Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

CRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Steve Amund, whose book most recently is Candy Freak,

A Journey Through the Chocolate underbelly of America.

It's published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

His previous book of stories, My Life in Heavy Metal, was published by Grove.

Now, this is a book in an area that people, more and more writers are finding that they're calling creative

nonfiction. And I wondered if you'd start by telling me about that.

Well, telling you how I came to write the book or about creative?

Creative nonfiction, because somehow, it's somewhere between what John McPhee does and

new journalism, the Tom Wolfe phenomenon.

And it feels like something after people had learned that writing a memoir wouldn't automatically gain them the attention the first memoirs did.

Suddenly creative nonfiction became the thing that offered a new potential. It didn't have the

inherent fear that fiction seems to compel in people. Yeah. Well, I'm not a great believer in the

division between genres. I think all the genres, poetry, fiction, nonfiction are doing the same

essential work,

describing what it means to be human in a particular age, and the best of it,

describing what it means to be human, period.

...