"Undertaker, Please Drive Slow," your account of the life of Cheri Tremble, a patient of Jack Kevorkian, was rejected by The New Yorker but later published in the literary journal Tin House. Why did you decide to go with Tin House? Do you see yourself publishing in the national magazines again?

The piece was rejected by a magazine and two literary journals, in one case because the editor felt that readers might be misled or confused by the form, and in the other cases because their lawyers suggested they steer clear of it. I didn’t disagree and also wasn’t surprised, since I knew that the piece went far afield of what I originally planned, and because, simply put, you can’t just make up stuff willy-nilly, refuse to call it fiction, and not run into some opposition. As a writer, the problem was this: If I called it fiction, pretended Cheri Tremble was a figment of my imagination, it wouldn’t be interesting to readers, and if I treated it as journalism and wrote just facts, it might have been mildly interesting to readers but not at all interesting to me as the writer. So, since I’m the one doing the work, it’s best if I do it my way, and let them take the highway.

You don't pay attention to the literary marketplace. Why do you think that being overly concerned with publishing is detrimental to artistry?

For me, the publishing world has nothing much to offer--they aren’t going to make me rich, because any book I could write would take a minimum of five years but wouldn’t earn more than the equivalent of one year’s pay. So here’s the reality: if I’m lucky, I could make $40,000 over five years on a book. With my particular talents, I’d do better working as a secretary--I can type about 90 words a minute. As it stands, only a few people are allowed to make a viable living as literary artists--those who are so gifted and visionary that they cannot be ignored. The rest of us, the worker bees and the gifted visionaries who fall through the cracks, have to struggle along as employees with an interesting avocation. It’s the endeavor that’s important, the sense of thrill that comes through creating, the deep satisfaction that comes from illuminating some kind of truth, personal or otherwise, and the sense of pride that comes from doing something as well as you can.

You mentioned among your influences Annie Dillard, Barrie Lopez, Joan Didion, and Loren Eiseley--a cross section of what might be called the old guard of creative nonfiction (though the term didn't exist when they started publishing). Do you see yourself as part of a new school of creative nonfiction, one that is testing and expanding the boundaries of the genre? And how do you reconcile your writing, which so often crosses the line between fact and fiction, with that of your influences, who were ultimately literary journalists?

Well, I’m not sure that the folks that you listed are literary journalists. I think of those writers as artists, first and foremost. In fact, with the exception of Loren Eiseley, they have all written fiction--Virginia Woolf being another example--and use fictional elements in their essays as well. E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” is an essay, a short story, a succinct portrait of America’s mood during a particular moment in history…. It is moving and intelligent and makes its point subtly and devastatingly in the last line, a sentence that rings like an alarm in the reader’s mind for hours afterwards. In Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook,” there is a moment, in her litany of spiraling despair, where she mentions that she hit a black snake on her way home. That brief, visual flourish, with all its metaphorical beauty and dread, tells us all we need to know about depression and insecurity and the dark tunnel-vision of youth. So all that to say: If there is a new school of creative nonfiction, it has a way to go in surpassing the old school.

Have you lost interest in memoir?

I’ve already written memoir and journalism, so I’d like to find something different. Nothing feels quite right these days, in terms of writing projects. I’m in some kind of anteroom, reading magazines and waiting for a door to open in my imagination.

A friend of mine has an Elmore Leonard quote taped to her computer: "If it sounds like writing, rewrite it." You labor over every sentence, hoping that each will be a surprise for the reader, a labor that often results in a painfully slow composition process. Are you ever worried that the work will show in the writing--that it will "sound like writing"?

No, because what you’re describing sounds to me like a kind of overwritten, purple prose. If a writer works hard to comb out what isn’t absolutely necessary, what remains will be sentences that are true to the idea and the emotion. If I labor over every sentence, it’s because writing well is very difficult for me. This isn’t for weenies, as we like to say back home.