How did you decide to become a writer?

I don’t remember it being a conscious decision. I was always a big reader, and a really nerdy kid—I had all sorts of imaginary friends and my mom says on camping trips I’d sit in my tent all day and write myself into whatever book I was reading. But I didn’t see writing as something I could actually do as a career—growing up, I didn’t know any writers and it felt to me like a pie-in-the-sky profession. I figured I’d sneak in time to write when I wasn’t working—when I was a kid I wanted to be a psychologist. It was in graduate school that I started trying to figure out a feasible way to make a life of it. The Stegner Fellowship has been more important to my fiction than anything else—it was the first time I felt comfortable calling myself a writer without using air quotes.

What literature has been important to you?

Grace Paley and James Baldwin have had, without a doubt, the biggest impact on me. When I started writing, I was really worried about seeming sappy or sentimental, so I wrote these very lean and tightly controlled stories, though it went against what came naturally to me. It was only when I read Paley and Baldwin that I saw how emotionally direct stories can be without seeming manipulative or corny. I get the feeling that every one of their stories is something they felt they needed to write, that they were more interested in being straightforward and honest than wowing the reader with their cleverness. They also write such character- and voice-driven stories while still giving us a grand sense of the larger events happening around them—the politics of their fiction extend so naturally from their characters that I never feel they’re forcing their opinions down my throat. Their stories can also be so angry, without ever resorting to meanness—they’re two of the most generous writers I’ve read. And they both write such gorgeous prose without ever being arty or flashy. I could go on and on. My other favorites are Knut Hamsun, Isaac Babel, Alice Munro, Bernard Malamud, William Trevor, Vasilly Aksyonov, Leonard Michaels, Ivan Bunin, Edward P. Jones, Raymond Carver, Deborah Eisenberg, Mavis Gallant, Joan Didion, Nadine Gordimer, George Orwell, Chekhov and, like everybody else, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenna are probably the most important novels to me, along with American Pastoral and Housekeeping. I also like a lot of younger contemporary writers—Aleksander Hemon, Charles D’Ambrosio, Susan Choi, Chris Offutt, Sam Lipsyte and Dan Chaon, to name a few. And of course I was lucky enough to study with some of the best writers around while here at Stanford: Elizabeth Tallent, John L’Heureux, and Tobias Wolff.

How often do you write and what is your typical writing process?

I write on all the days I don’t teach. I write best in the mornings, before my day gets cluttered or stressful. My new plan is to turn off my phone and email—I’m horribly addicted to the Internet and can begin by researching one small (yet seemingly so necessary!) detail for a story and the next time I look up from my computer I realize I’ve just wasted three hours reading Gawker, or that I’ve gotten into a bidding war on eBay over vintage patio furniture, both of which I did this week.

I don’t have a special desk or a lucky pen or anything like that. If I can sit down and get something done, it doesn’t matter if I’m dressed or still in my pajamas, or have my music on or off. Sometimes I write in my apartment or in coffee shops nearby, and I’m also part of the San Francisco Writers Grotto, which is great—I share an office with a couple friends in a larger building of writers, and at lunch we all come out and eat together.

What issues do you struggle with in your own writing?

I have a hard time with middles. Before I start a story I usually have the opening scene, or at least the first paragraph, worked out in my mind, and soon after comes the ending. But middles have to achieve so much—they need to simultaneously sustain the tension I set up in the opening scene while raising the stakes, they need to be surprising and not make the reader feel like I’m dragging them directly toward an ending I refuse to budge on, even when it’s painfully obvious where the story is headed. That’s something I’m always wrestling with—I’m a stubborn writer and often fall in love with my endings, and once I’m actively writing toward them, my stories can lose steam or collapse altogether. I always tell my students to shoot through an entire first draft before revising so they don’t become married to phrases they’ll have to cut once the piece is done, and of all the advice I give in the classroom, this is the hardest to take for myself. It just feels so demoralizing to wake up and turn on my computer and try to make sense out of a pile of rubble—I need at least one solidly written section to tinker with just to get in the mode of writing, even if it doesn’t end up in the finished piece.

How has your writing changed since you began your career?

When I first started writing, I read the same stories over and over, trying to understand how they were put together. I didn’t know how to do anything, and certain writers—Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver and Lorrie Moore especially—served as models for everything from how to start a scene to how to use white space. Lately I’ve been finding that I trust my own instincts when starting stories, and though I know that has a lot to do with writing consistently over the past few years, I think it has more to do with having studied those stories for so long. And one of the amazing things about these writers is that when, for example, I teach Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” I still feel like the wind’s being knocked out of me every time I get to the moment where Robert puts his hand over the narrator’s and tells him to draw. I feel the same way when I teach Richard Ford’s “Communist”—I know I should see it coming, but it surprises me every time I get to the part where Glen Baxter shoots those geese.

Do you think it’s possible for an author to truly extract her own history and personality from the stories she creates?

That’s something I think about a lot. I’m almost finished with my story collection, and half of the narrators are men and some of the stories are set abroad or in the past. But no matter how different they are (and how different I tried to make them from each other), they all circle back to the same themes and are very obviously written by the same person. Grace Paley has this great quote, not to write what you know but to write what you don’t know about what you know. That’s what it feels like for me. I read a lot of nonfiction, and I love the feeling of trying to understand what it would have been like to live in another place or during a different time, or even to live here in the present day, but as a man, or a person much older than I am—I often find that I’m able to access certain emotional truths about my own life by not exploring things head-on. I don’t have any stories about young female writers living in San Francisco and teaching at Stanford, but I do feel that my collection accurately captures what I cared about, questioned and obsessed over during the time in my life I was writing it.

What do you think a short story can achieve that other forms of writing cannot?

Some might say a story can have a more fully developed narrative arc than a poem—but what about Philip Levine, whose poems are so character- and narrative-based? Others might say that while short stories can be novelistic in scope, their brevity demands that every word count—but what about poetically compressed novelists like Christine Schutt and Carole Maso? And then there are longer stories that I admire precisely because of the way the writers work with dead time and slower, more idle moments—I liked Jhumpa Lahiri’s newest collection of longer stories (Unaccustomed Earth) even more than her first because they felt so lived-in; the unhurried pacing of the stories made the endings even more shocking and resonant for me.

What advice would you give to undergraduates who have studied creative writing, but don’t know how to carry that interest into life after college?

Move somewhere cheap where you have time not only to write but to read. After college I lived in expensive places (Bay Area, Tel Aviv, New York), and was always piling on job after job to pay rent—I wouldn’t use my computer to write, I’d use it to search Craigslist for jobs. Before the Stegner I was living in Brooklyn and working three, sometimes four, jobs at a time. I was barely writing at all, though it was what I wanted to do most. It was a fun time, but also unnecessarily anxious and frustrating. I never really got the starving artist thing—what’s so romantic about it if you don’t have any time to make art?

And once you’re in that cheap place, find other people who like to talk about books, and a few who are interested in swapping work. But be careful about choosing your readers, especially with new writing—I heard Philip Roth talk once and he said something that really stuck with me: never let anybody read your early drafts if they aren’t on your side.