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LRS: Do you listen to music when you write? How loud is the volume? When I'm generating new material I try to find some music that somehow aligns with the mood or the emotional space of the work. When I'm revising I can't listen to anything.

Means: Sometimes I listen to music, but it has to be a certain kind of sound—and the lyrics can't lure me away from the work. But usually I use music to avoid the work. There is no doubt that I've learned a lot about form from listening to Bach and Schoenberg—at least I like to imagine that I learned something from Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces: there's something about the atonal quality combined with the brevity and the way they seem, to me at least, to be modern and ancient. And I'm still an old school, diehard Sonic Youth, Dylan, and Springsteen fan, just to name a few.

LRS: In his essay "On Stillness," Charles Baxter examines stillness in fiction. Stillness, Baxter explains, includes a pause in dramatic action and in character thought. The narrator or viewpoint character becomes absorbed in "the minutiae of setting," so that objects seem to take on the story's emotional feel. It seems that your work is filled with such moments. I'm thinking of the viewpoint character in "The Nest"; amidst a separation from his wife, he becomes lost in the workings of a hornet's nest. Or "Lightning Man" offers a handful of still moments when Nick, following or preceding some violent lightning strike, becomes lost in the finer details of the Midwestern landscape. I wonder if stillness is not just a kind of necessary distraction of sorts.

Means: I think the stillness you mention comes out of what Andre Dubus called vertical writing, rather than horizontal; going down deep, and deeper, into the situation instead of moving to some end point. If you don't have that stillness in short fiction, you end up leaning too hard on plot, or irony, or some technical device. Or maybe if you use plot too much, or you're ironic, or silly, you can't have that stillness. In part I think it's inherent in the form. There's a great story by Eudora Welty called "The Whistle" that is so still and quiet and lovely it's amazing. Maybe it's the fact that survivors, or those who suffer, tend to find solace in those moments of silence. But I agree with Baxter's general premise, although I don't think you can make a conscious decision to include stillness in the work. You can't just say: I'll slip some stillness in here, and some more here.

LRS: I like the notion of vertical writing. It reminds me of reading Munro's stories, how they peel back layer after layer of character, deepening complexity and sustaining, as Flannery O'Connor put it, the mystery of personality. I wonder if there really is no ending point. That is, even when a short story stops, that mystery of personality resonates.

Means: Well, I think Munro said something, in an old interview, about starting a story with a feeling and then building around that feeling. I love her work and think it's deceptively daring in the best way, moving around within the bounds, the confines, of the form: she takes these huge risks, but they're hard to see if you're focused on her subject matter, which is quiet and isolated. She also said, somewhere else, that she works very hard, and I think what she does is the result of a hell of a lot of rewriting. I don't think there really are ending points, at least not in the stories that work, but rather a kind of forward movement radiating out from the terminus of the story. That's what stories do best. They leave you with this sensation of having gone through something and then, in the end, carrying it with you. Novels don't do that. A good novel leaves you with this deep sensation of completeness, I think, whereas a story is just a blip, a ping. Where the story ends is a risk the writer takes; the reader feels that risk too, and goes along with it.

LRS: Your work takes particular interest in the interior lives of characters. Specifically I'm thinking of "Coitus" and "The Project," in which the narrator's and point-of-view character's consciousnesses are closely detailed—guiding the reader to leap from one interior mode (e.g., memory, thought, perception, fantasy, dream) to the next. Each interior beat feels like an action in and of itself, in that it both forwards the narrative line and reveals character. This seems like a conscious departure from fiction with protracted action and elaborate plotting. Do you see this as a kind of aesthetic choice on your part?

Means: I'm not sure if it was a choice or a matter of simple artistic survival. There was a point in my life as a writer, actually a day, when I threw up my hands and began to write differently. I just went into my own isolation. I embraced something in myself. My inclination for years was to avoid writing the way I really wanted to write and to shape stories into that horizontal mode. I'd also been trying to write chronologically, to avoid my own style and the fact that I did not think in an orderly fashion. Mainly style is a way around certain deficiencies and an embrace of certain abilities. Those leaps you mention, and the interior modes, usually arrive out of the story, intense revision in some cases, and throwing stuff out. I think about story first; mainly in terms of making something happen and having some sort of real situation between people. For example, when I was writing "The Project," I was spending way too much time thinking about termites in my house, crawling around, and then

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