Richard Rodriguez has been called America's best essayist. He's also a broadcast journalist, a social commentator, an architecture critic, a former bookstore owner, an admirer of Andy Warhol, and now -- for the first time -- an opera librettist.

But it's Rodriguez's literary work -- and opinions -- which have won him wide attention. His most recent work, Brown: The Last Discovery of America, continues the themes of education, alienation, class, and language present in his earlier works, Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father. The essays in Brown are lush with ironic wit and cinematic images of Sacramento, San Francisco, and the Mexico from which his parents emigrated. Rodriguez returns to his parents' village with a film crew in tow, he ruminates on the mytho-poetics of Stanford's Indian mascot, and he claims Richard Nixon as the father of all Hispanics.

For two days in September, Richard Rodriguez visited the University of Pittsburgh, where he talked to small groups of students and gave a public lecture. He talked with Hattie Fletcher and Chris Weber, two students in the University of Pittsburgh's MFA program in creative nonfiction.

How would you describe your writing process?

I feel I should say as a disclaimer that I'm skeptical about my conscious description of what is clearly an activity that engages the unconscious. After all these years, I'm still not sure what my writing process is. I may have been writing a great deal in my sleep last night, for example. I have no way of knowing exactly how my dream work contributes to it -- I mean, the depth of my sleep, the intensity of my sleep, the lightness of it, how that touches my morning hours of writing.

Do you think that your dream process does play an important part in your writing?

In some way, but partly because as a child I was very afraid of night. I was afraid of the loss of control I would have during the night. I had to finally accept the fact that that loss of control is somehow a liberation, that I was free to float, in a sense. I have very vivid dreams. They're not nightmares, but they're very complicated, they're peopled, they have very rigorous narratives. Sometimes as a child I would wake up exhausted in the morning, having woken several times during the night and gone back to sleep and engaged in another dream. As I came to expect this as a kind of free-floating experience, it allowed me to be much freer.

I realize that the mind works in some process, and I'm attentive to it.

Did you consciously choose to become an essayist, or was it more of an organic process of pursuing what and how you wanted to write?

You know, I don't read fiction anymore. I reread some novels that I loved as a younger reader, but I haven't read a novel now for ten years. Sometimes friends give me these huge novels that they've written, and I feel, by page thirty -- with the appearance of the dark stranger, and the clashing machinery sounds in the distance -- I feel a kind of lethargy. I just can't bear it anymore. Almost all of my reading now is in nonfiction, almost all of it is related to specific problems I'm thinking about or working on. I love the challenge of writing about [them] -- whether it's a freighter or the sewer system of Paris -- interestingly. I like that problem. And that has been part of my reading life for a long time. I've loved the difficulty of nonfiction.

Recently, I think, maybe when I began to sort of write my own work, I just moved into the direction of nonfiction inevitably. One of the things that I don't like about the term "creative nonfiction" is that I don't think the term nonfiction should be juxtaposed to fiction. I think it should be juxtaposed in some sense to poetry, and what I'm looking for is a way of reconciling those two impulses within myself. Poetic nonfiction is really what I want to do. For example, in some essays of mine, where I feel myself getting a little bit too journalistic, there will be an intrusion of these italicized sections that just melt the prose. They just melt it into a totally different direction, almost dreamscapes. I hadn't read Days of Obligation for years, and I was reading it on the plane over the weekend. I was reading the chapter on Tijuana, and the first day, Palm Sunday, when I'm in Tijuana, suddenly there were these recollections of these two earlier trips to Tijuana: one with my family and another several years later with my best friend's family when they came down for the bullfights. We saw Kim Novak and sat behind her when she was presented with the ears, etcetera. Well, those two memories are encased in a kind of italicized freedom, and they deflate the essay from going too far into one direction. I'm really looking for ways of continually pulling back the journalist and remaking him as a poet. So I do see myself as an essayist, but I do see myself as an essayist who very much wants to poeticize the world.

You talk about reading as an influence on your thoughts, like reading James Baldwin. Stylistically, how did your writing develop?

I would guess that I marry lots of writers as I write. I do know that my reading life is crucial to my writing life, and I'm in the debt of a lot of writers. I remember reading Carlyle's French Revolution, and I was just liberated by that book, because I didn't know you could write history that way. I didn't know you could so fully imagine it, and I thought to myself, Well, that would sort of be interesting to do that with my life and with the history that I've been a part of. To turn Richard Nixon into my Richard Nixon and to place him in the chapter with professional wrestlers and Benjamin Franklin . . .

I don't know any writer who does exactly what I do, but I certainly know writers whose work has been very influential. I think of Baldwin clearly. What I loved about Baldwin as a reader was his stylistic calm. I liked the fact that the more intense the emotion was that he was describing, the calmer the prose, the harder, the more controlled the prose was. That was a very deep lesson for me.

The other writer, I think, I was reading at the same time I began writing seriously in my own voice, was D. H. Lawrence. . . . The drama in my life between the working class and the middle class is the great drama of my life, much more so than ethnicity or any other aspect of my life. And that connection to a voice like Lawrence -- what Lawrence brings into my life -- he gives me permission to essentially free myself of the inhibition, the middle class inhibition that I taught myself. I taught myself, in some sense, not to be working class. Not to [talk] with my mouth full, but also to take a bath every day, to brush my teeth. I'm speaking seriously; there is a kind of middle class propriety that one learns, and you learn it from watching your classmates, and you learn how to talk at dinner, something you're not taught in the house, and so forth. I think what Lawrence gave me was the opposite permission, in some sense -- to go back to the sensuality of my life. And in the short stories, particularly, and then Sons and Lovers (which is, I think, his greatest novel), there is a possibility of using writing as a way of engaging again those emotions that you repress as a child, becoming a reader and moving away from both the brutality and the sensuality of your childhood. Lawrence is so much in awe of and horrified by his father, that it just reminds me very much of my relationship to my own family.

I'm interested in the tension between your educational work within the academy and the ways in which you pursued your own education informally. How much did each world contribute to your writing life?

I think I had at least two different educations, from a very early stage. That was partly because I had a private language. I had this memory of this private language, Spanish, and what Spanish gave me is sort of what my own homosexuality gave me. It gave me a different way of viewing history; it gave me a different way of understanding. Even when I was no longer Spanish-speaking, even when I was closeted . . . One of the things gay men know from a very early age (lesbians, I presume, also) is that . . . you have an ear for irony. You understand that when people say something this way, you understand it differently. That becomes a kind of alternate education. And when I was reading these history books as a child, I was always looking for violations. That's always been part of the way I understand American history, is as this erotic history that's going side-by-side with the official history, the banners and the bulbous politicians in Washington and so forth. But I never found a way of marrying those two histories until relatively late. I was working out so many dramas in my own life that had no relationship to the dramas of the classroom, and I wouldn't have thought that I could use that.

The reason I went to the theater in London, for example, was not to educate myself -- I was educating myself in the classroom, I thought. I went to the theater as a way of civilizing myself, as a way of having conversation, as a way of knowing how to manage a drawing room comedy, if I found my life a drawing room comedy. How does one speak?

But I have several regrets along those lines. One is that I didn't really travel. I'm not sure I still know how. My parents never took vacations. We never knew that as children; we never knew what that meant. To go away for two weeks and not do anything is just impossible for me, to this day. I do realize that a lot of yuppie workaholics do that same sort of thing, but my parents simply didn't know what vacations were. So my notion of vacation as a child was taking care of somebody's house. I was a newspaper boy and people knew I was around, and I would water their lawns, feed their cats and so forth. Sometimes they were very large, beautiful houses. I had run of the house, I was very respectful of these closed houses, but I was very curious, too: the smell of a house that has been closed for two or three weeks, and the way you could sort of sit in the backyard in these wonderful gardens and read novels on a summer night. Now, in some sense that was my vacation, but in the real world, I regret very much that I did not travel as a young person. I didn't have that education. Of all the things I regret in my life, it's that.

By the time I began to travel in middle age, it wasn't the same. It isn't the same. I go to South Africa for two days to give a talk, but I don't travel. It's not travel, it's a kind of time capsule journey between Atlanta and Cape Town. And it's interesting, but the conference room that you speak in is [the same] in Atlanta as . . . in Cape Town. I don't have the physical stamina to do what young people do routinely, which is travel. So in that sense I didn't have as much of an alternate education as I would have liked to.

But I felt free at night. You know, night was always my freedom, and my parents, God bless them, they didn't know exactly what I was doing, but I could do anything. You know, some traveling theater company could go through Sacramento, or Eleanor Roosevelt came though Sacramento. I could go and they didn't protest. I would call my father, he would pick me up outside these places. Malcolm X came into Sacramento, and I went. I always went by myself, because I didn't assume anyone else would come with me. [If] you were my best friend, I wouldn't have proposed it as an idea. It was something that I was doing. I didn't expect that anybody in the world was interested in Malcolm X except for me. You understand how private I was. In school, you and I had conversation, you talked about the weekend football game or something, and I participated in all that in some way. But my private activity, like the drama of professional wrestling or boxing matches, I never saw anybody from my age. I never saw anybody. There's no way I would have seen anybody at a lecture by Eleanor Roosevelt from school; there was just nobody. So I just grew up with that idea that I had a different Sacramento, you understand? In some ways, it was liberating for me. If you were my classmate and suddenly I found you there, it would have been a little startling. I don't know if I would have liked it. I loved the freedom of it. I could wear a black suit and so forth (I'm still wearing these dark suits) that my mother bought at Sears, and it was appropriate. I could take it anywhere.

Brown is so full of puns and allusions. What kind of work do you hope to see your readers do?

It's funny that you ask the question that way, because what I want readers to do is to loosen up. And not to work so hard. And to play with the text. It seems to me that it's a difficult text in some ways, but it's also a very playful text. And there's a kind of intensity of seriousness that I want to overturn. I want the reader to be more casual with the book and also to realize that the book is in some sense very playful. And as you say, there are puns and there's a lot of verbal play in the book . . . Normally when America starts talking about race relations, we go into this ponderous voice, and as much as I respect the oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr., we all do begin to sound like Southern Baptist preachers when we talk about race relations.

[In the book, I talk] about watching Lawrence of Arabia, the David Lean film, with Peter O'Toole, and when he's playing with his robes in that extraordinary, sort of campy transvestite scene, I love the boy being entranced by that. And Lawrence himself -- that is, Peter O'Toole -- being entranced by the transformation. There's a wonderful book by Jan Morris, a travel writer, called Conundrum, which is really about her sex change. I think it takes place in North Africa, and the night before the genital operation, he's in a hotel that is really a part of a hospital, I think. He goes to the full-length mirror behind the door, and he says goodbye to himself, essentially. He says goodbye to his male body. It's the most extraordinary travel book I've ever read, because the journey to North Africa becomes the journey to femininity. And in some sense, one of the things I loved about Lawrence of Arabia was that it engaged that kind of sexual and ethnic and religious transformation or theatricality. Maybe because we're so puritanical and we're so afraid of the theater, I don't think people realize just how playful brown is as a color. When I was referring last night to Madonna's ability to take on different roles, I find that extremely joyful and I don't respond as puritans do, with a furrowed brow. I find Brown to be a very amusing book. So don't work so hard.

Do you worry at all that it's so based on literary and cultural allusions that you will lose people?

Yes. Well, I don't worry. I know that I will lose people. As a reader, you know, I read many books that I never read. When I read Ulysses, there's much in Ulysses that I haven't any idea -- I'm not Irish enough, smart enough. Or T. S. Eliot. It isn't that you decipher the allusions. It's that you learn to live with allusions, it seems to me. I know that she's alluding to something, and that's the way I understand her. I don't have to [ask], "Well, what does that mean, exactly?" I think there's an impatience on the part of younger people. Unless they've seen the movie or worn the T-shirt, they're adrift. "What is he talking about?" "I don't know what he's talking about." Well, live with it. I don't know what you're talking about, either. I don't know who Guns N' Roses are. But I know enough so that when I hear it, I know that you're alluding to something, and that's the way our conversation proceeds within the postmodern age.

Yeah, of course I'm going to lose people. But you lose them all the time. Anything more difficult than Madonna's children's book, you're going to lose people.

There's a friend of mine, Ilan Stavans, who's a professor at Amherst. He's been a very loyal friend of mine for many years. He's a Mexican whose family was Polish and escaped Poland for the safety of Mexico, and [he] grew up Jewish in Mexico. I was talking to him once in Boston, and I was in a bit of a funk, because the book store I owned in San Francisco, that I was co-owner of, closed. Not because of the chains; it closed because we lost readers. We lost readers who could read books freely and with joy. That generation was just passing. You know, the old lady who didn't go to college, but was a society matron, she would come into our store and read everything. And she had died, and her daughter, who had gone to college but read with much more focus, only certain kinds of books, was now replaced by her daughter, who had [also] gone to college, but read almost nothing. We would see her at Christmastime. That's why the store closed. And I was talking to Ilan, and I said, "You know, it's so difficult," (this was just before I finished Brown) "I know this book is going to have no success, and I can't imagine anyone can read this book, it's so dense and so difficult. But I don't know whether there's another book in me beyond this. I'll just finish this and that will be the end of it. I don't believe that there are readers in this relationship I have with the text." And he said, "Why do you always talk about writing as an engagement with the future, with readers who are to come? Why don't you think of it as an engagement with the past?" His return to Judaism in recent years as his children have been born has encouraged him to think of himself as a writer in relationship to tradition. And that really liberated me. I remember we were sitting in the Charles Hotel, in the bar, when that idea just slammed against my consciousness, and I suddenly realized that I am in conversation with the writers that I love, and there may not be any readers in my future, but I am confident that I am talking to the dead, and they know the allusions.

How do you choose which pieces of your life you're going to share, and how do you fit those pieces into larger arguments?

Let me answer the first one negatively. How do I figure on those pieces of my life that I'm not going to share, is in some ways the more interesting question. When I wrote Hunger of Memory, I certainly was very troubled. It wasn't exactly because I was so sexually repressed; it was rather that I was so discreet. I had learned a certain discretion of sexuality as I have with social class. I don't offend, as a habit. I've learned to keep myself disciplined, and that's in matters of class as much as ethnicity or sexuality. For example, if I go to a Baptist or Jewish or Catholic school, I always ask the person who has invited me the range of freedoms I should assume -- or not assume. When I wrote Hunger of Memory, I knew that I was writing about the scholarship boy. Clearly, part of the scholarship boy's dilemma in my life had a sexual tinge to it. And there is some aspect of him in his own sense of emasculation by learning books.

Lawrence talks about his father coming upon his books one day, and his thick finger is leafing through -- Lawrence is watching him from a distance -- his thick finger is leafing through this book with incomprehension but interest. And then closing the book. But it's the detail of the thick fingers which the asthmatic son yearns for in some sense for his own life, the physicality of Lawrence's father.

I thought to myself, If I make this too overt sexually, and if I make the scholarship boy into a gay little boy (which is what I was), I'm going to give him a sociological cast that undermines the universality of the experience. In some sense I withheld pertinent autobiographical information as a way of not distracting the reader. Right now I know a lot of young readers can read this without thinking -- although there are, by the way, an increasing number of teachers who say, "By the way, Richard Rodriguez is a gay writer." That might color some readings of the book, but I like the ambiguity of that issue in the book.

And I liked the chapter in which I talked about my envy for men's bodies, construction workers. I like the care which I took not to say more than I needed to say. I know a lot of boys who are not, in my estimation or by their own admission, homosexual, who respond to that material. So in some sense it's not so much an issue of how much do you include. Sometimes it's, How much do you withhold?

How much [do] I include otherwise? I find that if you start thinking about a specific time of your life, like a journey for example to Tijuana, Mexico, you start remembering: I'm going to remember that lunch I had with that woman in Tijuana on the Avenida de la Revolución. As I start remembering that event, I start remembering that day. It's curious, that they almost become magnetic, these single memories; they start drawing all kinds of things that you didn't remember that you remembered. There's a detail to that day, which becomes a week, which becomes a time of your life -- it's that August. Well, many times memory has that. You open just the slightest peephole, and suddenly there's a rush of detail that comes through it that you didn't know that you had. There's all kinds of things that are sitting in your imagination right now, and one of the things writing does is release it. . . . If you start telling me about a specific event in your life, when your grandmother died, that afternoon, when you got the phone call, it's curious; there's all kinds of things that begin to attach themselves to that memory. After a while, it's just this circle of vivid detail that's really astonishing. And when I get to that stage, then it really becomes a matter of choosing between [details]. Remembering the texture of a motel bed covering, for example, comes very late: it's the first night my family has been to Mexico again, and here we are in this dive, which is really a whorehouse, in Tijuana, and we're all sleeping in the same bed to save money, and I don't want to be there (I wanted to sleep on the San Diego side) but here we are on the Mexican side, in this dusty street with naked lights and so forth, and I'm thinking, We're in Mexico. As I remember that night, I suddenly remember the velveteen bed covering. I could even remember the color of it now, or I think I remember the color of it now. That's the way memory happens. It's really lush; it's such a gift to writers that memory comes so fully clothed.

Your books don't follow a traditional narrative arc, so when you have all these ideas and images and different scenes and moments, how do you decide on a structure?

I think that essays should be complete. I just feel that's a necessity for me. I don't like it to be messy and to require another chapter to deal with it. In that sense [the book] doesn't have narrative as a novel must. But I like [the essays] to be cumulative. That is, I like people to have read the fullness of it. So I do have a sense of -- if you read this chapter, you should have probably read that other chapter earlier, just to get sense of it.

I reorganized Brown radically several times. I really did think, as I said in the introduction, that I was going to put the Hispanic chapters in the beginning. But I didn't want to do that. By the time you get to those chapters, I want you to be so totally confused that . . . you're just in a drunken stupor. And in that sense, I want it to be cumulative. But if you told me you read chapter 6 first, I wouldn't be horrified. Because it could be read first. It could be read as a single chapter, if that's all you read. I can't, you cannot control a reader. When you're working with nonfiction, you're not working with the same expectations and the same demands as fiction. We're just in a different time zone. We work as people whose ideas are not driven by the same kinds of structural concerns as a novelist. Though I think I am a storyteller. Someone asked me in class yesterday about the autobiography of an idea. I'm interested in the way thinking occurs over time, and that time is really the way I write an essay, is the way I structure an essay.

You talked earlier in our conversation about the poetic sort of interrupting the journalist, or a poetic thought interrupting a journalistic one. I'm wondering when the journalist interrupts the poet.

Oh, he does.

And what that's like.

You know, I was speaking more like a journalist last night than not. I was talking about the world that I've reported on, events in American history and so forth, but obviously the poet plays his little role, with his jokes, and his asides, and his demands to be linguistically in control of the tongue and so forth. It's not always an adversarial relationship. One of the things I didn't want to do was talk about writing last night, because I didn't think that audience really wanted to talk about writing. . . . I thought that the journalist won the day. I think that in some sense his points were well-taken by that group.

But on the other hand, I think the poet got the most laughs.

Do you see moving into a different genre?

Well, I'm doing two different things right now. One is that I'm working on an opera, and the other is that I'm working on a love letter to God, which is not exactly an essay. It feels almost like a novel, curiously enough, because it engages a kind of fictional biography. . . . The great Louis Kahn -- the architect, the great Kahn of Modernism, from Philadelphia, he used to build some of the great neo-modern buildings of the world, like the Government House in Bangladesh -- just used to have on staff this kind of Zen Buddhist guru who used to go with him to different sites around the world. They would sit together in this open field, and he would contemplate, What does this space want to become? Not, What do I want to build here? but, What is this space telling me about what it wants to accept here? They would sit in different places for days and days, and I encourage writers to do that. It's quite possible that the material will dictate a different form.

My allegiance to the essay is not final; my allegiance is to the material. I don't think I want to write essays about love of God. I think I want to write this other thing that right now feels like a fictional letter. It's rather shocking. Not sexually shocking, although there is some -- the tradition of Spanish mysticism has always engaged this whole erotic question about loving God, St. Theresa loving God erotically. D. H. Lawrence always imagined, in the modern age that had such difficulty with theology and with religion, that sexuality was a key clue to our transcendence -- there is some erotic content to the letter, as I'm writing it. But by and large, it doesn't feel like anything I've ever written before. It's quite different.

The opera, I don't want to say anything about. It's about the death of a public person we all know.