I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.

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.

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

But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.

One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.

Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.

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.