page 2-bold and italics mine
I realized that in order to describe the rich tangle of experience there [at the antinuclear actions at the Nevada Test Site in the late 1980s] I needed to describe, to analyze, to connect, to critique, and to report on both international politics and personal experience. That is, I needed to write as a memoirist or diarist, and as a journalist, and as a critic--and these three voices were one voice in everything except the conventions that sort our experience out and censor what doesn't belong. [...]
Since then, I have been fascinated by trying to map the ways that we think and talk, the unsorted experience wherein one can start by complaining about politics and end by confessing about passions, the ease with which we can get to any point from any other point. Such conversation is sometimes described as being "all over the place," which is another way to say that it connects everything back up. The straight line of conventional narrative is too often an elevated freeway permitting no unplanned encounters or necessary detours. It is not how our thoughts travel, nor does it allow us to map the whole world rather than one streamlined trajectory across it. I wanted more, more scope, more nuance, more inclusion of the crucial details and associations that are conventionally excluded. The convergence of multiple kinds of stories shaped my writing on one way; this traveling by association shaped it in others. Early in my history of walking, I wrote that "if fields of expertise can be imagined as real fields, fenced off and carefully tilled, then the history of walking is a path that trespasses through dozens of fields." So are most unfenced lines of inquiry. I learned two kinds of trespassing at the test site, geographical and intellectual.
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