How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection?
I'd learned along the way that it is wise to open a
collection with a particularly strong story, so I placed what I (and several
trusted others) considered to be one of my "best" stories first. I
was also guided by a roughly chronological thread. The first three stories are
set before or during World War II (the first story extends to the immediate
postwar era), and the last three stories take place in the first several years of
21st century. The middle story—the fourth of the seven—happens to be set pretty
much at a midpoint, in 1972.
At what stage do you start seeking feedback on your work
and from whom?
I need a full draft, that's for sure. I have five or six
writer friends I turn to most often for initial feedback, but I don't
necessarily share all new work with everyone in that group. I try to be mindful
of what's happening in everyone's lives—sometimes, it's just not the right time
to ask one or another person for this immense favor—and some readers seem
better suited to particular manuscripts than others.
Then, too, if I'm writing a story that is inspired not by
something I've personally experienced or overheard or read about, but rather by
an incident or situation I've gleaned from the life of a friend or family
member, I typically send a draft to that friend or family member first. I'm
working on a story right that falls into this category. It's much easier—less
"scary"—to send something out to fellow writers for a critique. I can
tell that I'm delaying the inevitable need to email this story to the person
who should see it next.
What do you think a good short story collection should
deliver?
I love the response that one of your previous blog
contributors. Charles
Baxter, gave to this question: "Interesting characters, intriguing
situations, beautiful sentences. Hauntings."
What book or books made you want to become a writer?
Two that I like to mention are Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I read first as a
preteen, and La vie devant soi,
by Romain Gary, which I was fortunately assigned during a college semester in
France. (The latter was published
under the name Emile Ajar and translated by Ralph Manheim as The Life Before Us: ("Madame Rosa"). It's probably signficant that as different as they are, both of these books feature
young protagonists who aspire to be writers.
What kind of research, if any, do you do?
I earned a PhD in history, so it's not surprising that I'm
quite fond of research, especially document-based research. The kinds of
research that I've pursued have changed over time. As recently as the
mid-1990s, when I was beginning to write fiction, the Internet wasn't the
resource that it is today. Academic researchers simply had to spend great
chunks of time in libraries and archives, and I'm so grateful for those
research experiences. It was in an overseas archive, in fact, that I came
across the documents that inspired by first (albeit still unpublished) novel.
And one of the best things about living in Cambridge, Mass., as long as I did
was my access to the Harvard University libraries. That said, I'm equally grateful
for the online databases and other resources that help me locate everything
from historical newspaper articles to full bibliographies on the subjects in
which my fiction is grounded.
Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and
not revised it later?
Never. What's that like?
What's the longest narrative time period you've ever
contained in a short story?
The second story in Quiet Americans, "Matrilineal Descent," which appeared
first in TriQuarterly, takes the
reader from 1888 through World War One, with a final flash-forward to 1940.
That's probably the longest span I've covered in a single story.
