But to go back to the idea of art over craft—what I really mean to say is that the art comes from the craft. The first thing I tell students, and tell myself, is that there’s nothing new under the sun (second thing is not to use clichés). We as a culture become jaded and bored by nearly everything we see; spend an evening in thrall to your devices, and you’ll witness the gamut of human experiences and emotions. So in order to make art (literature) out of just that—human experiences and emotions—we have to find new and surprising ways to convey our insights. That means we have to have insights, which means we have to think, and that means we have to work to create art out of life, to bring something new to each sentence, a surprise for the reader. Not in a pyrotechnic way, but through intelligence, through our powers of imagination, and through the rigorous refusal to waste a reader’s time.

But that said, an interesting thing happened when Vijay called me on break and asked me to please write a craft talk. With a real job to do, I suddenly became newly absorbed in my book.

In 1973, when I graduated from high school, I could type 112 words a minute—yes, with a lot of errors, but it got me a job at the local army installation, where errors didn’t matter. That job was hard and boring, like sitting on the writing sled with seven men who wanted me to make their coffee. Which I did. And I didn’t even drink coffee back then—in 1973, I was an eighteen-year-old bowling-alley girl who drank Pepsi at eight a.m. and smoked Winston Longs in the office. In my top desk drawer at that army installation, I always had a book open. Anything from The Love Machine to Ulysses; it didn’t matter to me. It only had to have words.

I didn’t know from writing, as they say, but I knew from reading. And in the end—if we’re talking here about teaching the craft of nonfiction—then I will confess that I don’t believe writers learn a great deal from having their work critiqued by an editor or a teacher or colleagues. Learning to write comes from reading, both the work of published writers and of our peers, and from using one’s powers of insight and creativity to analyze what one reads and figure out why it works when it does and what is missing when it doesn’t. This is where knowledge is gained, and it’s slow and frustrating, nebulous, diffuse, much less direct and directed than having someone write Great! in the margins of a story or—in the case of many personal-essay workshops—I need to know more about your mother. Why did she hit you so hard?