A lifetime of wide-ranging, deep reading is clear from your writing. Your essays always enrich and delight in a meaningful, inspiriting way. What is your definition of the essay?

In The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and most of the work that preceded it, I considered myself a literary reporter. But going out into the world and recording what you find is completely different from reflecting about that world and about yourself. I like Adam Gopnik’s distinction between reportage as writing from the outside in and essays – personal essays, that is – as writing from the inside out. I also like Montaigne’s view of the essay (which comes from essayer, to attempt) as a trial or experiment rather than an exhaustive treatment.

What is your view of creative nonfiction?

I think of creative nonfiction in its older sense, the one used in the title of the legendary class John McPhee teaches at Princeton. That class has been called both Creative Nonfiction and the Literature of Fact; McPhee uses the phrases interchangeably. In the genre he writes and teaches, no facts are “created”; everything is true. The “creative” aspect comes from using some of the tools of fiction — character, dialogue, narrative voice, nonformulaic structure — to tell a true story.

You are the first to hold the endowment of the Francis Writer in Residence at Yale University and also were recently awarded the Richard H. Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence from Yale University. What have you learned from teaching? What aspect of mentoring is most satisfying for you?

Teaching hasn’t taught me to be a better writer. It gives me less time for writing and less time for reading canonical works that might, by slow osmosis, improve my own writing style. But that’s not why I teach. I teach to expand my world view; to get to know brilliant young people, some of whom write far better than I did at their age; and to help train soldiers who will fight on the literary battlefield and keep books alive long after I’m gone. Also, I absolutely love it. Of the three occupations I’ve held — writing, editing, and teaching — teaching is the most enjoyable. It wins hands down.

What is your current view of e-books, and literature which seems to be slipping off the read-in-bed, write-in-the-margins page and onto a pixelated screen?

E-books are useful in certain contexts (textbooks, vacations, large-font reading for the elderly and others with limited vision). But in general, I hate them. The decline of the printed word — in books, newspapers, and magazines — makes me incredibly sad.

Upcoming and/or future projects? Have you ever considered writing a novel or book of poems?

My big project right now is teaching. I write only in the summers: no sacrifice, since, as I’ve said, I love teaching, and also since I don’t consider essays a lesser form than books just because they’re shorter. I’m currently working on an essay about the South Polar Times, a magazine published (or, rather, produced, since there was only one copy of each issue) on Robert Falcon Scott’s two Antarctic expeditions. Because I’m interested in both the history of polar exploration and the history of periodicals, this is something I’ve wanted to write about for decades. It’s so exciting finally to have the chance!

At some point I’ll probably have enough essays for another collection, and I hope I’ll have the good fortune to see it published. And after my husband (George Howe Colt, also a writer) finishes his next book, I’ll likely do another reported book. George and I switch off, one of us writing a book and the other holding a job with health insurance. Each of us edits the other’s work. George just finished Book 3, but for a variety of reasons we’ve decided he should forge ahead with Book 4 before I do.

As for the genre: I took a couple of fiction classes in college, and the main thing I learned from them was that I shouldn’t write fiction. Reading fiction gives me great pleasure, but I lack the necessary imagination to write it. I’m no poet either. I’m not just being modest. If you read my attempts, you’d agree that the greatest gift I’ve ever given my readers is likely my decision to spare them my stories and poems.

The fifteenth-anniversary edition of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down — the true story of a severely epileptic Hmong child and her family who lived in Merced, California, and their difficulties with the health care system — was recently published. In the afterword, you describe Lia, who spent twenty-six years in a vegetative state after her neurological crises in 1986, as someone who has “altered the course of my family life, my life as a writer, and my whole way of thinking.” What is at the heart of this extraordinary statement?

Lia’s mother, though she was labeled a child abuser by the American legal system, taught me how to be a good parent. Lia herself taught me that a person’s value cannot be measured only by her achievements. Hmong culture taught me that there are some problems for which the rational approach is not always most effective. The unexpected success of the book opened many opportunities for me as a writer.

Lia died on August 31, at the age of thirty. Her three-day funeral broke my heart. It also gave me the opportunity to reflect on what a gigantic role the Lees have played in my life, how deeply I prize their friendship, and how rich and complicated my relationships with them have been over the last twenty-four years. I also gave much thought to how remarkable it was that Lia’s family kept her alive so long at home. They defied every expectation. Also, in ways I cannot explain and that perhaps only the Lees understand, I miss Lia.