There was something else, though, which is from my dad, who had pressed Twain on me in an almost child-abusive way very early on. So that stuff never sounded quite as new to me as I think it might have to a normal person. I immediately heard older stuff in it. And as a result, the guys you’re talking about in the 90s, they didn’t sound as new either. This is not in any way to denigrate it; it wasn’t that they didn’t sound great and exciting, but they didn’t sound new. I had a sense very early on of standing, in however and diminished and eccentric a way, in a stream that was fairly deep.

 

RM: Do you remember when you decided to set aside fiction for nonfiction? And was that a sort of Wolfean, nonfiction-is-now-the-more-exalted-artform-based decision, or was it just based on your inclinations?

 

JJS: I took a workshop with Mark Richard, I wrote stories while I was living in Andrew Lytle’s house, I think I was still writing some fiction when I got to the Oxford American. I wrote a lot of fiction when I was living in Peru, in Lima. My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, was on a Fulbright down there, and I was teaching, and writing more fiction. But I think it was just that my short stories, I realized at a certain point, were bad. And the first couple of nonfiction things I wrote seemed…less bad. The fiction all had that horrible tone of like, hoping that it meant something. And I realized that the badness of it was coming from a kind of falsity in it, and the falsity wasn’t there when I worked on essays. There, something real happened. A need of saying what I meant.

 

RM: Do you like the term “essay” for what you do?

 

JJS: I love it. It’s a brilliant word to assign to a genre, because it has a kind of formal uncertainty built into it, into the very name, “an attempt,” like an attempt on a mountain. Already it implies improvisation, it implies variation. Some Latin American literary critic that my friend Ron Briggs was telling me about said, “The essay is the least stable of the literary genres.”