think that you see these places themselves more clearly with the perspective of time passed? In other words, does time provide for clearer focus or does it blur perspectives on place, whether because of nostalgia, say, or through some potential mischief of memory? 

Well, let’s take Paris as an example. I lived in Paris when I was in my mid-twenties.It was a certain kind of city, heavenly in its own way, with its own deep roots going back to the age of kings and my connection to it going back, in a very young romantic writerly way to the Paris of the 20s, with Stein and Hemingway and Pound and company. I remember that well, and could, if I tried hard enough, properly recreate the experience for myself and possibly others. If I went back tomorrow, the city would be a different place, changed by decades of progress and such, and I am changed by time, also, it would be quite different.  New branches, new leaves, old roots. But this perspective that time yields us is the way we see everything in our experience, non? We are time-travelers, going two steps forward, one step back, all the time. Or maybe one step forward, two steps back.

And the earth moves and quakes, and revolves about the sun, and the galaxy moves ever so distinctly toward what destination we will never know. All life is traveling, at various paces and speeds.

Another related question: As much as these pieces explore various worlds — whether on foreign lands or closer to home — they also explore your own past and your inner life. In his essay “Toward a Definition of Creative Nonfiction,” Brett Lott talks about “the self as continent, you its first explorer.” What has travel writing — writing about that world “out there” — helped you to learn about yourself?

 I didn’t have any such sense in the foreground of my minds as I traveled and wrote these pieces. All I wanted to do was write good essays, which is to say, fresh, appealing, perhaps even upon occasion moving narratives that grew out of actual experience. It’s refreshing for a fiction writer to be able to do this from time to time. Fiction is trebly — at least — more difficult. To paraphrase a remark of my dear old late friend John Gardner, the nonfiction writer just writes the piece, the fiction writer first has to cough up a country.

So would you call these essays easy to write? 

When I sat down to write the pieces they came mostly easily, in a few drafts. (I can hardly ever say that about my fiction.) I had only to recognize the need to make other people see and feel what I saw and felt. And thought. And put it in a forward-moving narrative, in language that was expansive without seeming overblown. And as I write these last lines I realize how different nonfiction narrative is from fiction. And how much the same. It’s just that you can be a little more self-conscious when you compose nonfiction without destroying the tension in the piece.