Interview with Scott Russell Sanders

INTERVIEWER: You began your education studying physics and then switched to English. If you were starting over, would you take the same path?

SANDERS: I would still study science. That is, given the passions I had as a boy, and also given my abilities. All the standardized tests showed that I should go into science and math, and those were the subjects I loved as a boy and young man. I continue to be fascinated by the vision of the universe that science is gradually unfolding.

At the same time, I don't regret abandoning the formal study of physics in order to pursue literature, because I actually have much more aptitude for reading and writing than I do for abstract theoretical analysis. Even from my limited study of science, I gained a vision, a way of seeing the universe, a way of appreciating human ingenuity that I would be very reluctant to give up.

INTERVIEWER: What do you see as the goals of creative nonfiction?

SANDERS: The goals depend, of course, on the writer. For some writers creative nonfiction may be a way of making sense of life. It may be a way of recording a memorable person, event, or passage of history. It may be a way of thinking on paper, of clarifying a confusing experience.

I think creative nonfiction should provide the reader with the same kinds of pleasures and satisfactions that other literature does. It should be entertaining; it should be inspiring; it should be well made. In addition, the essay, memoir, autobiography, or other varieties of personal nonfiction can help readers think about the shape and meaning of their own lives, can help them think more deeply about war, sex, nature, race, and other important matters. So creative nonfiction can serve many different purposes, both for the writer and for the reader.

INTERVIEWER: In your interview with Robert Root, you said that you feel an obligation to be honest and represent scenes as accurately as you remember them, but your writing, especially in Hunting for Hope, is so meticulous. You even talk about the fly that landed on your son's back. Did you record these details as they happened, or did you go back and reconstruct them later?

SANDERS: It depends on how far back in the past the event occurred. For example, that detail about the fly landing on my son's back was something I wrote into my journal a few minutes after I observed it. As I mention in Hunting for Hope, I was taking notes during my hiking trip with Jesse as a way of pondering the challenge that he posed to me when he said he felt he had been denied hope. Since I felt hopeful about the future of humankind, in spite of my many worries, I wanted to figure out where my hope comes from, so I began taking notes to provide Jesse with answers. I usually write in my journal or a pocket notebook when I travel, because I'm stimulated by new places. Thus, many of the details you find in my work were recorded on the spot.

On the other hand, some of the details about events and people and places encountered long ago, as in my coming-of-age memoir, A Private History of Awe, are drawn from memory. And we know that memory is creative and transformative: it moves things around, provides atmosphere, fills in blanks. We don't recall the past unerringly. But I take seriously the prefix "non-" in nonfiction. When I'm writing nonfiction, my implicit contract with the reader is that I'm not making anything up. The reader can trust me to give an honest account of what I actually remember. At the same time, I realize that memory will fill in details. And you can't be sure whether the details that memory provides would have been recorded had a film crew, let's say, been on site at the time the event occurred. I happen to possess a powerful memory for sensory details; that's one of the reasons I became a writer, because...