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

The idea for the Buddy Bolden essay was to capture something of the place of Bolden in New Orleans culture and mythology, and to insist on the validity of native perspective with respect to that culture. Of the essays I've written, I'm especially pleased with this one, at least in part because my own goal was clear. Also, I'm satisfied that I was able to create a kind of New Orleans sound and feel for the piece... .

How did your essay develop, both in your initial thinking about it and in the revision process? What happened in writing that you didn't expect would happen?

This is one in a series of essays treating similar themes. In this series, I try to give a sense of what it means to be a New Orleanian. One of the main components of the native identity has perhaps more to do with how we hear ourselves rather than how we see ourselves. I wanted to write a piece that got at the heart of that sound by addressing the problem of what can never be heard--in this instance, the ever absent sound of Bolden's silver horn. I wanted to write not about silence, but about the eternal absence of a sound we all know (or believe we know), and to say something about the extent to which we are marked by that sound and its absence. I did a great deal of research in order to write this piece and came away quite happy at finding very little to work with because, again this--to my mind--pointed to the theme of absence. Not because nothing has been written on Bolden but because the material presented as factual does not manage to say anything about Bolden that we (natives) really need to know... .

... .how does your experience writing in creative nonfiction depend upon or depart from your other kinds of writing?

I came to this genre from poetry... . I'd always planned to write essays and made notes for 10 to 12 years for prose pieces I thought could work... . I began writing articles for a local monthly simply to establish in my own mind that I could write prose, that I had not forgotten how to write sentences. And I sense that mine is a poet's prose... . perhaps an exaggerated version of my speaking and thinking style--long sentences, parenthetical examples, longish asides, etc... .