You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.

You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

I was giving up--being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.

But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.

I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is "depressing" because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don't seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; "witty stories," in which every problem is the occasion for a joke; "upbeat" stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We're grown ups now.