The following phone interview was conducted Spring 2005 by Virginia Guynn, Shepherd University Student.

How did your childhood influence your writing?

Well, I think West Virginian's are a lot less mobile a society than most of the rest of America. West Virginian's tend to feel a lot of fidelity to place. My family had been in West Virginia for 200 years, before it was West Virginia, and I grew up with a real sense of generational placement. My ancestors had lived in the area; there were a lot of stories about them. I feel as though that enriched my childhood quite a lot. I feel too that growing up in a rural environment influenced me, and made me aware of the power of the natural world in such an intense landscape.

Along those same lines, how do you feel that your Appalachian roots are reflected in your work?

The majority of my works are set in Appalachia. Much of my fiction refers back to that sense of place, that type of geography, that particular economic and social dynamic, of which I was very much aware. I grew up breathing it in, being part of it.

I think that's true even of those things you've written that are set in a different place, or that are not distinctly Appalachian. Like for example in some of the short stories, the traveling characters refer back to it.

Yes, I think that's true.

When did you leave West Virginia?

I really didn't leave for good until I graduated from college.

Do you ever think about moving back?

I'd love to buy a little place there. But my children are very much involved in the New England area. There are a lot of things about the Northeast that really work for me and suit the way I've developed and changed since I left West Virginia.

Do you consider your writing to be a part of the Southern Renaissance? I'm referring to Perry and Weaks in The History of Southern Women's Literature They talk about a Southern Renaissance and include you and your writing in their evaluation of what they are calling a Southern Renaissance.

Starting from what period of time?

I gathered it was starting in the 60s and 70s

I'm pleased to be included in that categorization. I think the South is producing a lot of wonderful writers. It's really important now that diversity has become such a huge issue both nationally and internationally, that all the regions of the country be heard from. I think fiction writing and poetry are really essentially the communication between one ethnic, or political, or racial group to another.

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your writing?

My family of origin. I think that's true for every writer. And in terms of influential writers, certainly all the Southern writers--Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, James Agee, and other writers. The Eastern European writers, Kafka, Bruno Schultz, and Beat writers like William Burroughs and Kerouac.

Switching gears. Many of your stories seem to have autobiographical elements. How has this effected the people in your life. And has it been difficult for you or them to write about personal events and issues in your life?

The writing is much less autobiographical than it might seem. And it's true too that the minute you write something down, a story based on a real event, the story is transformed into something else. No one who sees themselves in a piece of fiction ever feels that itís a true portrait, because it isn't. I believe myself, and I tell people that I work with, that every writer has the responsibility to be compassionate with their characters whether they stem from real life or not. If compassion is a focus from the beginning, the writer has met his or her responsibility. I think every piece of really good or great work regards some shard of reality.

I appreciate you being honest about that answer, because I asked that for my own personal information as well as the readers of this interview. I think itís something that people think about a lot when theyíre writing from experience and writing what they know.

Hopefully, our stories are always written in such a way that they convince the reader of a specific reality. I suppose it should seem that the writer has experienced everything in the books. I think if the writer has done his or her job, the reader is more or less convinced that the story is true. And in fact, in literary terms, it is true. Fiction creates a truth that is sometimes more "real" than reality.

That's a good point.

If I remember correctly you took a cross-country trip after you graduated from WVU in the mid '70s? Can you explain how this trip affected your writing?

Oh, I wouldn't say it had any greater effect than anything else did. I think it was seized upon as an interesting detail by interviewers right after Black Tickets came out. The perceptions and the way of thinking communicated in Black Tickets, and later in Machine Dreams, was the result of many years of traveling, and of staying in place. Childhood is certainly travel, for everyone. Little by little, we journey into our own identities.

Can you describe the process you go through when you write and what the experience is like for you?

I'm typically a language oriented writer, which I think comes out of having begun writing as a poet. I'm very likely to start a story or a novel with just a line, as opposed to beginning with an idea. I typically find the voice of the character to be the key to the language. I look to the language for how to proceed. I work very slowly, really more or less like a poet, line by line. I don't do a lot of revision. I'm a very self-censored writer, in a way.I work through the material in my head before I manage to get in on paper. I typically reread what I've done the day before in order to get started the next day. That is, I go back to the material itself, and work in a more or less organic way. I try not to think about the work too much from the outside. I don't want the work to be limited by my ideas about it.

That's very interesting because I know the process of writing can be very different for authors. That really sheds a lot of light on how the process goes for you.

I think the artist has a relationship to the work that is very much similar to the relationship with the self. A lot of it has to do with overcoming a resistance to facing the truth--not the autobiographical truth, but the true elements in the story. Writers have certain rituals, certain ways of working that help them overcome the resistance, allow them never to look away, but to hone in on the heart of the material.

You began as a poet, later turning to fiction. Your prose exhibits passages that are no less than shear poetry, your images often wonderful and unique, and your use of language rich and distinctive. How do you think starting out as a poet enriched your writing?

Many of my favorite writers, those from whom I've learned most, began as poets. I love fiction that weighs syllables, that uses rhythm within the line intently, as does poetry. My sense of story has more to do with pattern and echo than with beginning, middle, and end. The whole point of language, for me, is that words might capture perception itself, and vault through time, or beyond time.

Would you care to comment on any of your early publications, how they contributed to your development as a writer?

Many times those were art editions of work that later came out in novels or story collections. I was very much involved in the small press movement and had friends who were running their own presses, doing beautiful editions of books on beautiful papers. The whole world of book design and book art was really interesting to me.

It's too bad that that whole world of fine arts publishing has just vanished at this point. It never was economical for the publishers, but the publishers were artists. They were recognized as artists at the time, and were often supported by grants. Those grants have really just dried up. It's not something that our present government wants to put money into.

How have you found the time to write? I know you're busy as a college professor, a wife, a mother.

I haven't found enough time to write. I only publish a book every five or six years, but I think it's important to do other things. I don't think one can just stay locked away scribbling madly. I feel as though I want to be very involved in my children's lives, my life as a teacher. In some way, it all seems to work, even if it takes awhile. So, I try to just be patient.

Your writing presents an interesting juxtaposition of middle class life with life on the fringes so to speak. Can you comment on the significance of this?

What a writer chooses to represent implies a political position. I suppose I agree with the Biblical idea that the way we treat the least of ourselves, those who have the least in our society, the least privilege, sheds light on the heart and soul of our culture. And I feel too that outsiders, those who are considered the disenfranchised materially or spiritually, often have a particular take on the world that has a great deal of value. I suppose that's part of my subject matter--the fact that I want to speak for those who might not speak for themselves.

In Why She Writes on your webpage you refer to the divided consciousness of writers, can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

I mean that the writer particularly, as opposed to artists creating in other mediums, speaks and creates in language. He or she is participating in an active life. At the same time, a part of the writer stands apart, thinking about what he or she is doing or seeing or hearing--remembering it, really. There's always a sense of being inside the situation, and at the same time remaining outside, so that one can observe and think about it. We can count on memory to pretty much self-select the most important details of any experience, the ones that are important in terms of the writing.

Can you also comment on the idea of the writer as a spy?

I don't mean that in the sense that the writer betrays anyone. In fact, the function of the writer is almost a religious one within a culture, or a neighborhood, or a family. I think many times the writer is the one who is both blessed and cursed with finding out what things mean, discovering the connections of one thing to another. We all want to know what things mean. In the act of writing, the writer discovers meaning. (Pause)

So, I suppose it's not meant as the idea of the spy in terms of espionage, in a kind of James Bond sense, but more in the sense of the idea of bearing witness.

Right... just from my own experience, I think that writers tend to be more keenly aware of what's going on in the lives of other people or in the dynamics of a culture, and that tends to be the substance for their writing. That's what I gathered when I had read that, not so much the James Bond thing.

Another question that Iím interested in is, how did you go about invoking some of the darker characters in your writing like those in Shelter and some of the short stories in Black Tickets and also Fast Lanes?Was there a process that you went through to get into the heads of those characters?

Is there a specific one?

Well, in Shelter the character of the father and what his methods were or (his) mode of thinking, it seems really authentic.

The language of Shelter is very dreamy and subterranean, over powering and exacting. It sets up the linguistic equivalent of the physical space the book creates. I saw Buddyís father, Carmody, in terms of his entire past, as someone who was just exploding. There was an inevitability to that explosion, and the slow damage he inflicted on everyone around him, the children in particular. In that way, he came to represent a force of evil. But, the book very much asks whether evil exists, if it exists at all, or, if it is really just a function of the fact that those who are damaged go on many times to damage others.

Machine Dreams contains situations that are specific in terms of the experience of war. Did you conduct a great deal of research to write that book?

A certain amount. Some of the research was simply lived, because I grew up in the shadow of the Vietnam War. I knew people who died there. The war was really a shadow over my generation. I came of age in the era after the war, when all of American culture had been transformed by resistance to war. That response seems unthinkable today. We should ask ourselves why. I thought of Machine Dreams as a warning, and a reminder that it is ordinary people who pay the price when war begins and is waged.

My research only underscored this. I did interview a number of Vietnam veterans about their experiences. Much of the rest was really... self-research, you might say. Writers work with identity itself, and identity is never simply personal or small.

I really like the way that book is written with the perspective of the mother and father and then also a male and female child. I felt like it gave a real holistic picture of the experience.

That's what I was going for. I wanted that book to be arranged in such a way that it used time itself as a character. There were lapses in time between the sections, so that the reader would know the characters so well that there would be a shock of familiarity when they encountered them again. Like catching a reflection of ourselves in a store window as we pass by the world contained in the window.

Something that I've come across just in reading what other people have written about your work is the concept or the theme of disillusionment with the American Dream. Do think this is true and what do you think of the "American Dream?"

I think the American Dream really exists. If you ask the average person from Malaysia or Peru or Burma or the Ukraine, I think they might agree. No matter what the failings of this country might be, there are an awful lot of people who would rather live here than deal with the difficulties of the places in which they are living. That said, I think it's our responsibility as beneficiaries of the American Dream, those of us born into what really could be seen as unfair privilege, to question what the American Dream means to us and what it means to the rest of the world. We need to redefine it in order to keep it alive. Thinking about it keeps it alive. I think it's the responsibility particularly of artists, teachers, and parents to really make their children aware not only of American history but of where we go from here.

After there's a period of war or terrorism for example, some of that breaks down, there's less faith in it (the political system of this country), and then in time it sort of builds back up you know. I think we've even seen this with the Iraq war and we're in the process of defending it and redefining it. But it seems inevitable that it's going to continue to be cyclic in nature. I find that your book Machine Dreams still is very much applicable to what a lot of people are going through now.

I think it's really important that we question this government. We've certainly been in wars before, but we've never been in a situation quite like this one. Terrorism is going to be a fact of life, in the same way that polio was a fact of life for many years. We can't simply cede our influence, our own power to speak and act, because we're under threat. I think we have to question authority and make authority as democratic as possible and not allow the government to use a very natural fear to make this country less American.

Okay. I'm going to move on to MotherKind now. This book had a lot of appeal to me because I'm a mother. I really sped through that book. It appears to be highly autobiographical. But, I'm wondering what the experience of writing that book meant for you.

The book is autobiographical in the sense that it moves out of my close relationship with my mother. The basic facts of the book--that I took care of my mother during her illness and that she lived with my family--were true. At the time all that was happening, I was frankly so busy and often overwhelmed. Eight years later, when I began to write the book, I was almost recreating what had happened, or completely re-imagining it, because I didn't really remember it. A lot of the things about mothers and babies, about what mothers feel, were things that people had said to me over the years. They weren't really things that I myself felt or experienced. And, of course, the book is full of details, because women who are raising children deal with details. Their identities enlarge. In fact, that's what mothering is, being responsible for all of those details and creating everything anew every day. When I began writing the book, I really entered a new reality in a sense that began in what really happened but very much became the world of the book.

Of all your books, do you have a personal favorite?

No. I consider my work as more or less continuous. One book leads to the next, and one book can't be written until the book that precedes it has been written. I feel as though writers have a sort of homing instinct or some unconscious way of deciding how they move from one project to another.

Can we talk about what direction your writing is moving in now? I read the two stories you had mentioned about the character Termite. Is this the beginning of a new novel?

It's the book I'm working on now. Neither of the sections that have been published are the beginning, but they do come from my work in progress.

What inspired you to write about the character Termite and his sister Lark?

Well, I may mention that in one of my talks when I come down to Shepherdstown. Should I tell you now or should I just save it?

That's really up to you.

Over the years, there were several inspirations for this child. I worked in daycare centers when I was in my twenties, and I worked with a little girl who had spina bifida. I also worked with a child who had CP; and I have of course known children who are autistic. I've always been fascinated with the kinds of leaps they make to compensate for what they don't have. I'm fascinated with what language means and what can be going on that isn't obvious, what's going on inside that isn't apparent to the observer. I'm interested also in connections between identities. Part of my subject matter, part of what Shelter is about, is the fact that when the child characters go to Camp Shelter, they each have a secret that separates them from each other. As they enter the world of the book, their identities almost begin to overlap.

From the beginning, between Lark and Termite, there is an incredibly strong bond. The reader participates in this and begins to understand it. I think every book needs to educate the reader, teach the reader how to read into that particular world. Certainly, my books demand that. It takes awhile for the reader to understand where the book is going, to get into the rhythm and go with it. I see Termite as a divine character in a sense. I think that there is an element of divinity within us and hopefully I'm capturing that in my work. Because of his isolation and because of some of the secrets of the novel, Termite has an almost prescient quality. That's what I find most compelling.

Well, the language of it is very convincing and I will say that I got a lot out of it, especially the second time, because as you're saying I had learned to read it.

Any idea of when the novel will be finished?

I don't know. I think it might be published in 2007. That's kind of where I'm going with it.

Do you have an idea for how the story develops?

I'm probably three-fourths of the way finished. I hope to finish a rough draft this summer.

What advice do you have for emerging writers?

Read. Read really widely. Become familiar with a body of work from an entire gamut of writers. I find as a teacher that many young people who want to write in fact have not read very much. Their task becomes quite a bit more difficult. I think that we learn to write partly as we're taught, by using language, by swimming in it, so to speak. Usually, the obsessive readers become writers. So, my first advice would be to simply make certain that you've read, and then try to focus on why you want to write.