Please visit Roxana Robinson's website to learn more about the author.

Felicia C. Sullivan: From your latest story collection, A Perfect Stranger, in both "Assez" and "At the Beach" (a woman gives her husband the silent treatment after they debate over the possibility second child and it is only after an almost tragic incident that the silence is broken and all is somewhat resolved), silence plays a pivotal role in unraveling troubled marriages, speaking volumes. What role does silence, or the lack of communication play in these two stories?

Roxana Robinson: In "At the Beach," the wife uses silence as a weapon during a quarrel. I think silence is a subtle and extremely powerful tool - it's rejection, in its purest and most painful form. The husband in the story feels this very strongly. The wife excludes him from her warmth, and from the warmth she directs at their child. She's banning him from their life. It's painful and chilling for him, and eventually devastating.

Silence, as a weapon, is the opposite of shouting or argument, because it grows steadily more powerful over time. Of course, silence is only powerful if both people are engaged, if the excluded person wants to connect. And, eventually, silence, like any hostile tool, will lose its efficacy, because the person being shunned will finally disengage, and depart.

FS: A certain element of control permeates through "The Treatment" (a gravely ill woman is comforted by her daily methodic ritual intravenous antibacterial injections and finds her carefully constructed world compromised with the arrival of a visiting nurse who brings in reality and truth) and "Blind Man" (a father deceives himself about his daughter, a former cocaine addict's recovery and finds himself perplexed over her death on her first day out of his protective home and into the real world), where both protagonists are comforted by a relative blindness, a pleasant, numbing tunnel vision. Can you talk more on this? And the coping mechanisms deployed by these characters?

RR: I don't actually see these characters as either blind or controlling. I think these stories are about the chilling revelation that you can't trust the people or the processes that we normally think we can trust - the experts and their solutions. Most of us go to doctors when we're sick, most of us believe in antibiotics. Most of us get well when we're treated. Most of the time the experts know what they're talking about. But sometimes, even if you go to the expert and follow the instructions, things go very badly wrong. This suggests a terrifying instability in the ground beneath our feet.

FS: In recent essays you spoke of your writing space and rituals – the necessity for you to divorce yourself from the real world when creating a new, fictitious one. How do you find your "in" to a story? Notably, the ones in this collection. Was it a word, a character? What started these stories flowing?

RR: The way that I write stories is quite different from the way I write novels. When I start a story, it's because of a certain moment that I find particularly powerful. It can be one that I've witnessed, or heard of, or experienced myself, but for some reason it takes on a particular potency. That moment becomes the centerpiece of the story. My task then is to write toward that moment, creating the characters and the tension and the urgency and the engagement that will make the moment be as powerful for you, the reader, as it was for me, the writer, when you encounter it. It usually comes at the end of the story, and something else usually happens, too, something that I can't predict.

FS: In several reviews you've been labeled as Cheever's heir apparent, compared to Henry James and Edith Wharton, as an astute chronicler of WASP family life. Your novels deal with extraordinarily complex, flawed, yet privileged characters, notably daughters yearning for their lives uncomplicated by divorce and remarriage in This is My Daughter. Some say we write out our obsessions. Do you feel this to be true for your work? Do you feel in contemporary American society that the WASP is a dying, yet classic breed?

RR: WASPs are alive and well. They just no longer run things.

FS: Picasso once talked about an artist only growing when they experiment in different medium. Nabokov was said to have thought in hue. Whether it be art, architecture, or music, do you find other mediums, especially visual ones, influencing your work? Or are you influenced by place?

RR: I recently gave a talk about the use of art in my work, and in writing it I realised that art had played a part in every book I've written. The protagonist in my first novel, Summer Light, is a photographer. Art is obviously central to my biography of Georgia O'Keeffe. The woman in This Is My Daughter is an art historian, and in Sweetwater, the setting of the Adirondacks was chosen because of my studies in 19th-century American painting. So I was intrigued and rather surprised by the constant presence of art in my writing.

I am influenced to a certain extent by place. I would never write a story because of place, but many of my stories are very strongly connected to their settings. I like writing about places for which I feel affection - I was recently accused by one critic of raising francophilia to the level of fetishism, which made me laugh.

I do like France very much, and I like writing about it. There are three stories in this collection set in France, and they all draw on certain aspects of French culture. One story is set in New Mexico, and it refers to a community there. I think the rest of the stories are set somewhere around New York. I've set my fiction all over the place, really - some stories have been set in England, and I've set novels in England, Maine, the Adirondacks, Baltimore and - quite a lot - in and around New York. I don't want to become someone who always writes about a certain place. I suppose this does mean that I am influenced by place, but this is not the primary impulse.

FS: Recently, I took in a Picasso/Matisse documentary and something about Matisse and his work confounded me. During the French occupation in WWII, Matisse vowed (even after his daughter was arrested for her involvement in the Resistance) to only create beautiful, joyful pictures. He would keep his anguish, his inner turmoil utterly divorced from his work. Do you believe as writers that we can exercise the same sort of control in our work? Do you limit or sometimes find you constrain your characters for the good of a story/novel? Is this division from art and life possible?

RR: Writers must exercise all sorts of control for the benefit of the work. Whatever the work needs is what you must put in it. I can't imagine constraining a character for any purpose.

FS: Which artists, writers, alive or dead, would you love to have in your home?

RR: It would be fun to meet O'Keeffe when she was in Texas, in her twenties; it would be fun to meet Edith Wharton in her thirties, but only if we were friends. I don't know that it would be fun to know Virginia Woolf. I'd have liked to have known William Carlos Williams, and Arthur Dove.

FS: Any new projects?

RR: I've just finished writing a foreword, for Modern Library, to a collection of early stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's wonderful to reconsider someone's writing in that way. Some of these stories I'd read years earlier, some I'd never read, and it was fascinating to encounter the group of them, all written while he was in his twenties. When I went to St. Paul on my book tour, I asked my escort to drive me past Fitzgerald's house, so I could see what it looked like, and what the neighborhood looked like. I'll never stop being, on some level, a biographer. I always want to know about the writer's life, and the circumstances of it.

What was fascinating was to see that his house, though solid, stone and respectable, was in a neighborhood of mansions. So that, from a photograph, it would seem as though he lived quite affluently. But if you drove down the avenue past it, his house looked quite different in context.

I also have an essay on stepmothers ("Wicked") that will come out in an anthology this fall. The collection is called The Nuclear (as in family) Bomb, and will come out from Norton, edited by Ann Burt. I'm also writing essays for two other anthologies - it seems anthologies are hot! - one on nannies, to be called The Other Mother, and one on Mr. Wrong, which is about the man you got away from.

And then I'm working on the inevitable novel-in-progress.