Felicia Sullivan: Rumor has it that you are working (or have a completed a new novel). How does this new venture differ from your short story collection, The Kind I am Likely to Get?

Ken Foster: Well, it's longer than my stories. It's called "Missing" and it is about four characters who want to disappear for different reasons. It takes place in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and it was actually inspired by the disappearance of the lead singer of Manic Street Preachers seven years ago, though as it is now there is no similarity to that story. People are more likely to think it is about Jeff Buckley, but it isn't about him either. It took a long time to figure out how to stretch a narrative longer, and at first I tried all the wrong things. It was too self-conscious. Now I realize that you don't need to have all the answers at the start, because everything changes anyway.

It is told from each character's point of view, which is a way of solving two problems: you get to see aspects of each character that they aren't aware of in themselves, and it gave me the opportunity to jump into a new mind every twenty or thirty pages. So far the people who have read it like it a lot, much more so than my stories, but I'm worried that it might still be too "small" or "quiet" to attract much attention from a commercial publisher. We'll see. Meanwhile, I'm working on something else, set in Costa Rica, which introduces a whole new set of problems to solve.

Felicia Sullivan: What is on your bookshelf right now? What has been sitting on your bookshelf that you promised yourself you will read, eventually? What will never be on your bookshelf?

KF: My bookshelf is overflowing. I always keep William Maxwell there, and so now I have Alec Wilkinson's new book about him as well. The new Alice Munro, because she always impresses me, but I rarely read her. This new debut novel, "10th Grade." "The Esther Stories." And "The Corrections," which I've had since it came out and haven't cracked open. But I got the first printing, which actually has an error in it, so there is a little slip of paper inside that says "Correction" across the top.

What will never be on my bookshelf? That's a hard one. I'd say Lorrie Moore, but I'm probably lying.

Felicia Sullivan: As both a writer and a teacher, how does workshop and evaluating your student's work if at all influence your work? Are you influenced by current/past writers?

KF: Hopefully none of us are really "influenced" by anyone, because it suggests copying or trying to repeat someone else's acheivement. But I do think we all find someone who is succeeding at what we are still just trying, and so there is something reassuring in seeing someone has succeeded before us. Just as there is something reassuring in seeing that even great artists have occassionally failed.

Teaching is a great (in every sense of the word) burden, because I want to encourage students to keep going, and at the same time let them know what isn't working, where they aren't trying hard enough to imagine the story, or what just isn't to my taste, but maybe my taste isn't the one they are trying to meet. And it is invigorating, because so many of the students I've had really are trying, and succeeding, so it makes me want to go home and work just as hard.

Felicia Sullivan: You've received your MFA from Columbia University. What (in your opinion) are some of the advantages and disadvantages in investing in a MFA?

KF: The advantage is spending several years with other writers at your stage of development and hopefully being part of a community that includes the faculty, who should be showing you the ropes of writing and publishing and teaching and all of the other things that a writer can do with themselves along the way. But some programs, like Columbia, are too expensive, with little support, and sometimes the teachers aren't that good at doing anything in or out of the classroom. Being a good writer doesn't make a good teacher, and often the teachers have their own deadlines to meet for their first priority, which is a book that may be under contract. Yet, my own experience at Columbia, in retrospect, was terrific. I had amazing teachers and was able to study in each of the three areas: fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry. But I was one of the few people there who also had a full-time job; most of the others were straight out of undergrad, very Ivy league, writing novels about their semester abroad. And very white too, of course.

Felicia Sullivan: What types of subject matter do you tend to drift towards when approaching a new story? Which themes turn you off?

KF: What a tough question. I always think I'm striking new ground. But then I find I'm circling the same themes. People who are missing from their own lives, people who are watching instead of taking action. I guess I think that's the big problem in our society now, so I keep coming back to it, this false sense of being disconnected, that what happens to one person doesn't effect another, that action is best taken by someone else. My characters make the mistake of not taking action when they could. Their hesitency is their great flaw, where the drama and conflict come from.

What turns me off? I guess anything can be made compelling in the right hands, but generally I don't feel that I care about stories set in the business world, or a corporate environment, unless it is made personal. But the simple actions of people doing their white collar jobs aren't compelling in themselves. And glitz on its own, fabulousness, isn't inherently dramatic, even though people make the mistake of thinking that they are. Surfaces just don't do it for me, it is what's underneath, and the contrast between the two, that are interesting.

Felicia Sullivan: If you edit a collection of the best contemporary writers, whom are some of the writers you would feature?

KF: I just edited an anthology of essays about dogs, and so I'd pick some of the same people: Rene Steinke, Elissa Schappell, Chuck Palahniuk, Chris Offutt. And I edited The KGB Bar Reader, so I'd include any of those: Jacqueline Woodson, Kathryn Harrison, A.M Homes, Lucy Grealy, Luc Sante, Meaghan Daum, Michael Cunningham and so on. And there are people I'd have loved to include in either of those books: Sherman Alexie, Colson Whitehead, Frederick Barthelme, Robert Boswell, the list is endless.

Felicia Sullivan: Any parting comments? advice? realistic advice?

KF: Writing is never easier, and the better you get, the more you have to challenge yourself, so it just seems to get harder. The only way of getting through it is to keep on pushing.

a bit about ken...

Ken Foster is the author of a collection, The Kind I'm Likely to Get, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. From 1994-96 he coordinated the KGB Bar reading series, and he is the editor of the original anthology of fiction and nonfiction, The KGB Bar Reader. A second anthology of essays, Dog Culture: Writers on the Characters of Canines, will be published in Fall 2002. His writing, both fiction and non, has appeared in Paper, Salon, Flaunt, McSweeney's, Bomb, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice, Newsday, and other publications. He teaches at the New School and privately in New York City (but he'd love a job somewhere warmer!).

You can purchase Ken's Books from Amazon.com: