Excerpt from an interview with Patricia Hampl

Following is an excerpt from an interview with Patricia Hampl by Katherine Jamieson in last month's Writer's Chronicle, Vol. 43 #2.
There is a nugget of wisdom here for writers of creative non-fiction.

Jamieson: How do you help your students break out of a psychological self-focus in their writing?

Hampl: I encourage attention, descriptive writing. Not just looking to the past, not trying to understand it, but to attend to images almost as if they were photographs, and to write those. To discipline yourself to say what you see, rather than what you feel. Let the feeling flow through the seeing. I think it's a liberation.
One of the things that meditation tries to liberate you from is the terrible strictures of feeling, of the emotional batting about of rage and joy and anger. Mostly anger and frustration. All that thrashing around. Describing what you see liberates you from those feelings that are strictures.
They feel like your reality, but they aren't your reality. Your reality is your ability to see and say. But we think our reality is our ability to feel. Try just off-setting that a little, and saying my truth is saying what I see. It offsets the self, just a bit.