“Grandmother, Grandfather, how healthy are you?” The recorded female voice sounds metallic over the bus loudspeaker. “The medical services provided by Seto Rehabilitation Hospital have been trusted by the Tokuyama community since the fourth year of Emperor Showa.” I am sitting in the back seat of the bus, paging through my English-as-a-second-language textbooks, jotting notes that pass for a lesson plan.

I’ve been asked to write about fictive techniques and how they have informed my creative nonfiction, and now that I have begun, the truth is that I can tell you just about anything. I

Why rock 'n' roll songs have such silly lyrics.

As the pressure mounted in his David-versus-Goliath personal-injury case against two of America’s largest corporations, Jan Schlichtmann, the central figure in Jonathan Harr’s non-fiction legal thriller, “A Civil Action,” battled personal demons, as well as legal ones.

Two weeks into my freshman year at college, I came out of the financial-aid office carrying paperwork that approved me for an on-campus job.

I’m ungrounded in Florida. I’ve come to Sarasota, a spot I picked off a map, to forget a marriage that came apart, to put distance between me and what I’ve left behind, to escape the smoky, airless kitchens that have become my career. I want a job where I can breathe again.

Just a piece of privacy lattice away, my maniac neighbor is attacking 2-by-4s with a buzzsaw. I would be happier hearing birdsong, but that savage is not interrupting me. I have turned my back to him.

St. James didn’t think of himself as an artist. His intentions went far beyond art.

It’s drizzling in April, so I take the subway instead of my bike. I never know what party I’m going to cater until I get to the location. Usually I don’t care.

A black-and-white snapshot contains my first memory of a place that no longer belongs to me, a place gone from my life forever, in this picture stand four generations of a family: a young woman, her father, his mother and two great-grandchildren.