SOURCE: Ford, Richard, with Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais. “Invitation to the Story: An Interview with Richard Ford.” Kenyon Review 23, no. 3-4 (2001): 123-43.

[In the following essay, Levasseur and Rabalais discuss Ford's fictional work, paying particular attention to the difference between writing novels and writing short stories.]

Richard Ford's novels include A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, The Sportswriter, Wildlife, and Independence Day, which won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award in 1996. He has written two collections of stories, Rock Springs and Women with Men. He has edited The Granta Book of the American Short Story, The Granta Book of the American Long Story, and The Essential Tales of Chekhov. Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais interviewed Mr. Ford at his home in New Orleans on June 3, 1998. Kevin Rabalais met with him again on December 4, 1998.

[Levasseur/Rabalais]: It has been more than twenty years since the publication of your first novel, A Piece of My Heart. How do you look back on your body of published work, particularly the early novels?

[Ford]: I don't think about it unless somebody comes along and makes me think about it. My idea about those books is that I like them, and I feel about them today exactly the way I felt about them the day they were finished. I'm not a person who looks back at something and revises my opinion of it, particularly work I can no longer affect, change, or improve. It goes without saying that if I were to set out to write a book called A Piece of My Heart today, I would probably do it differently. But that's not what's going to happen. There's a wonderful story by Jorge Luis Borges called “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In that book, a man named Pierre Menard decides he is going to write a book. The book he wants to write is Don Quixote. He hopes to write, without access to the other book, exactly Don Quixote. That, in a way, is Borges saying something about the nature of how we look at time, how we look at the past and past events, how we would like to change them or repeat them. But we can't; that's an absurdity. I'm very happy about all my books. The thought that somebody might read A Piece of My Heart, or, as is going to happen this fall, make a movie out of The Ultimate Good Luck, thrills me. I'd be neurotic if I constantly picked away at those earlier accomplishments. I'm not neurotic.

The Sportswriter and its sequel, Independence Day, differ both in sentence structure and in tone. Was the change in Frank Bascombe's life something you wanted to set up through the length and structure of the sentences?

I wanted, without knowing how it would eventuate, to have Independence Day record change in Frank. I didn't know what the change would be because there ain't no Frank. I make Frank. Frank existed in one book; then when I started to write Independence Day, he didn't yet exist in that book. I knew a good working conceit for a sequel would be for the book to record a change in Frank's persona. But I didn't know how it would work. The opening sentences in Independence Day are as they were when I first wrote them. Virtually unchanged. That was the mood, tone, sentence weight, and syncopation that was first available to me in that book. I thought when I was writing it that it was the same prose as The Sportswriter. It was only after I put the two books up side to side, very late in the process of writing Independence Day, that I realized the sentences are much shorter, much less complex, generally more succinct in The Sportswriter.

Did you reread The Sportswriter before you started work on Independence Day?

No. I very deliberately did not. Eventually, I had to skim through it to try to be sure the street names were the same. A couple of times, I had to be sure I hadn't simply repeated myself with a certain image. It's a complex and involved clerical process to write long novels. There are so many things you have to remember and keep straight, and when a book is related to another book, that just exaggerates the clerical morass.

“The Womanizer,” the first story in your collection Women with Men, was written during a plane trip to the United States from Paris. Independence Day was written over a four-year period. How different is the level of intensity you experience when you write a novel from when you write a contained piece in one sitting?

When I was on that plane coming back from Paris, I was writing, I guess I'd say, feverishly. I had all this stuff bubbling out of my head, and that doesn't happen to me very much because I have the instincts of a novelist. That is to say, even when I'm writing short stories, I pace myself so as to always be fresh and not run myself into the ground. With a novel, I don't want to work myself silly because I'll get frustrated and write beyond my capacity to be good, and the next day I'll have to throw stuff away. I am very measured in how I work. I go at the thing, and then I stop. I do this all during the day, all during the week, all during the year. So it was very different writing that story on the plane. I sat down on the plane and realized there were some things I had to write down. I started writing, then the plane left, and I was still writing and filling up all these notebooks. When I got back, the story wasn't precisely finished, but it was drafted out. That was pretty intense. It was very unusual.

Is it true you wrote many of the stories in Rock Springs during the time you were writing The Sportswriter?

At least half of them.

How did you make the transition from novel to stories?

There isn't really anything difficult about that. You just stop doing one thing and start doing another. First you wash the dishes, and then you dry them. It may seem to be a feat, but it isn't. When I would come to periods in writing The Sportswriter when I wanted to stop or I was tired, I would write a story. I can be very diligent. One of the things my mother taught me was to try to make everything seem as normal as you can. Don't let the world dictate to you that there is something more difficult than your experience tells you it is. If somebody says, “I don't know how you can have this tone going in your head all the time and then switch over to something else,” tell him, “Well, maybe it isn't really that hard.” Earlier, I was talking on the phone, and somebody said, “Has there ever been anything in your life you wanted to do but thought you mustn't do?” I said, “I don't think so.” I don't want many things, so it should be possible, given the modest number of things I want, to do them. In a way, writing may create magic in the heart, but it is not performed magically. I wouldn't be able to do it if that were the case.

Gabriel García Márquez has written that stories are more difficult for him than novels because stories force the writer to constantly begin again. What has been your experience with these forms?

Writing is writing to me. Sometimes you write long; sometimes you write short. Stories are easier, of course. But for me, they each have different pleasures. They each afford different problems. It's just my impulse not to raise the profile of the problem.

You've said that you have the instincts of a novelist. Don DeLillo has said, “The novel is a meat-eating form. It devours everything.” Chekhov, however, often wove more texture through his short stories than others fail to achieve within a three-hundred-page novel. In terms of the story's open-ended form, what do you feel are the differences in potential between stories and novels?

I think about the most obvious ones, that it is the difference between a good big fish and a good little fish. Which would you rather have? To me, novels are a more estimable form because they include more. By including more, they present the possibility of a wider variety of effects, a wider variety of experience, possibly a wider variety of moral insight and challenge. To me, they are a more engrossing narrative form than the short story (if you think engrossing is good). It's not so much that big is better or that small is less good. I just happen to think that short stories, one by one by one, are less important than novels. It is also true that stories like “An Anonymous Story,” “The Darling,” or “Peasants” could very likely, in all of the categories that I just described, be better than nine out of ten other five-hundred-page novels, in terms of their felicities, complexities, their sustained analysis and sustained notice in their importance. But I write both, and I am the world's greatest expert about my own experience. For me, one form is more potent and more valuable than the other. But, you know—we don't really have to choose. We're free to read them all.

What kind of relationship do you have with your characters?

Master to slave. Sometimes I hear them at night singing over in their cabins. And sometimes, I'll wake up at night and write down what I hear and what I think of, what seems to be in their voices. Other than that, they don't have an existence I don't confer on them. I'm kidding, of course. But they don't talk to me. They don't tell me what to do. I make them do whatever I want them to. I'm basically practical, cut-and-dry about characters. They're made of language. They're not people, and I can change them as such. I can change the color of their eyes, their genders, their races. I can do all those things to them. They are totally subservient to me. Which isn't to say that I always plot out their every action. I act on a whim at times, and they have to exist upon that whim. I'm very disdainful of these aesthetes who talk about, “My characters wouldn't do that,” or, “I just start writing it and then my characters write the book.” Horseshit, is what I say. It's a ruse to get out of taking responsibility for your mistakes. Authorship means I authorize everything.

Many of your stories and novels begin with setting. You've also said you are not necessarily concerned with getting the setting “right.” For instance, if you're writing about Mississippi, it doesn't have to look like Mississippi looks.

It can't because Mississippi looks only one way. It looks the way you see it when you get there and get out of your car and walk off into the cotton field and look out at the levee. That's how Mississippi looks. It means only one thing. I can try, through the agency of language, to provoke you into that mental picture, but right away, you understand that language never gets anything that accurately—nothing that's physically provable. Anyway, language is more interesting to me in its poetic and non-cognitive qualities than is the mental picture I might betray. So I'm willing to alter the mental picture on behalf of certain pleasures of language. In any case, landscape in my stories is always just background to what the characters do. Plus, even if you could be “accurate,” different readers would always envision it differently.

You seem to have a strong interest in the weight of words within a sentence—the sound of one word and its relation to others within the sentence. Where did your interest in language originate?

I don't know. From reading Faulkner. Maybe from getting immersed in those long, sometimes endless sentences, and sometimes losing my antecedent, losing my pronoun reference, and sometimes losing all sense of where the sentence is going and still liking it. Maybe from being dyslexic and having to pore over sentences so gravely that I became more attached to the physical qualities of the words than to their referents. From being a very slow reader and always weighing the word as I read it just as I do now when I write it. Those things. I grew up in Mississippi and, for reasons I can't begin to tell you—but Eudora Welty is the same way—I grew up making word jokes and puns. We weren't particularly educated, but we were inventive with words. I've always assumed we grew up with a strong sense of irony and absurdity in Jackson because of the basic absurdity of racism: words meaning different things from what they seemed, etc.

Did reading Faulkner at a young age and noting his attention to language allow you to see the possibilities of writing fiction?

I can't very well say no, because you read his sentences and you see what they do, how lush and profuse they are. I never really wanted to do that; I never really wanted to write like Faulkner, although I think for a while I was kind of immured in it because I wanted to write about the South, and that came with it. But I don't think Faulkner was particularly stylistically influential in terms of the types of sentences I wrote or the ones I write now. I recognized when I read Faulkner that he was one kind of writer, and that he was probably not the kind of writer I was ever going to be if I was moved at times to imitate him. I never thought there was anything to gain by emulating him. There were other writers who were influential to me on the level of the sentence. Ford Madox Ford was a very affective writer for me. Pinter, Borges, and other writers, too. My view of what sentences are is a very licentious view. I think sentences are not conceptual formulations the writer sets out to fulfill. They are totally spontaneous, invented things you have to restrain somewhat to make sense.

What type of process do you go through to create dialogue?

That's a thing I do first by ear. Probably most writers, including letterwriters, do the same. I try to hear the sentence. I write a sentence I like tonally that has the right number of beats in it, that sounds right, and then I see if it is interesting. If it isn't, I start rearranging it. I end up changing its tonal qualities to adapt to what sense it makes or promises to make, and then I develop a new tonal structure for it, a new structure of sounds and relationships, and then sometimes the sense changes. That's one way invention occurs. It's very much like rhyming poems, or poems in metric patterns. The poet starts trying to figure out how he can accommodate sense with the poem's sound structure, and then the poem develops. You start out with a set of understandings you don't finish with, and that's good; you've learned something.

The Ultimate Good Luck was originally written in the first person, then changed to a third-person narrative.

I didn't like it in the first person because it was too short. There really wasn't much of a book there. I showed it to my friend Geoffrey Wolff, and I said, “I wrote this book to the end as I understood it to be, but it's just one hundred and fifty pages long. That just isn't enough. It doesn't feel like enough of a book.” He read it and said, “Well, you're right. It's not enough of a book. It's not a story, and it's not a novel.” He said, “You may have to try it in the third person.” I thought that was an interesting idea, and when I started doing it, there was the book waiting to be imagined, but in another intellectual mode. I was teaching at Princeton then. I was young and ignorant and didn't know how to do it. I certainly had no idea how hard it would be, or how much a different narrative mode using the same focus character would change, or cause me to reimagine a story. That was a learning process. It made me realize I had to be more scrupulous when I start a book so that I can try to anticipate mistakes.

Much of your work is in the first person. Do you feel more comfortable writing from that point of view?

No, that's just the way a lot of the stories turned out. I did notice something, and I can't account for it right now, but in stories like “Empire,” “Occidentals” and “The Womanizer” (all stories written in the third person), I have a much harder time finding redemptive language for events and characters. Those stories all turn out to be—and I don't know if it's just coincidental—harsher stories. The moral quotient to those stories tends to be of a more negative kind. They tend to be stories that indict their characters more than the first-person stories. Why? I don't know. But I'd like it not to be so.

Do you think you have more flexibility, then, with a first-person narrator?

I don't know. I don't feel, when I'm writing a story in the first person, any different from how I feel when I write a story in the third-person view. There are no tactile distinctions about those two methods for me. You can almost, in a falsely spatial way, say that from a third person you're above the earth a little more, whereas with the first person you are very close and personally involved with the characters. Maybe the first person enjoins the reader and the writer to be more sympathetic to the character. Maybe to be god-like is naturally harsher. I wrote a long story in Berlin, which the New Yorker published, that is in the third-person point of view, with a woman as focus, and it is a much kinder story than any other story I've ever written in the third person. It's a Christmas story. Maybe Christmas helped.

Several of the stories in Rock Springs are set up as stories within stories. There are points when the narrator addresses the reader, saying that now he is going to tell a story. Many of the stories also end in hope. Are these themes you wanted to carry throughout the collection?

You're talking about the deliberate invocation of storyness and the deliberate attempt to find something affirming about the story. Both things are deliberate on my part. I want a reader at the beginning of a story to understand that he or she is reading a story. I'm trying to make a clear, almost contractual arrangement with the reader of the story, which says, “OK, now quit thinking about this and that. Here's a story. It's made up. It's a contrivance made of words. It's not your life. It's something else. It's special. I made it as well as I can. Enter into it. Take pleasure.” I think that submission and entry are pleasurable for a reader, or can be.

The other is another matter. That's something I kind of stumbled on. The first two books I'd written had a rather dark view of the world. My friend Walter Clemens, who's dead now—he was the wonderful book critic for Newsweek magazine—told me once that he thought I had somehow or other short-circuited my sense of humor by writing The Ultimate Good Luck, and he wished I hadn't done that. In the process of musing about Walter's remark, I began to realize that in those two books, what I had been looking for, and what I would probably always be looking for, was drama of some kind of high order. And I had begun, out of youthful ignorance and ardor, to associate darkness—emotional, spiritual, moral darkness—with high drama. It's not unheard of. But by the time 1982 rolled around, I realized I could no longer sustain identifying darkness with drama. I just sort of ground to a halt. I needed, and this was at my wife Kristina's suggestion, to write something that was optimistic, or that concerned redemption of a secular kind. And that, with a couple of notable exceptions, has remained my purpose. When you get to the next to last movement of the story and you have one more movement you know you are going to write, you have the option of making that last movement anything you want it to be. My impulse is always to say, “Sometimes I'm defeated. How can I contrive this ending to be the proper ending and to give the reader something affirming?” It's just an instinct. I am, basically, an optimist. I think every writer has got to be an optimist. It's in the character of literature.

Throughout your career, you have edited several fiction anthologies: The Best American Short Stories 1990, The Granta Book of the American Short Story, The Granta Book of the American Long Story, The Essential Tales of Chekhov, and two volumes of Eudora Welty's stories and novels for the Library of America. Why have you chosen to focus much of your energy on the work of other writers?

Well, for my colleagues, really, and for readers. And also to keep myself reading. If you write all the time and your life is taken up with trying to find something interesting to write and letting yourself be talked into doing this, or talking yourself into doing that, most of your energy is spent writing. One of the things I don't feel I do enough of is read. I take these projects on so I can read something I haven't read before. The Chekhov project is a case in point because I was reading many of those stories for the first time. I was interested in the Granta project of long stories because I wanted to read those stories again. They were stories I wanted to champion. The case of Eudora Welty's work was a matter of doing something I felt compelled to do because of the excellence of her work and because this was such a good opportunity to have all that work consolidated into one place. Ultimately, though, these projects are for others, but also for me, too. I do get paid for it, but not much.

In 1992, you edited the Granta Book of the American Short Story. How did you choose those stories?

I knew a lot of the stories I wanted to put in the book. It was exactly the kind of process you would think: I sat down and made many lists of stories I'd read and remembered liking. The important thing is that, with a project like this, you don't do it all in a day, but that you give yourself a long time. I went back and flipped through the contents pages of a lot of books and looked for stories I remembered liking. I then got together my long list and read the stories to see if they held up to my remembrance. Then, I decided how I would organize the book and how I would represent the different decades on which the book was focused: 1940s through the beginning of the 1990s. I wanted the best stories I could find, really. It was very unscientific. But what isn't?

What are the differences in editing your own work and selecting works for an anthology?

When I read my own stories that are in progress, I try to read with as critical an eye as I can. I think I take on the role of the reasonable reader who would be stopped by something that didn't make sense, or who would be bored by something that went on too long, or who misses something due to some imprecision. When I read stories for compilation in an anthology, I'm reading stories that are finished and that are already excellent. I don't feel that the way I read my own stories in progress—or the way that I read my own stories in public readings years after they've been published—is at all like how I read a story for possible selection in an anthology. I read those latter stories as an admirer, even as a hungry student. I certainly did find that all of Chekhov's stories were not as excellent as the best of them, but I also found that my affection for his stories did not always cause me to choose the stories I thought everybody would conceive to be most excellent. I had favorites of my own that I realized would probably deviate from the general canon of Chekhov's excellence, which normally champions his work written after 1890.

Because Chekhov is regarded as the master of the short form, do you think he is a looming presence for many writers? How do you think he affects writers today?

Chekhov was a very humane writer, and the kinds of ways he would be most influential would be through those features in his stories that illuminate our complexity. His formal view of his own stories was quite undoctrinal and various. He wasn't a writer who, as say Hemingway, would bias young writers toward a certain way of putting a story on the page or of writing sentences. Chekhov's writing is so various that he wouldn't affect you very much as a writer in any one way. He is often said to be the master of irresolute endings, but that isn't always true. His endings are not open-ended; many are quite conclusive. I think most of the ways Chekhov would be likely to affect a writer would be ways he or she would want to be affected. That is to say, he would encourage a writer to be more searching in his analysis, more humane in his view of people readers might otherwise in a conventional way be likely to dismiss. He would be encouraging in asking a writer to write about people who might not ordinarily seem natural subjects. He would encourage writers to pay attention to landscape. He would teach writers all kinds of intensities: the intensity of notice, of sustained analysis, of the intensity needed to imagine human motive. He would teach someone that writing is a high calling, but not necessarily sober-sided, which would make him a good influence. And we are also reading his stories translated into English, so we don't have them in their original language, only in that buffer zone of English, which may (if Ms. Garnett was any good) stress larger thematic matters and stress less matters of surface style and local effect.

In your introduction to The Essential Tales of Chekhov, you say, “His wish is to complicate and compromise our view of characters we might feel we understand at first.” What goals do you feel short fiction should attempt to achieve?

Whatever goals the writer wants. That's just what Chekhov did, which were estimable goals; but that's no reason to think it's what anybody else should try to do. Anybody else should do what he or she wants to do. The short story is a form that is certainly open. Henry James wrote that the terrible whole of art is free selection.

What do you feel is the importance of a community of writers?

In a way I would probably not be able to specify, it's very important. Some of its particulars are—and I'm fierce about things like this—that we writers not run each other down in print. I know that because I did it once, and I didn't think I was right. It's important that we try to be as much as we can be forces for good in the lives of our colleagues. I was at an American Booksellers Association convention the other day, and I was standing in line, waiting to get a hot dog. Tim O'Brien came into line and grabbed me and said, “God, I haven't seen you in a long time. How are you?” That was important to me. He and I started off together as young writers. I realize how much it meant to me, seeing him. I hadn't seen him in years, but there was that sense, and we both felt this without having to say it, that we've both been through this together. It's probably just a small thing—like Shriners meeting other Shriners. But I liked it. I know we both have the same kinds of aspirations, which is to make a contribution to the world in some way using our best selves. I don't always like my colleagues personally, but I regard them highly as people who are writers. I write them fan letters, and they do the same for me.

You grew up across the street from a house in Jackson, Mississippi, that Eudora Welty once lived in. How do you look back on this coincidence?

My family came to North Congress Street a good while after she had gone. The house was by that time owned by a Supreme Court justice. But when I was growing up at that place, 736 North Congress Street, I never knew Eudora Welty had lived in the house across the street. It was only in the '80s that I found out from somebody, maybe her, that she had lived there. She always likes to say, “We were neighbors.” And I'm happy to think so, too. We did go to the same grammar school, which was next door to my house. We're thirty-five years apart in age, but we had some of the same teachers. It is a sweet coincidence.

Since then, you and Ms. Welty have become close friends. With Michael Kreyling, you recently coedited two volumes of her work for the Library of America. How does she feel about your involvement in that project?

She was glad I was involved for mostly personal reasons. I was sort of the neighborhood boy, and so I think she felt that I would do as good a job as I could, and indeed, I didn't have to do very much. People who were involved in that project did much more than I did, however: Michael Kreyling, who was my coeditor, and Noel Polk, a Eudora Welty scholar at the University of Southern Mississippi, who did very important reconciliations of Ms. Welty's manuscripts. My job, I sometimes think, was largely ceremonial, but I am happy to be associated with the project because, for us Mississippians, her work embodies something indestructible and incontestably good. I care for Eudora and I am her literary adviser and her neighbor.

You have also written recently in the New Yorker about your friendship with Raymond Carver. What does a literary friendship involve?

A literary friendship is one like any other friendship: it offers the faith that someone will act on your behalf, if by acting on your behalf one doesn't have to betray oneself. For writers, I think, specifically, an ongoing interest in the work one does is essential, a willingness (and this is hard) to not always give the most favorable answers to questions when the truth is asked for. That is to say, a willingness to be amiably candid, if value is put on that.

In that essay, “Good Raymond,” you describe a time when you and Carver collaborated on a screenplay. What has been your experience with literary collaborations?

I've worked with other people, but writing screenplays is inevitably a collaborative business. But with Ray and me, that was nearly twenty years ago. Ray was getting to be famous, and I was plugging along. He had some contacts with movie directors, and I didn't, so I felt fortunate to be working on that project, even though it never came to anything.

How do you feel about the way your career has progressed since then?

Before any really serious good luck came my way—and good luck is always just temporary, I think—I spent years writing and experiencing the normal vicissitudes of a writer's life in America, which is to say working a long time and not having many readers, having publishers drop you, having your books not picked up for paperback, normal things. I didn't think any of it was exceptional and still don't. When days finally came that I had a bigger readership and things seemed to work out for me better for a while, my habits as a writer, my expectations for what my work would enjoy and what pleasures I took from being a writer, were already very well established. It would have been hard to have shaken me off the ground I thought I was standing on. Even if the ground grew in elevation, I have always had the certainty that it will re-descend.

The subject of luck runs throughout your work. Have you developed any theories on luck throughout the years?

I've always been struck by how things happen in your life in an unplanned way: your father dies on a Sunday afternoon; your dog gets run over by a car; you have a child, and the child suddenly dies. You don't want these things to happen. Everything you've done in your life has been designed to prevent these things, at least if not from happening, from happening in a way that totally surprises and defeats you. And yet they do. So much of the world is driven by that randomness, which I sometimes call luck. I've always preferred the old adage turned on its ear: design is the residue of luck. I think everything, basically, is subject to unexpected intervention and that our character as human beings, if we can be said to have character, has a lot to do with how well we accommodate, how well we try to invent a vocabulary and a moral scheme that allows us to take responsibility for our actions in a universe that is much affected by randomness. That's how we stay cogent to ourselves. Of course, some things aren't random at all. Some things we or others predictably cause, and we must own up to them.

Luck also seems to reverberate in your life: the chance upbringing near Eudora Welty and being invited to a writers' conference and meeting Raymond Carver when you were both just beginning. How do you look back on these encounters?

In the aggregate, that is how everything happens. There are courses that cause people to collide. I used to have a friend in New York who wasn't a very good friend. When I would publish something, or when someone would write something in the press about me that was complimentary, he would always come to me, and in a suspicious way, say, “How do you think that happened?” or “Do you know someone there?” He was always slightly impugning any good luck I had. And I always think of it as being just good luck. But the truth is that those kinds of collisions take place one way or another. Sometimes it is just the quality of one's work that wins out, and sometimes you're in the right place at the right time. Sometimes it's a mistake. But I've never had the feeling that in the literary world the fix was in. It isn't profitable enough to want to fix. Consequently, it's just nicely timeless and free. I do still believe that all good writing will eventually find a readership. I mean, so much bad writing does. Why shouldn't the good enjoy its small victories?

Much of the attention you are giving colleagues seems to be strengthening the international reach of contemporary American fiction.

I'm pretty familiar with contemporary Irish, Scottish, and English writing. I'm a little familiar with contemporary French and Spanish language literature, but beyond that, everything has to get into translation for me to be admitted to it. But my everything is that my generation of American writers, not excluding any others—the one after me, or the one before it—but my generation, people who are now in their early fifties, has produced a remarkable number of very fine writers. And I take great pleasure in that because we went through the same periods of life. We didn't follow the same tracks necessarily, but so many of us do try to write about American culture in a humane and considered way, many of the ways I describe that Chekhov would influence writers. It is one of the reasons that I try to promote the work of others in the way I do. It's good for me to do that, and it's natural. But I never want to argue that American literature at this particular moment is better than another culture because it doesn't have to be better. It only has to be good. And my work is to find the good and call it so.

The Sportswriter, the book that launched a wide readership for you, was a paperback original. Was it your decision to publish the novel this way?

Yes. It was my choice. The people at Vintage told me, “If we publish this book in Vintage Contemporary format, we will be able to get a lot more books out there. We aren't exactly sure we can get review attention for it, but let's roll the dice. We'll do our best, and we'll put a lot of books out, and we'll really get behind it.” Vintage had had great success with Bright Lights, Big City a couple years before, so I thought I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. It was just that time when paperback originals were a novelty. I caught that wave and got lucky. Gary Fisketjon, my editor at Knopf, said, “We should try this.” The book sold well and continues to sell well. But it was published well.

You've said your working schedule becomes more intense the deeper you become involved in a project. How do you find your rhythm?

There really isn't much of a rhythm. You quit one day and start the next, and try to catch the way things sounded the day before. There may be something of a rhythm when you work at something many days in a row. I can detect it when I break it. If I write six or eight days steadily and the work is going in a fairly harmonious way, if something comes along that causes me to take three days off, then I'm aware that something has been interrupted. So if it's a rhythm, then OK. In an odd way, I don't really like to work that much. But I have found over the years that in the context of my life, it satisfies me to work. It's a little bit like eating spinach. You are not supposed to like spinach when you're a kid, but people make you eat it. After a while, you begin to like the taste.

I've read where you said your choice to become a writer was an arbitrary one you decided on when your mother asked you what you wanted to do. Is that really how it started?

Yes, but I must've been thinking about it. There's such a long time between now and 1968. But when you are at the beginning and you say you would like to be a writer, you don't really know what you are saying. You're just saying a sentence that seems plausible that nobody can refute and that doesn't cause anybody embarrassment. You set about doing it. After many years, it begins to have the appearance of genuine purpose. But at the moment of embarkation, I didn't know what I was saying. I could have easily said I wanted to be a chimney sweep. I guess if I'd said that, I'd have probably gone on to do it.

Were you writing before the time of that decision?

No. I had been in law school until three days before. I had been at Washington University, and Stanley Elkin was the adviser to the literary magazine then. I remember hauling out one of the stories I had written as an undergraduate and dressing it up, smoothing it out, getting it proofread, and taking it over to that magazine. Of course, it got rejected. But there must have been something percolating in me in 1966 and 1967 that made writing stories attractive. What was left after law school were those words about me becoming a writer, totally ridiculous words, baffling to my mother. She didn't say no to the idea, but she just looked at me with a sort of wan despair.

You've written a memoir of your mother's life, and you've said if it weren't for her, you wouldn't be a writer.

True, but if it weren't for my wife, I wouldn't be a writer, either. If it weren't for a lot of other people, I wouldn't be a writer. My mother, at least I can say, never discouraged me from being a writer. She never thought it was a terrible idea, though I don't think she understood it very well. She told me when I was young, and later when she was dying, “You must make yourself happy. Go toward those things that make you happy. Stay away from those things that make you unhappy.” Now, I don't believe that just deciding to be a writer will make you immediately happy. But some inner peace may be conferred upon you by trying to do something you consider inherently good. My mother was very instrumental in that way. All through the years between 1968 and 1981, when she died, I was trying to write books, and she was very respectful of that. It's important that your parents not impede you, that they not castigate you or reproach you for doing something they didn't do or something they may not understand. She was always firm in her conviction that if this is what you want to do, then do it.

The memoir of her, My Mother in Memory, was published in Harper's and later in a small, fine edition. Have you thought about trying to get that book reprinted for a larger audience?

If I could, I guess I would like to write a memoir about my father, which I have tried to do—two or three years ago—without any success. But that—those two—might make a book. I'm not, nor have I ever been, dying to put everything I write into print. It just so happens everything I have ever written has made its way into print. That isn't the thing that motivates me. For instance, I was looking at my curriculum vita the other day, and I noticed how much nonfiction I have written. I've probably written three times as much nonfiction in my life than I've written fiction, particularly short stories. Some people over the last ten years have said, “Why don't you collect your nonfiction?” But I just don't want to. I don't care about making a book out of any of those pieces of nonfiction. I just don't feel like it's a worthwhile publishing gesture.

It seems that, for a writer, work and life are one and the same. It is not a nine-to-five job where you leave the house to go to work. How has this affected your relationship with your wife and friends?

I've never thought about that. I guess, at an early stage in life, it felt a little queer to always be home, but then I got over that. Sometimes, when I was an unknown writer who was staying at home writing books and there wasn't any product and no evidence that I was actually doing anything, people would laugh about it—being a househusband and not doing anything. That ended, though. I don't think it's had a really big effect on my relationship with other people at all. When I started to publish books, the naysayers slipped to the back row. As far as my relationship with Kristina is concerned, we started out in life this way. The year we were married, '68, was the year I started trying to write stories. So we never had a life that didn't involve me staying at home writing stories or that didn't involve her getting in a car and going to work, which she did and does to this very minute. That's the only life we've ever known. She was certainly never reluctant to have me at home. We are pretty conventional people in most ways. We have a house with pictures on the wall; we have dogs running around. I have a motorcycle and a car. But at the same time, we are not much inhibited by convention. We don't let it tell us what's right and wrong. This is the way we've always set out to live. It didn't seem to me to be radically divergent from what other people did. It was never an issue.

The short story doesn't seem to be in as wide demand as it has been in the past. What do you feel is the reason for this?

Magazines. There aren't many magazines. Writers would write stories if there were more magazines. There are plenty of little magazines, but little magazines don't get read very much. And the reason they don't get read very much is because there are a lot more writers than there are good writers; there are a lot more stories than there are good stories. You have only to edit The Best American Short Stories to understand that. But there are still enough good writers and good stories floating around in America to fill the quota of many more good, wide-circulation magazines. What you detect to be a sort of falling off in the popularity of the short story is, I think, accurately detected in these reasons: magazines are under terrible financial pressures; they are going out of business; they are having a harder time finding a niche in the American consciousness; they have a lot of competition.

Aside from the magazine issue of publishing stories, it seems that collections of stories are becoming more difficult to publish.

That's always been the case. Eudora Welty, all through the late thirties and forties, didn't want to write any novels. One of the things she warred against in the publishing world then was that you had to write a novel. She didn't want to. She didn't do it for a long time. She preferred stories. We've sold a lot of copies of Women with Men. We're already on the third printing of the paperback, and it's been out only three weeks. I think books of stories, probably not commensurate with the number of books of stories that are being published, do OK. I know that Tom (T. C.) Boyle just published an enormous book of stories. He's a money-making novelist. But if the publishing industry was not doing fairly well with collections of stories, they wouldn't be publishing them. As a writer, you can't worry much about things like that. You can't fight battles for which you have no armor. You're not, as a writer, in the publishing business. As long as publishers are publishing short stories, then you should be writing them. If they finally hang the shingle on the door and say, “Sorry, no more short stories,” then maybe you should no longer write them. But if you think, “Well, people do publish stories, and I know I've written some good ones,” then go ahead and do it.

At a signing in New Orleans held just after the publication of Women with Men, someone asked you about the cover of the book. You mentioned that when you chose the photograph for the cover, some of the women at Knopf didn't like it because they thought the woman in it was not pretty enough. Some critics have branded you a writer who writes for male readers, but although many of your male characters are decent people, or they are people who are trying to be decent, it is the women who are the stronger characters.

Well, what that means is that you've read the stories. It also means that people who brand me a “male writer” haven't read my stories. I like to hunt, and I like to fish. I used to box. I've got a pretty wife. I just get sort of typecast as a certain kind of guy. Even if the fiction doesn't bear that out, I still get typecast. I rather hate to think, though, that I've been writing books all these years, working this hard, for only half the population. I would never do that. If I really believed I was doing it, I would quit. I would say, “No more of that.” Women and men are so much alike as human beings, and they need to be addressed in ways that cause them, by the agencies of that address, to seek out the places they are alike rather than just hide behind the gender distinctions.

How do you and your wife respond to comments like that against you and your writing?

I've never been surprised by it. I've been surprised by how long it's held on. When you first make your entrance in the world as a writer, there isn't much for the press to hang on you. So they hang whatever they can hang on you, often something superficial or just invented. Maybe living in the West as I have, or being a southerner as I am, or being the kind of guy I seem to be, maybe that made sense at one moment. But for it to persist so long is silly. I think what Kristina felt when she first saw it was, “Well, you are kind of a male guy. You are not ashamed about being a man, and you do have certain tastes that are traditionally male pleasures.” It didn't bother her. I get mad in a sort of flash way when I see somebody dismiss me for being something I'm not. But other than that, please spell my name right. My idea about these things is that you really have to start worrying when they get it too right, when somebody's got you all figured out.

Is there a third Bascombe novel planned?

I was thinking of having Frank be a Negro. I was thinking of having him become a woman. That's just a way of saying, “Yes, I have.” I have to imagine a third book that is so distinct from the other two it's almost not qualified as a sequel. So I'm in the process of accumulating the information about that. I've been doing it for a year, and I'll go on doing it for a couple of years while I do other things. I think probably in a couple of years I'll sit down and see if anything makes sense. As it was, there was an impulse in me when Independence Day was published to think, “Well, I've written two. Maybe I could write three.” But at that point all I could figure out was what I could write next—what happens the next day after Independence Day was over. And to me that's not what a sequel really is. A sequel is a distinct book from its predecessor. I need the intervention of time to cut me off from any of those stylistic conceits or sentence structures so that I can hatch something new, if indeed I can hatch anything at all. I know a lot of things already about how I would like to write that third book: I know where I would like it to take place; I know where I would like it to be set; I know some things I want to have in it. I don't have yet, and I'm kind of sensitive to this, that big conceit that I had in Independence Day. But that's OK. I will have to hope to find it.

I see that you have books by Václav Havel, essayist, playwright, and president of the Czech Republic, on your bookshelf. What do you feel is the role of the writer in American society?

In America, writers are totally marginal and not taken too seriously, which may be freeing. Here we have become a country of professionals, and writers are not professionals. We are amateurs. We don't have any rules for governing our daily lives or for our quasi-, would-be vocational lives. We are inventing new things all the time and working within and outside established modes. We don't fit in, but we're not left out completely, either. A writer is a person who looks at the world from across a frontier, V. S. Pritchett said. That's kind of the way it is in America. Our role as writers is to try to write about the most important things we know and hope that other people will agree about their importance. I don't, however, think the concerns of novels finally formulate the public consciousness very much. In fact, we're always tugging at the coattails of American culture. We're followers, not leaders. We're always writing about things that have already occurred. In that aspect of the arts, we are always slightly retrospective. There's almost no way in which narrative art can be avant-garde. It's always reacting to something in the culture.