Maria Flook, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson:

Did you know Willis would be a driver for WASTEC in Open Water? How did you come up with that?

I have a real interest in working-class occupations for my characters, I guess because I’ve had my fair share. I mean, I wouldn’t know much about Wall Street situations, you know? If you can give some realistic information about the working lives of characters, you are giving them footing in their worlds in a larger context than they might have if you kept them in their kitchens and living rooms. I’ve worked in banks, in fish processing plants, as a waitress, as a correction officer; I worked in a factory that makes velveteen boxes for the jewelry industry in Rhode Island. They aren’t real velvet, but some kind of stinking resin they spray onto these little boxes from high pressure nozzles. It isn’t good to breathe it.

If you can put your character in some sort of job setting or working conditions, a lot can happen. WASTEC was a very low-end and ill-suited occupation for Willis. You wanted him to get out.

One of my favorite work settings in recent fiction is the emergency room in Denis Johnson’s brilliant story “Emergency.” He has his characters working beyond their job capacities. His main character is lovelorn and doped up and has deeper problems than the hapless patients he attends to, but putting him in that setting, with the hospital routines and familiar details, skewed just right by Johnson’s relentless wit and edginess, helps the reader see him as a hero.

FLOOK, Maria. Novels: Open Water, Family Night. Short-story collection: You Have the Wrong Man. Memoir: My Sister Life. Nonfiction: Invisible Eden. Emerson College.

Vikram Chandra, interviewed by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais:
Even the most ordinary lives, once you begin to press on them a little, reveal themselves to be full of the most affecting pathos. It is certainly tempting, as a storyteller, to play with the larger-than-life characters and landscapes of Red Earth and Pouring Rain. But it is also satisfying to tell the kinds of stories that Subramaniam does in Love and Longing in Bombay. He seems to listen to the stories that some very ordinary people tell, the kinds of men and women who your glance might pass over easily in a local train in Bombay. And he discovers that the ordinary isn’t very ordinary, after all. My temptation as a writer is to investigate all these stories, to tie them together in the mesh they make in the world.

CHANDRA, Vikram. Novel: Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Short-story collection: Love and Longing in Bombay. George Washington University.

Edwidge Danticat, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson:
All writing has a certain level of autobiography, whether it’s emotional or actual autobiography; we’re always drawing a little bit on our own experiences, and I am no different. I don’t write pure autobiography because I want the freedom to make things up. However, I do feel like I need something actual, something real to keep me going, a feeling that there’s something at stake. Often including actual events along with the fiction gives it a sense of reality. In The Dew Breaker, for example, there are actual people in there that others might recognize. For the characters to have actual people next to them lends a kind of reality and gives the fiction a parallel in real life, and that keeps me writing, gives me a sense that the characters and their troubles really matter.

DANTICAT, Edwidge. Novels: Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker. Story collection: Krik? Krak! Travel: After the Dance. Two novels for young people.

Elizabeth Cox, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson:
I take from everything I see and hear, from my own secrets and the secrets of others. I use everything, I just don’t tell it straight. I don’t use it in a way that is strictly autobiographical. The break-up of a family was written right after my divorce. Some of the things that the children said were from my own kids, but what happened in the book is not what happened to me. The pain of it is true, though. I wanted to put the pain in straight.

COX, Elizabeth. Novels: The Slow Moon, Night Talk, The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love, Familiar Ground. Short-story collection: Bargains in the Real World. Wofford College.

Kevin Canty, interviewed by Linda B. Swanson-Davies:
I see myself and the selves of my characters as being a collage of a lot of different things, of real experiences, and things that were made up, and things that I saw on television, and things that I read—fantasies, memories, desires. It’s a patchwork. I was talking to my mom this summer, and found that neither of the first two things I remember in my life ever happened. I remember them very vividly. One of the things could have really happened when she wasn’t around, but she was there in the other memory. I remember it vividly, but apparently it didn’t happen. My advice is that if you don’t like to hear that, then you should never ask your mom about these things. It’s very interesting to see how much we’re able to superimpose our own version of our lives on the events of our lives. People say, “The past is the past,” but nobody’s ever talking about their whole past. Everybody’s editing. Everybody’s doing what, in a sense, a fiction writer is doing—taking snippets of detail, the ones that seem to matter, the ones that seem to count, and assembling them into a life. It’s what I do when I’m putting myself together, take these snippets and put them together into a coherent form.

CANTY, Kevin. Novels: Into the Great Wide Open, Nine Below Zero, Winslow in Love. Short-story collections: Honeymoon and A Stranger in This World. University of Montana, Missoula.

Jayne Anne Phillips, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson:

What is the role of autobiography in your fiction?

It’s a starting point, much in the way that physical details are a starting point for writing about meaning and time and dimension. The reader should think that whatever you write is autobiographical, because they should be convinced intensely of the reality of the piece. They should feel that it comes from somewhere very deep in the writer. But the minute you work in language, the minute you work in fiction, there’s a translation that occurs, like the translation from one language into another, from book to film, thought into speech. There are such different forms of being. The only thing that’s autobiographical is the need to write something that has to come from your own life in some way, but it may have very little to do in a paper-doll way with the material itself.

PHILLIPS, Jayne Anne. Novels: Shelter, MotherKind, Machine Dreams. Short-story collections: Fast Lanes, Black Tickets. Brandeis University.

Sigrid Nunez, interviewed by Linda B. Swanson-Davies:
A woman came up to me at a reading and she said, “You know, I would love to write about my past, but I don’t remember anything.” I told her that if she sat down and started to write, it would all come back, but she said that she had a feeling that if she did that she would just naturally start inventing. And I said, “Exactly! And this is how novels are born.”

NUNEZ, Sigrid. Novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, The Last of Her Kind.