JOHN DANIEL is the author of a memoir, "Looking After;" a collection of nature essays, "The Trail Home;" and two books of poems, "Common Ground" and "All Things Touched by Wind." He wrote the text of "Oregon Rivers" and is editor of the anthology "Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World." He has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, a research and writing fellow at Oregon State University's Center for the Humanities and recently held a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Two of his books, "The Trail Home" and "Looking After" have won the Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. He presented a workshop entitled "Writing About Loss" as part of the University of Oregon Literary Nonfiction "Writing About" series.

Q: Which do you consider yourself more--a writer of poetry, fiction or nonfiction? And why?
A: For the past five years I've been writing nonfiction almost exclusively. I haven't been a fiction writer since the 1970s, when I was first getting started, writing bad stories with good hearts. But my nonfiction has now swung round from personal essay to extended personal narrative, and I find myself not far from fiction at all. I'd like to write a novel before I'm done.

Q: What are, in your opinion, the similarities between writing poetry and writing prose?
A: Writing literary prose, prose that attempts more than the mere conveyance of information, is much like writing poetry. You need to pay the same attention to sound, rhythm, the activation of the reader's imagination along with his intellect. You're released from worry about line breaks, but that's about it. Everything else about verse, even rhyme to some extent, is still relevant. And, like any serious work, they both come hard and slow.

Q: In the workshop you presented at the UO, "Writing About Loss," what were the main points or lessons you wanted to communicate to the students?
A: No particular points or lessons. I chose the theme because writing about loss is a good way to get authentically engaged with something the way a writer needs to be engaged. A great deal of literature, including much of the best, is writing about loss. I also wanted my writers to think about the potential of personal narrative and what liberties a writer is entitled to take with the truth--a very problematic truth--of memory. Honorable men and women will disagree on this. Thinking about it is what's important.

Q: At what point during or after the death of your mother did you decide to write "Looking After?" Or put another way, how did that book come to be?
A: While my mother was living with my wife and me I was trying to draft a memoir about coming west and coming of age in the 1960s. I had plenty of material but couldn't find a way to shape it. After my mother died I kept working on the coming-of-age material, showing it to my editor, who eventually suggested--gently--that I didn't really have a book and that my immediate need might be to write about my mother. I resisted this for several months, then, "click," about two years after her death I sat down and wrote the epilogue, the prologue, and the first few chapters. The book came out not in finished form but pretty much in finished order, as if it had assembled itself within me.

Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm now writing the coming-of-age memoir, which turns out also to be about my father and his career as a labor organizer. A "popoir" to go with the "momoir," but a very different kind of book. I'm trying to tell stories and let the stories do most of the work. It won't be published before 2002. I'm also writing an 80-100 page essay on what I most deeply believe about nature and community. It will appear as a short book entitled "Toward Oregon" in the Credo series being published by Milkweed Editions.