It is no secret that most of your writing comes from your experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer.  Both of your short fiction collections, The River of Lost Voices and An American Affair, and your novel, Steal My Heart, tell stories of U.S. citizens living in Guatemala. Did you consciously begin writing fiction related to your experiences, or did your writing take this shape organically?  How do you feel about the idea that writers must leave a place or put time between themselves and an experience before writing about it?  Do you feel that this particular niche, this blending of North and Central America, is an area which you will continue to explore in your work?

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was in the third grade, so it would be disingenuous of me to say I go into any situation—even into the grocery store—without thinking I might find ideas or inspiration for a story or poem. But I didn’t join the Peace Corps to find good material. I joined the Peace Corps to find a girlfriend.

Joking!

I joined the Peace Corps to see a different part of the world, to explore a different culture, to do some good for other people, and, finally, to—perhaps—find material for my writing. I had lived in Guatemala for two years before I felt even remotely competent to write about it. And when I did begin to write about it—after I’d extended my Peace Corps service by nine months—I wrote like crazy, thinking I would lose my grasp of the country and the culture as soon as I returned to the States. Thankfully, this didn’t prove true. I could close my eyes and be magically transported back to my little house in Santa Cruz Verapaz.

I don’t think writers necessarily have to leave a place in order to write about it. On the other hand, some writers find distance helpful. Too much distance in time, however, is dangerous.  It’s easy to forget the small details of place and culture that are essential to great fiction. Every time I sit down to write a story set in any year before, say, 1990, I have to remember: No cell phones. No Internet. No The Simpsons. Oh—wait—The Simpsons debuted in 1989.

Your characters often find themselves in unstable environments due to political unrest, cultural clashes, and guerrilla war.  The tensions of the stories, however, surprisingly come from within the relationships between the men and women, rather than from the setting.  Which holds more weight in a story—characters or setting?  How do you discover the particular blend of character and setting in a story?  Where do you begin writing, and what is your process of story evolution and development?

Character is impossible without setting. However, once I’ve established the setting, my characters take over and the story becomes principally about them. Another way to look at this: My stories move from the particulars of setting and character toward the universals of character. So in “The Foreign Correspondent,” in An American Affair, it’s crucial that the setting is a country in Latin America in which the president pulls a self-coup. Likewise, it’s crucial that the female protagonist is from the States and the male protagonist is from Latin America. But after this is established, it becomes a story about love and the sacrifices one is willing—or unwilling—to make in order to sustain it.

I find inspiration for my stories everywhere. For example, when I was living in Guatemala, a family moved in down the street from me, and the two teenage girls in the family decided to introduce me to their younger brother. This is the way they introduced him: “He was born dead.” I found this haunting, and it became the inspiration for “José del Río,” the first story in The River of Lost Voices.

“Coming Home,” a story in An American Affair, was inspired by a Peace Corps legend. In the legend, a Peace Corps volunteer marries a Guatemalan man who, upon landing in the States, ditches her. I thought I would write this exact story, but the characters started pulling me in another direction.

I write a dozen or more drafts for each story. Sometimes I discover what the story is really about only after draft twelve. Then I have to do a heavy rewrite and begin the revision process all over.

If you had to define a purpose for your work, what would it be? What is the one thing you hope your stories accomplish when they are put out into the world?

I do hope readers find my stories entertaining. I think engaging  readers on this level is a basic obligation of most fiction. (Some fiction, like the novels of Henry James, are like vitamins. They’re good for us.) In addition, I hope readers find in my work something that changes their perspective, whether it’s on a part of the world they know little about or on the way men and women relate to each other.

Who are a few of your favorite writers and how have their works inspired you?

Tolstoy is my favorite fiction writer, and if I’m guilty of long-windedness, I’ll blame it on him. Ivan Turgenev has probably been as big an influence on my fiction as any writer. His novella First Love is poignant and exquisitely written. In addition to being a twisted love story, it’s the story of a complicated father-son relationship. All of this plus an amazing cast of minor characters in about 100 pages. Hard to beat, but of course I’ve tried.

Others: Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles, Kate Chopin, Albert Camus. Jean-Paul Sartre, William Styron, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, José Saramago.

We’ve had wonderful fiction writers read at WVU, and I admire their work: Elizabeth Graver, Patricia Henley, Janet Peery, Ann Pancake, Richard Wiley, Nancy Reisman, Peter Makuck.

Two of my favorite modern short-story writers: Mary Gaitskill and Lorrie Moore.

My all-time favorite writer is my father, who for thirty years was a columnist and reporter for the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer.