The trajectory of my writing has moved further and further away from autobiography. My first stories in Confessions of a Falling Woman worked familiar territory - places I had lived, people I knew, my life as an actor in New York - and many were prompted by or grounded in personal experience.

Whatever one may say about the perils of workshops, they help writers internalize an awareness of audience.

You're unusual. That's better than popular if you have some courage.

Along the way, I've worked as a waitress, I've done phone surveys, and worked as a receptionist, and for the last twenty years I've taught. When I was an actor, the key was to find a job that kept your days free to audition.

I figured that to be a writer I would need to have been born in the nineteenth century, be British, or have three names. So I turned my sights elsewhere . . . to acting.

I think I was also afraid of the novel. I write line by line, proceeding at snail's pace, rewriting as I go and paring the excess away. This is against all the best advice for writing long form prose, and I have tried over the years to break myself of the habit, but I can't bear to leave anything ungainly on the page and half the fun for me is that tinkering. So the length of a novel was a daunting prospect.

Before I got my present job, I spent many years teaching writing part-time, so-called, at community colleges and universities. It's academia's version of migrant labor.