Research Article| February 01 2012 Interview with Carl Klaus Robert Root; Robert Root Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Carl Klaus Carl Klaus Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction (2012) 14 (1): 125–145. https://doi.org/10.2307/41939161 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Root, Carl Klaus; Interview with Carl Klaus. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 1 February 2012; 14 (1): 125–145. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41939161 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressFourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State Univeristy Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| August 01 2011 Interview with Lia Purpura Robert Root; Robert Root Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Lia Purpura Lia Purpura Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction (2011) 13 (2): 89–101. https://doi.org/10.2307/41939131 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Root, Lia Purpura; Interview with Lia Purpura. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 1 August 2011; 13 (2): 89–101. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41939131 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressFourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 Michigan State Univeristy Board of Trustees2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| August 01 2010 Interview with Michael Steinberg Michael Steinberg; Michael Steinberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Robert Root Robert Root Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction (2010) 12 (2): 147–159. https://doi.org/10.2307/41939078 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Steinberg, Robert Root; Interview with Michael Steinberg. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 1 August 2010; 12 (2): 147–159. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41939078 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressFourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 Michigan State Univeristy Board of Trustees2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

and the field, the layering of repetition and memory has so twined my sense of the land with my sense of my own past that one leads to the other and back again without the least interruption.”This is the premise underlying “The Walk,” the first of three essays in William deBuys’s most recent book, also titled The Walk. Set on a tract of land in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, in the village of El Valle, along the Río de Las Trampas (River of Traps), the essay follows the author on a walk around the land he has worked for decades as he tries to deal with his losses—the end of his marriage, the deaths of friends. The two essays that follow “The Walk” in this small book,“Geranium” and “Paradiso,” take him further into his search for a way to find some measure of peace within himself.Together the essays offer an engrossing and moving meditation on grief and hope. Although William deBuys was born in Baltimore and educated in France, North Carolina, and Texas, for nearly 30 years he has been associated with the American Southwest, working as a conservationist and environmental activist and writing award-winning books about land and people. He first came to New Mexico in 1972 as a research assistant to the psychologist Robert Coles, and within a few years he, his artist wife, and the photographer Alex Harris had purchased land in El Valle. DeBuys writes memorably about the region in his first book, Enchantment and Exploitation:The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (1985), which won a Southwest Book Award.A second book, written by deBuys and illustrated by Harris, River of Traps: A Village Life (1990), focused more tightly on El Valle and the friendship of the young writer and photographer with an aged farmer, Jacobo Romero, who taught them how to live on land that Hispanic New Mexicans had farmed for generations.The book was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize, won the Evans Biography Award from Utah State University, and was listed as a 1990 New York Times Notable Book.Working with another photographer, Joan Interview with William deBuys

1 To investigate the composing processes of professional expository writers, interviews were conducted of six subjects who regularly produced expository prose under the pressure of a weekly or monthly deadline. Subjects included Noel Perrin, essayist, book critic, and Dartmouth College professor; Tom Wicker, political columnist for "The New York Times"; Walter Kerr, drama critic for "The New" magazine; Susan Eykamp, managing editor of "Photo Marketing"; and Neal Gabler, a cohost of the PBS program "Sneak Previews" and film critic for "Monthly Detroit." Each interview was recorded on cassette and conducted according to a previously prepared set of questions. In addition, the notes and drafts of at least two articles were collected. Four conclusions were drawn from. the evidence and documentation: (1) writers continued to develop their abilities beyond the levels of mere proficiency or competence; (2) writers gained ability through immersion in contexts and increased familiarity with a habitual, predictable task environment; (3) writers' commitment to and proficiency with their subject depended upon the degree of their personal intellectual involvement or commitment to that subject; and (4) standards of quality in writing were flexible in the view of the writer according to exigencies'and characteristics of the task environment. (HOD)

after I switched the imagined audience for my essay. The picky teacher had been thinking about the Chronicle of Higher Education. The child of Holocaust survivors had been thinking of the New York Times Op Ed. But then Tikkun, a liberal Jewish magazine, came to mind and a day later the right beginning, in the right voice, with the right persona, arrived. Maybe I needed the safety of a Jewish audience to find my way—or at least its possibility. Whatever it takes to trick yourself toward completion, you try it. Writer Sue Miller, in describing her own difficulties in writing a memoir about her father’s Alzheimer’s disease, talks about finding and facing your dragon, no matter how fearful. It can take years, but that’s what writers do, she says, “whether they triumph (slay the dragon), or whether they’re defeated (are slain, devoured).”The success of the struggle, I would add, is connected to the self you send to face the dragon. Most selves take detours, as my first two personas did, in order to avoid the fire. It’s only when who you are and what you need to say feel like one, that the ‘I’ is strong enough to move in close, and hopefully, slay the damned thing.

It had been almost thirty years since I'd been in Los Angeles when I flew out to California from the Midwest to attend the 1987 convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, and from the time I landed to the moment my committee meeting began the next morning, I felt as if I were visiting a foreign country. I lived and worked in the rural center of Michigan's Lower Peninsula; in my community I knew of only one black family and at my university, in a dozen years of teaching, I'd had no more than a dozen "minority" students in the thousands I'd taught. In L.A., among baggage handlers, cashiers, taxi drivers, hotel clerks, waitresses, and salespersons, everyone who spoke to me used English with Meso-American, Caribbean, African, and Asian inflection; I met no one who spoke unaccented American English until I entered the room with my fellow English teachers. I was the Midwest representative on the NCTE Committee on Affiliates and the topic for our annual meeting this year was "diversity." It was a theme our committee embodied—I was one of two or three white men and among the other nine or ten members were several "women of color." When I told them of my monocultural hometown and my unbroken string of multicultural encounters in L.A., the Hispanic woman opposite me nodded sagely and the black woman next to me put her hand on my shoulder, leaned forward with a grin, and said, "Welcome to America, honey."

268Fourth Genre Objects and Empathy by Arthur M. Saltzman Mid-List Press, 2001 256 pages, paper, $16.00 Trying to describe the essays he has coUected in ObjectsAnd Empathy, Arthur Saltzman writes in the preface, "I have learned that the terminology itselfis under construction. Once generic distinctions start to leak, people bring in anything that might conceivably hold water. 'Literary nonfiction,' 'creative nonfiction,' and 'lyric essay' are some of the makeshift semantic hybrids in current use and designed to catch the sort of prose work which is very like an essay but which exploits the linguistic playfulness, associative logic, and imaginative license ofpoetry"The kind ofessay he writes, he claims, "tends to prefer insinuation to insistence, resonance to resolution. If the critical essay challenges its topic to wrestle, the lyric essay invites it to dance. ... It is ruminative, sly, self-effacing, intimate, sneaky fast, and (as long as we're breaking in new expressions) 'idiosyncretic.'"Whatever the final terminology we attach to what he's doing in the book, his descriptions of the form certainly apply to his own essays. In a way, Objects and Empathy is composed of essays in the most traditional sense, the kind of associative attempts that Montaigne originated in his great coUection of essais. In the Montaignian tradition the essay is an adventure in associations, a meandering trail of bread crumbs through the mind of the essayist; it is writing that Addison described as "running out into wildness" and seeming to be "thrown together . . . without any order or method" in order to "appear in looseness and freedom." It is also the kind ofwriting thatJohnson defined as "an irregular, indigested piece." It is probably relevant that Saltzman quotes Joseph Epstein (who like Saltzman grew up in Chicago) in his preface: Epstein is one of our foremost traditional essayists, who has described his own essay writing as "taking a line out for a walk," essentiaUy starting somewhere on a subject and foUowing the thread to an unplanned conclusion. Edward Hoagland and PhiUip Lopate are essayists in this tradition as weU, as is Cynthia Ozick, whose own titles (Art & Ardor; Memory & Metaphor) are similar to Saltzman's. This was the tradition which, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spawned countless essays on whatever topic the essayist chose to take up—Mary Coleridge once wrote a dandy essay on paper matches—since the reader's delight in the essay was not in its information or its argument but in watching the essayist make something ofthe topic. The title essay of Saltzman s collection Book Reviews269 is just such a piece, an essay that takes a loose coUection of objects—particularly stones—and rummages through a range of literary artifacts in which objects are displayed and their significance explored. Like an essay by Montaigne the discursive piece by Saltzman quotes liberaUy from other writers and follows a strand of associations that only this author could make—"My style and my mind alike go rambling," says Montaigne. In another way however, Saltzman goes beyond the linear ramble of the traditional personal or familiar essay. Many ofhis essays are segmented, multifaceted , seemingly loose assemblages of associative fragments. "How to Play" for example, is a rich quartet of discussions of board games: Sorry, Monopoly, Careers, and Scrabble. Each section probes the mechanics of the game and the psyche of its players, taking the commonplace and imbuing it with significance. In another, "The Girl in the Moon," a second-person history of a father's anguish over his young daughter's brain damage is punctuated with quotes from astronauts involved in the first manned lunar landing. Saltzman sometimes writes in first person, sometimes in second, sometimes in third, sometimes in a fictional persona, as when he writes letters to and from the imaginary comic book hero Gamma Man. The essays sometimes include intimate reflections on divorce and death but are never solely about the author's personal life as much as they are about the workings of the author's mind. At times the essays are tightly bound, as in a linear piece like "Body Language"; at other times they are artfuUy crafted, as in "Centers of Gravity," in which scenes from the author...

210Fourth Genre deep inteUigence. The reader wiU learn a good bit about the author. The reader wiU not, however, learn how to grow dahlias. Dear Friend & Gardener: Letters on Life and Gardening, by Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd. Frances Lincoln (U.K.), 1998. 254 pages, cloth, $22.95. Chatto and Lloyd are two ofthe best known gardeners in England. Both have written widely, and extremely weU, on their own gardens and gardening philosophies. They have been gardening, at opposite corners ofEngland, for over 50 years, and appear genuinely to be friends. Here again, chronology rules, as these letters were written over the course oftwo calendar years. They were written expressly for publication and despite the self-consciousness of the format (and occasionaUy of the writers) the book succeeds. The writers are at once writing to each other andfor the unknown reader. They can be, and are, informal, but they also recognize their obligation to provide context and formal explanation for that unseen reader—and findingjust the right tone for this double mission is tricky. The friends exchange new ideas for plantings, commiserate about the weather, rage at the depredations of visitors—human and otherwise—reminisce about other friends and other gardens. Their voices differ, their gardens and gardening styles differ, aU of which adds spice to their interaction. Here the reader may learn a fair bit about dahlias, and the book contains a thorough index—which teUs one something about English garden readers. Robert L. Root Jr. I'm continuaUy struck by the power of the memoir and the essay to evoke period and place. This power stretches across cultures, as these three books, one American and two Italian, demonstrate. Gathering the Family, by WiUiam Holtz. University of Missouri Press, 1997. 172 pages, paper, $14.95. Having referred often in classes and conference presentations to WiUiam Holtz's essay, "Brother's Keeper," I was happy to see his coUection of essays Book Reviews211 about his famüy and his experiences growing up in Michigan. "Brother's Keeper" is divided into 13 sections, most of which begin with a variation of the sentence, "My brother now is dead," a Une that builds the power ofinvocation over the course of the essay; the segments accumulate in force as they wresde with loss and responsibUity Other essays are also about loss, the death ofhis father, the death ofhis mother, the disappearance and death ofa feUow Forest Service worker, but the essayist's eye is also on his own understanding and response to these deaths. In "The Girl With the Golden Giggles" he attempts to sort out the evidence ofhis mother's life from clues—letters, cards, photographs—that introduce him to a woman other than the glum, taciturn person he remembers. Holtz's essays are neither confessional nor self-absorbed but rather the kind ofhonest and open investigative reporting ofhis own life that most of us could weU imagine doing with our own personal histories. Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi, translated by Frances Frenaye. Noonday Press, 1995. 268 pages, paper, $13.00. Carlo Levi, a doctor, painter, and writer, was exiled to a primitive undeveloped viUage in southern Italy as a punishment for his opposition to the Mussolini regime. This book is the account of his stay in Gagliano, in the province of Lucania. He is subjected to the pettiness of bureaucrats and party functionaries but within the terms ofhouse arrest has enough freedom to observe the struggles ofthe peasants to make ends meet in a desolate and unforgiving landscape. He paints a verbal portrait of the landscape and the interior lives ofits inhabitants that works simultaneously as ajournai ofpersonal experience and an insightful ethnography. This is one of the great memoirs of time and place, a document of observation that goes beyond "immersion reportage," no matter how unintentional Levi's immersion was, to become a major literary work ofnonfiction. The Road to San Giovanni, by Italo Calvino, translated byTim Parks.Vintage, 1994. 150 pages, paper, $12.00. This posthumously published coUection offive "memory exercises," what the Italian noveUst himself called "passaggi obbligati," is as much an exploration of the nature of memory as an attempt at memoir. "Memories of a...