Felicia Sullivan: From reading both Where The Road Bottoms Out and Loverboy, the prose is almost lyrical, and every sentence is a poetic gem. How is it that you converted to writing fiction from poetry? Do you still write poetry and plan to persue it?

VR: Yes, I do write poems, can’t imagine a life not writing poems. I’ve just finished a manuscript called SWOON. Having started as a poet, I never thought I’d be writing prose fiction. Maybe this is one of those stories made-up in retrospect, but I started writing stories after my first son was born. I was working full time in a high school and trying to write poems and, suddenly, I saw that a job, a life as a writer and mothering were really difficult, unbe lievably difficult. Especially if I had a hope of doing any thing with reasonable consistency and strength. I knew that the “easiest” thing to lose was a life as an artist (you’ve got to show up for a job. You’ve got to show up for a baby. Nobody needs you to show up to write poems) It was as if the work started getting longer to insist upon a writing life. I thought—weird, what are these? The line was long and prose, though syntactically more complicated than the lines I was writing in poems. Then I came to see these were fictions. I suppose it was my acknowledgement that I needed a life as an artist, and that I would claim space for that life. But, you know, as I write this, it starts to feel like that story is partially an invention.

Felicia Sullivan: In Where the Road Bottoms Out, many of the wonderful stories dealt with strong but beatifully innocent and some single but intriguingly flawed parents. As a parent, how did you go about shaping the collection? What was primarily the message you wanted to evoke to the reader?

VR: Despite my response to starting to write fiction, I wasn’t thinking about my parenting too much in these stories. And yet, obviously, parents and children are a strong current through the book. In fiction, I love moving/exploring/dwelling in the extremity within the everyday life. And certainly having been a daughter, a sister, a mother much of every day of my life life, I’ve had a chance to observe the family drama. (Which of us hasn’t?) About the flawed parents. Flawed? Well, I never thought about any of my characters that way. I’m interested in considering all the ways there are to be human. I suppose mostly all of those ways are flawed, or limited. My job as a writer was to render a world. I try and do so with permission and not judgement.

But really how I shaped the collection is sentence by sentence. I spent a lot of time casting about for opening sentences. Shaping the sound of those sentences. And then making a fiction one sentence at a time. I know that sounds like a stubborn answer—but I’ve never had a plan for a story. I’ve never had some idea where it might end, because I never thought about where I was going.

Felicia Sullivan: You currently teach at Columbia University's MFA program. In workshops, what are some of the key critical points you emphasize to the students? Has reading their work affected yours in any way? Do you find that teaching influences your writing or style?

VR: I try very hard to get students to look at language, to look at the possibilities in a sentence. They are in a rush—to make a story, a collection, a book--but they are not slowing down enough to look at all opportunities given in any sentence. There are so many possibilities—many quite dreadful, a few extraordinary. Story is made that way, not in rushing toward some plot, some dreamed-up events. That perhaps makes the experience sound pretty dry. Teaching influences my writing by sending me back to writers I adore to show my students how effects are created on the page. We, as a class, look at fictions—both their stories and stories I assign to them—to see how the thing is or isn’t being made. I want us to be like any craftsmen—able to take a beautiful chair (if we were furniture makers) and knock it apart to see how the pieces function together, how the thing is made, how the writer achieved her effects. They complain that it ruins their reading experience.

I say read it a few times then—once just for the flat out blast and then slowly to see how the tricky, hands dirty writer got you all blasted. We have, I think, a pretty good time together, quite a bit of laughing, as we make our stumbling way learning off of everyone’s story.

Felicia Sullivan: Who are some of your writing or literary/poetic inspirations? Which writers/poets do you revere?

VR: I read a lot. I feel that I’m reading all the time and still I have enormous, horrible, gaping holes in my reading life. It makes me sad. I love Dickinson and Shakespeare and Hopkins and Frost and Ahkmatova and I love so many of the poets I read when I first fell in love with poetry: Adrienne Rich, Phillip Le vine, William Bronk, Elizabeth Bishop, Jack Gilbert, Auden, Gerald Stern, James Wright—I’m leaving out so so so many—Gwendolyn Brooks, Muriel Ruykeyser, Ai, Kinnell, (perhaps you’re thinking I should be stricter in my reverence) I remember the excitement I felt going into a bookstore and seeing on the shelf a new collection by say, C.K. Williams. It was like hunger, really. And I’d sit on the floor of the bookstore reading trying to figure out what he was up to in this collection. Then, always the great turbulence: was I going to buy it or resist spending the money for the book. I admit I sprang for the book most of time.

Oh, I haven’t even talked about fiction (Where to start? Okay, say Flannery O’Connor to start) Or art (. Or dance (Balanchine, Pina Bausch).

I know so many people who claim to be disgusted with what is being written today. Sure, there’s no shortage of junk, no shortage of books that are impoverished, have the basest expectations of readers. But I think there is remarkable, adventurous work being done. I’m awed, humbled all the time by new work I read. Go to the store and buy books by: Ralph Angel, Marie Howe, Dawn Raffel, Christine Schutt, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, Mark Slouka, Michael Klein, Amy Hempel, Jason Shinder, Sheila Kohler, Douglas Glover, Gordon Lish, Garl Lutz, Noy Holland, Ishiguro, Mary Ruefle, Penelope Fitzgerald, David Rivard, Terese Svoboda. And I haven’t even gotten to Cormac McCarthy or Grace Paley whose books you should also run out and buy.

Felicia Sullivan: How did you come to pen the critically acclaimed Loverboy? How do you feel this work differs from your earlier work?

VR:I hope that Loverboy differs from earlier work. In fact I hope that every piece of writing I take on invents me newly. I know, I know, the same obsessions surface, can’t help but surface, but I want to place myself in a dire position in relation to my work. Trying the novel form was an attempt to destabilize myself—to see what would happen if I widened the arc.

With respect to how I started the book. I started with an image. A woman waking in a hospital bed. I knew she was a mother. I knew she had a son. That was it. And then I started the same task I described in writing short stories, casting about for a first sentence. And building the novel sentence by sentence. But also trying to figure out its architecture.