One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.

I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

Want! You must want something. What do you want?

You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.

Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.