Edward P. Jones, the New York Times bestselling author, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World; he also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004. His first collection of short stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short-listed for the National Book Award. He has taught fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Robert Birnbaum: What does the P. in “Edward P. Jones" stand for?

Edward Jones: Paul.

RB: When we last spoke, which was in late 2003 —

EJ: Yeah, it as maybe October or something.

RB: You had a sense that this [All Aunt Hagar’s Children] story collection would be coming out in the spring of 2004.

EJ: Yeah I have been traveling and everything and so knowing that you have to get up in three days and be someplace else isn’t quite conducive to letting your mind roam and figure things out for stories. So I think I had to get, maybe two or maybe three extensions. Luckily, I knew what the stories should be because I had worked everything out in my head. It’s just the way I do it. But especially there towards the end with two of the stories, “Bad Neighbors” and “Root Worker”, even though I knew where they should go, it was a difficult time of just getting through.

RB: So writing hasn’t gotten any easier.

EJ: No, it never gets easier.

RB: But apparently you haven’t taken up woodcarving [a reference to our first conversation]

EJ: It’d be nice. You wouldn’t have this problem with woodcarving. You’d have a horse and you’d see if one leg was shorter than the other or something.

RB: And a pile of shavings that would show progress.

EJ: Yeah, with a story it’s a different thing. You are dealing with all these people for one thing. And you can’t see it all in one set, in your hand like that, complete.

RB: I take it that your methodology, your approach to writing stories, is still the same as it ever was. You get some of it in your head. Or the whole thing?

EJ: Well, yeah, I try to get the beginning, middle and end— in a general way.

RB: And that’s when you put it down on paper. What stopped any of these stories from being novels?

EJ: There just didn’t seem to be enough there to make them into novels. I did want to make stories that when the reader was done it felt like it had been a novel. And then with several of them, quite a few of them I managed to do that-

RB: When we talked about The Known World, you mentioned that early on, readers had been, I don’t know if it was critical, but there were suggestions that the beginning of the book was not easy— that once you got through the first 100 pages, it was much easier. I have skimmed a couple of reviews of the new stories and they are almost apologetic, though effusively praising the collection and extolling your talent—in fact, are you aware of any bad reviews?

EJ: No, it’s just little things in the reviews [that are vexing].

RB: So the general response has been great— but what comes through is these stories are hard. And, in fact, one may have to re-read them.

EJ: [laughs]

RB: Are you being done a service by that suggestion? I take your position that there wasn’t enough for a novel but had you written more might the stories have been more accessible? In one story The Spanish… (name story) you have the little girl in school looking at her mates who have become girlfriend and boyfriend and then you have her father asking her mother if he is still her boyfriend? And then you switch back— which seems to suggest more than a short story.

EJ: Someone else would have to do whatever it is that is more. The girl is there and essentially it’s this moment in her life when things change. She has gone further from her home, only a few blocks, than she has ordinarily— she is out there in the world and she is about to see things that are a part of that world. And her life at home is nice and cozy and her mother and father consider themselves boyfriend and girlfriend, even though they have been married for several years. Out there are these kids her age and they are calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend and there is this disconnect, it seems. And its part of this world out there —it is a place of disconnections. That moment she realizes that she has a choice of going across the street to a school that is closer.

RB: Meaning the public school?

EJ: Yeah, it’s just an extension of her front yard. Or venturing out in to the world [by attending a Catholic School].

RB: Was it her choice?

EJ: They give her that choice—the Grandfather says —so the moment of this is not, I felt, a moment a novel could hold.

RB: Seeing this as a novel was more about the way you weave and transition between moments and locations. It’s not what I am used to in short stories. I started to think about what was left unsaid or unexpressed.

EJ: In my mind, the way the story works out; there was no more than that.

RB: In this collection you are revisiting, and you have reprised a some [minor] characters that were in Lost in the City —are you creating and populating a fictional neighborhood or place like William Kennedy or Faulkner or Susan Straight?

EJ: No. I didn’t intend to go back to those things but the mind does what it does. And so it just so happens that some of the people came back to me. Here and there, some of the major characters—

RB: And you mentioned The Known World in the last story—

EJ: That’s because I am a fan of Alfred Hitchcock so at the end of The Known World in that letter that this guy sends, he says, “I am very afraid of being Lost in the City.” And so in the last story I just mentioned the previous book. And if I am alive and working, if I have a fourth book, then the fourth book, the last chapter or whatever it is or story will have All Aunt Hagar’s Children.

RB: It’s as simple as that. But the characters, they have their own lives, they present themselves to you—

EJ: Given the fact that this is the day after the 5th anniversary of 9/11 I remember it was around ’95 or whenever the Oklahoma City bombing was, and it was a few weeks later that I was watching TV and there was this singer Gloria Gaynor singing I Will Survive. And for the first time I was hearing all the words. I had heard the song before but it wasn’t as clear. And what came to me was this woman in the title story Lost in the City, the woman who went to Israel with her friend who was a wealthy lobbyist and the lobbyist’s mother. The three of them went and this woman got drunk at the King David Hotel. Well this woman was in my mind and those two events, hearing that song and Oklahoma City bombing and all of a sudden there was this woman and i was thinking of a story of her years before she went to Israel. And when that happens these people are there and your job becomes to try to make a world of a story out of all that.

RB: Can you imagine not writing about Washington?

EJ: Yeah, I did in The Known World [chuckles]

RB: I think you were criticized for leaving your putative expertise in the urban setting for the rural—did you see that one?

EJ: I remember there was a review of Lost in the City —she was a reporter, not a reviewer, and she complained that in Lost in the City there were not enough men in the stories. Well, I don’t understand that —there are tons of men in there. —I don’t want to say this but sometimes it almost smells of jealousy. You leave the urban environment, so what? If Washington has been a place of plantations I certainly would have set the book there. But I couldn’t get away with putting plantations in, even in 1855— it would not have worked. And so I had to do what I had to do.

RB: I was searching for a convenient way of summing you up for myself and also in the context of having just read EL Doctorow’s The Creationists. And you take it for granted that every writer has goodly endowment of originality. But there is something about you that seems to be originality to the next level [laughs] I don’t know any writer whose stories are like these or whose process is like yours.

EJ: It’s not like I have this conscious thing. The story is there and so like with the Spanish story (name story)—the girl will realize certain things and that’s all —people want me to analyze what I do or analyze the work and all I can say is that I see myself as a simple story teller.

RB: Maybe it’s just a reflection of the current state of attention spans. There is a complexity about your stories. You describe a woman who somehow learns Spanish and then spends her mornings with her family, none of whom know Spanish, speaking Spanish.

EJ: Yeah

RB: You explain in that story, “For the day that some lost Mexican woman —

EJ: —will knock on their door” [laughs].

RB: It’s funny but it certainly is a disconnect or non-sequitor. So I wondered what was it doing there?

EJ: It may be not just black people but that’s the way that human beings are. It’s not beyond the realm of reality that this woman will go into a Safeway and there is the devil or a woman will get on the bus and for no other reason than that’s the way the world is, she will go blind. Or the one that I was really concerned about, the longest one, where events happen to this woman and people die all around her and she is never harmed. But she loves her family. She loves Spanish. There is nobody to talk to, so she just talks to herself.

RB: It’s a wonderful picture.

EJ: And because I don’t take anything from my own life —I did go to Catholic school for a few weeks and for some reason – I don’t know what happened, whether my mother couldn’t read a note that might have been left – but she didn’t come to get me one day so the principal (this relates to what happened to the little girl in the story, she was abruptly moved from kindergarten to 1st grade) took me to the first grade and I was in the first grade for several weeks but my mother couldn’t afford it. So there is that kernel of my own life in there but everything else in the story is made up. But you are trying to tell all these lies in order for the reader to believe it and accept it. If I said that the mother was a good mother and she baked cookies for her kids, you might be able to see her but not as much as if I tell you she just speaks Spanish before noon. Nothing but Spanish. It is this effort to pull the reader in and have the reader accept what you are saying.

RB: What separates the men from the boys is how well you do it. Baking cookies pales against this idiosyncrasy that you fabricate.

EJ: There is a time when the narrator talks about her mother and her next older sister and they are walking and they are conversing in Spanish. The mother, of course, is really talking Spanish and the little girl is picking up bits of it and I write that anyone who doesn’t know Spanish would think they were really having a conversation. And that’s just a nice picture.

RB: Have you been distracted at all by your apparent success? Do you think you are successful?

EJ: No, I don’t see that. I mean, I don’t see myself as being any different from what I would be if none of this had happened.

RB: If you hadn’t won a MacArthur fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critic Circle...

EJ: People invite me to read at colleges and universities and I think that they would still be doing that based on reviews. So it’s hard for me to know how different things would be if none of this had happened.

RB: More pressure?

EJ: The stories had been there even before I finished the novel. I don’t have any ideas right now I am not going to push myself to do anything. Not sure I understand this sentence?

RB: How does that feel? I have a sense that many people in your position would be fretting.

EJ: I try not to worry about it—there are things that I have done quite some time ago and I might go back and look at— there’s one thing I did back in the ‘70s called “Secret Dances.” It was supposed to be a novel. About three parents and their three children. So I don’t know. I’ll look at that and see. When The Known World came out and I went places and they would say your fans have been waiting to hear me read. Well no one ever told me I had fans out there.

RB: [laughs]

EJ: Lost in the City, sold five thousand copies— I am going places now and signing books and people bring out theses copies of Lost in the City. I think they were just collectors and some of them have been buying them up now. So it’s not like they cared about the work. I don’t know and even if I had known that there were a lot of fans out there, I couldn’t make myself work for them

RB: I am feeling certain that you have expressed somewhere, perhaps in our previous chat, a concern for your readers. Is that an abstraction?

EJ: The first person I concern myself with is me. This is why in that story, I can see this mother and her child walking along the street like that, because if I try to think about even ten fans, they all have different ideas about what they like in a story or novel and I can’t write to them. I can only write to what I hope is good, is believable and then send it out in to the world and keep my fingers crossed.

RB: Are you still working with the same editor, Maria —

EJ: — no Maria went on to another company and I had hoped to work with her because she was the only editor I ever knew. The contract with Lost in the City was with William Morrow and it called for them to have a first look at my new work. Ultimately my following books were bought by Harper Collins’s Amistad. But I have been very happy with Dawn [Davis.] She believes that I know what I am doing — the first days with The Known World, and I started adding a lot of stuff to the manuscript that she had in her possesion. I said, “Trust me this will be all right.” She said, “Yeah I trust you.” So it’s nice to hear. You hear these horror stories before you ever publish. Uh, uh—

RB: So you have it pretty good? A pretty decent agent from what I know—

EJ: Yeah, Eric has been —

RB: An editor you are happy with and can work with—

EJ: I can’t promise anyone that I‘ll write a fourth book. It might well be that I won’t.

RB: Why would you say that? Despite the empiricist precaution that the sun doesn’t necessarily rise tomorrow morning, we all count in it.

EJ: I might write something but I might not like it. There was a lady escorting me yesterday and she was talking about Richard Ford and how he went to a bookstore and was reading his new book and said he didn’t like it. So he read from an old book. Now why would you have a book out there in the world if you don’t want it —it's like having a child?

RB: It’s the other side of what you are saying, maybe you do satisfy yourself first but why is your judgment about what you have written any more valid than your editor or anyone else?

EJ: And that’s where reading comes in— you try to hope you know what’s good and what’s not good. But I’m not sure if I felt that way about something I would force on the rest of the world. People often write and get a name and they just publish any old thing.

RB: The pipeline becomes a high powered vacuum sucking in whatever—

EJ: I don’t want to be—

RB: So, if you are not currently pecking away at something what are you doing?

RB: My mind is always working. And like that morning when this woman [character] came back to me and there she was a couple of decades younger, and she was on Ridge St and was with this boy friend that was abusive and the community was seeing all this—that became a story. So tomorrow morning I might wake up with some idea for something. But if I don’t, I don’t. I don’t want to feel that I have to slit my wrists—I wouldn’t do that. I would find a milder way of killing myself, I guess. Writing is important and I am glad I am able to do it—they talk about the Mona Lisa and everything but if someone burned the Mona Lisa, up tomorrow the world shouldn’t end because of that, the world should end because some child in India doesn’t have enough to eat. So if I don’t write, if nothing that comes to me— then the world shouldn’t end. My world certainly shouldn’t end. But I hope I do [continue to write] I have things that I still have to say.

RB: If you consider the possibility that you might not write, the well has run dry, what would you do?

EJ: There are things that I have been thinking about but right now they are not fully fledged. It’s like in the early days of The Known World,

RB: In the twelve years preceding its publication?

EJ: What I had essentially, was this guy lying in his deathbed and these three women in the room with him. But there was no world of Manchester County. There are not all the other people—yet. So I just have to be patient and wait for all that to build up.

RB: Whether you are putting things down on paper or not, you have this vivid imaginary world that is going on— and whether they come to fruition or not, you are thinking these stories through?

EJ: Yeah. There was one that I thought I would use in the book about this young man and young woman in a southern place and the young man is not a handsome guy and he is just friends with this young woman. And she is engaged to his cousin who is a handsome sort of sort—full of himself. Just out of the blue they kiss, almost innocently and the cousin comes along and sees them. And he starts beating up on his cousin. The guy has being going through a world where people look down on him because of the way he looks. And he tells the handsome guy to stop— he doesn’t defend himself at first. And then at last he does and hits him in the chest. There was an article in the New York Times about 20 years ago about the way the heart does. And he happens to hit his cousin at that moment between beats. And it stops— the heart. And I write that heart "had already gone beyond one beat and it couldn’t go back. And it didn’t have enough power to go forward. So it just died” And that changes the lives of those two young people and they separate. They go their own ways in life. And then they end up —I already have the ending. I have already written —it’s called “The Bride of Fenton Street.” And they were in their late teens and now we are talking about 50 or 60 years later, where they finally find each other after all the things that they go through. That’s there but there is a lot in the middle that I have to work out. I am glad about that ending— for me the resolution of stories is very, very important. So all I have to do is come up with enough for these two people and then the story—

RB: That’s what you said about The Known World—you started with 12 pages, 6 were the beginning chapter, and the 6 pages were the final chapter.

EJ: I knew it was going to be a novel. I just have to work out what the resolution would be. In so many things you read the resolution isn’t quite there.

RB: And day to day as you are forming these stories, are you sitting somewhere on a bench?

EJ: No, no, I can be watching a DVD and be moved by something that’s unrelated to what I am thinking about. And I can stop it or think it through. Or I could be on the bus or walking in the street or something. Which was the case with the novel. Over ten years it is was matter of I would be standing some place and I would be thinking about a particular event and then I connect it with what went before and what’s after.

RB: You strike me as having an unusually strong power of concentration.

EJ: I don’t know— it may be it s because I don’t own a cell phone. So it hasn’t zapped my brain. I don’t have a car so I don’t spend my time thinking about the best route from point A to point B—I let the bus driver and the subway do that.

RB: [laughs] So you have an uncluttered mind?

EJ: Probably. I noticed that I meet people and it might be a month or two later and I don’t remember their faces. It would be nice if I could go up there [referring to his memory] and throw out a lot of stuff in the attic things that I don’t —I was in New York City in Brooklyn in ‘65 visiting an aunt. Before I went to high school. And there was something in the Daily News. That summer they would do a page of color cartoons, caricatures of some people, I forget the name of the bandleader but he was married to some wild talking Spanish lady.

RB: Xavier Cugat?

EJ: Yeah. And they would have a little bio. And there was one of Soup Sales. And they had his real name. And for years and years and years I would remember that name thinking somebody might tap me on the shoulder and say, "For $100 can you tell me what Soupy Sales real name is?" [both laugh] I don’t remember it now. But things like that, which takes up some space that I could use now.

RB: I have a sense that you have a vast reservoir of stories or story fragments—have you published all the stories that you have written?

EJ: Yeah,

RB: You publish them when they finally make it to paper?

EJ: What happens is that once I saw this woman from the title story of Lost in the City, then over months and months, other situations and stories came to me. Like for example, the first story is "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons." And the person who gave the girl the pigeons in 1955 was a man named Miles. Well, God knows, I can’t find any particular day or moment or anything that had me all of a sudden think of 1901 and this young, married woman comes from Virginia and is unable to sleep and is standing outside and all of a sudden sees this bundle hanging from a tree and that happens to be Miles a few days old. Where that came from I don’t know. But so that’s what I did. With Lost in the City it was always a book of stories. I didn’t have a piece here and a piece there and I say, "I have enough pages for a book.” The same thing with All Aunt Hagar’s Children. It was always like that.

RB: Unlike most story collections which are literally collected from the writer’s output to date, there is a greater cohesion intended with the way you put the stories with each other?

EJ: Yes, exactly. I wanted as much as I could, to have most of the stories about people that started in the South. And I have to stretch things because most of the people I knew came from North and South Carolina and Virginia. I don’t recall meeting anyone from Arkansas. There is someone from there in these stories, also Mississippi and Louisiana. Alabama, I never knew people like that in DC, but my effort was to try to include as many Southern states as I possibly could. Yeah, it was always a whole collection.

RB: Do you have any interest in writing for anything other than the printed page?

EJ: Umm, someone asked my agent if I had any interest is writing a graphic novel [laughs]? The printed page, that’s about all I know.

RB: Movies? Would you like to see a movie made of The Known World?

EJ: Well Anna Deveare Smith optioned it, I think last March— they have 18 months. I haven’t heard what has happened and I was supposed to see her this past April (2006) and I didn’t. We met last year (2005) and she had just read the novel once and was feeling he way and trying to figure out how she could make a movie. So I don’t know what happened. Maybe they optioned it again or not. But I yeah, I love movies. I love movies.

RB: So if the movie was going to be made would you want to —

EJ: Yeah, I would worry too —I start out as a fiction writer and I don’t want to get too far away from that. And I would be afraid that that would take up a lot of time that I should be thinking of fiction writing. So I love movies and I have grown up with movies. And I got this laptop a couple of years ago, just to see DVDs — well, email and everything else. For the first time I was buying movies, that I really love. The Godfather I and II. A Man for All Seasons. The Pawnbroker. These are movies that I know and loved and I am really happy to be able to see them clearly. But if the offer came along —

RB: As opposed to “I did my part” so whatever happens.

EJ: No.

RB: You’d still worry about—

EJ: Yeah because in the end the money guys, you know, “We can’t have this sad ending here.”

RB: "We can’t have a black protagonist." Is the story about Richard Wright apocryphal?

EJ: Which one?

RB: Supposedly MGM offered Wright $50,000 to change the color of the protagonist in Black Boy—

EJ: [laughs] I never heard that. I wouldn’t be surprised. [laughs]

RB: That would still be hard to believe.

EJ: The world is like that out there.

RB: I just saw the recent season of The Wire [season IV]...

EJ: Wow, the whole thing! You’re lucky I had asked George Pelecanos and he said, that they don’t give it out,

RB: I loved it before but this new season is so impressive. They took the story in to the school s and wrote about these at risk adolescents and have a brilliant cast of actors. I couldn’t stop watching it once I started— I sat for 13 hours one weekend.

EJ: Man, that’s what I did with the last season.

RB: That show is why I ask about whether you would write for the screen. The respect for the writing is central to this show

EJ: If some one offered me something —if they said we have an idea— can you do this. People want me to write non-fiction and almost all the non fiction stuff i have written has been about 2 or 3 pages. I am unable to do that. Especially when it’s about me. I don’t find anything interesting.

RB: [laughs] Make it up.

EJ: No, no, that’s the thing. You have certain standards.

RB: But you are a novelist. Isn’t that the license that you have—

EJ: Oh, no I could never do that. You grow up with the sense that as long as you follow the truth then you don’t have to have a good memory.

RB: That’s what good old Tom Jefferson said.

EJ: So, yeah, I could never do that. It’s just — nah, nah—

RB: So in any case you have been asked to write stuff—Nike will probably call you to write their campaigns.

EJ: [laughs] Of course, when you grow up— I was born after the Depression —but it's as if I was born during the Depression because you never get over that — there is a story that I am going to write and I have the first line “You never get over having been a child.” And all those years when we had nothing –it’s still with me. And I find myself thinking okay if I went out and bought, say, a nice stereo system —I don’t think they even call it that anymore.

RB: A home entertainment center.

EJ: And I would say, "This is nice," and then if I am homeless one day I am going to say, “Damn that $2000 could sure come in handy.”

RB: You really think that could happen?

EJ: Yeah. Absolutely. Before I moved back into DC a couple of years ago —periodically over the 21 years I was there, I had dreams about the fact that I had to move back into the places I lived at when I was a kid. But this time I had all those boxes of books and everything that I have accumulated. And it never goes away. I haven’t had that dream recently. But there are still some dreams of anxiety there. So no, if Nike said, Yeah, you know [laughs] — I would think about the kids in Vietnam who make those shoes [laughs] You have to think about that too.

RB: How is it that you stay conscious of that? Its easy not to.

EJ: Yeah, you try to live the simple life, I think.

RB: I mean conscious that Nike exploits foreign workers?

EJ: It gets through — I don’t get the newspapers anymore. Pacifica Radio and Amy Goodman. And a few things here and there on line, on the...

RB: Not the evening news?

EJ: No God, no [laughs]

RB: So you have this time when you go out and talk about this book, what’s that like for you?

EJ: It’s strange —you walk into these places and there are all these people. I was in Orlando or something and people started clapping. No, [it was] Miami. And it’s just very strange.

RB: People are moved by your work and by your own story. And you are very self-effacing

EJ: I tell people all the time — because I’m a fan of movies — I am also a fan of the good endings of movies.

RB: As in Frank Capra movies?

EJ: The endings that grab you. Like the ending of Patton. I always remember the ending — and I just happened to see an HBO production— Rome. I thought that was good —in the end of Patton, George C Scott is walking his dog and talking about Roman generals and the parades they were given. He says with all of, that in the chariot, with the general, there was always a slave saying, “All glory is fleeting.” In Rome, you hear the same sort of thing, “Remember you are only mortal” or something or other. So I think about that. People keep telling me you are going on tours and everything, enjoy it. But I can’t.

RB: Would you be content to just spend your days in DC?

EJ: I am glad I have a tour. I remember Lost in the City, there wasn’t any.

RB: Are you a traveler?

EJ: No, last year I went to Bangladesh for the State Department. I liked being in Business class. So if I could be in Business class whenever I travel that would be nice [laughs]. The traveling is hard but once I am there in a place, it's not that bad. I’d rather be out and about and let people know what I have done. It’s nice that that happens. It takes a lot out of you but still between this and being at home and not being recognized I wouldn’t want that.

RB: Do you have a picture of your life ahead?

EJ: No, there is nothing-long range. I am probably too old to have a kid but I would have loved to have a kid.

RB: How old?

EJ: 56 in October.

RB: I had a child at 50.

EJ: Yeah but that’s not 56 [both laugh] I keep thinking about Tony Randall, but that was Tony Randall.

RB: Charlie Chaplin.

EJ: Saul Bellow. You hear thing on TV and I watch these court shows — people complain about 2 o’clock feedings. I would love to be able to do that. I would love to be able to do that.

RB: There’s not a bad thing about having a child except the worry about maybe something bad happening to them.

EJ: I know.

RB: I can’t read stories that have bad things happening to children and I wonder how someone could write them?

EJ: Yeah, I have problem with that too— how you can write something to be entertaining like that, to happen to children? That was one reason in the story "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents," he had a little sister. In the story before that in Lost in the City, at his mother’s house he is sort of abandoned. When the story started coming to me there in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, I thought about Adam. And I wanted to find a way to give him a good life. And the thing about it is that you know what is good and you want to go that way but sometimes when you are telling a story you can’t necessarily do that.

RB: Because it doesn’t make sense?

EJ: It doesn’t fit the logic of the story. In "The Girl who Raised Pigeons", for example, her mother dies at childbirth. And her father, in those first days after that, is overwhelmed. He doesn’t know — he thought he would have a life with this woman he married. And I said to myself that I was happy he went on to be a good father, a really good father. But I knew that as a storyteller, if he had decided in those first days of her life, I can’t do this and he walked away, I’d have had no choice but to write the story like that. And the girl was tough little thing because of all that. So Adam Robinson was there, but that’s why I didn’t say a lot about the things that probably happened to him. A beating here, and a beating there. But I wanted him to be able to have a happy life. I had this guy Noah who was tough and had done this one thing in his life and he was afraid that one day it would catch up with him. And he knew he could love these kids, and he had to find a way to get there.

RB: Is it the case that the characters that inhabit your stories, are always hanging around?

EJ: No, I don’t think so. They don’t have any life without the life that I give them. So I am not sitting there —and I don’t have any furniture in my place, I still don’t, have any. I moved there in April 2004, so I sit on the floor and I sleep on the floor. But when I am sitting there and I am watching TV or the laptop, none of these people will walk into the room and start talking to me. None of these people will come in and say, “I didn’t like what you did to me in that story. I want you to write a correction.” No, it never happens. There’s a world in my head —in my imagination —

RB: The unknown world—

EJ: Yeah and sometimes things just happen up there. But it’s always because of who I am. But they don’t have any life beyond what I give them

RB: And they are not talking to you?

EJ: Not unless I put words in there. Writing is hard work and I am not going to let anyone take any credit for it but me [both laugh].

RB: Thanks so much

EJ: Sure, sure.

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Copyright, 2006. Robert Birnbaum
Buy The Book!
After the MFA's terrific interview.

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Robert Birnbaum, a bookish journalist, was born in Germany, grew up in Chicago, lived for too many years in Boston. He is editor-at-large at Identitytheory.com and a contributing writer at the Morningnews.org and lives in New Hampshire with blonde Labrador, Rosie . All you hot-shot book editors and agents may want to ask him about his book idea. Before it's too late.