Amanda Eyre Ward Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Amanda Eyre Ward talks about the genesis of her short stories, including those collected in Love Stories in This Town, and how her writing style has evolved over the years.

Reproduced with the permission of Random House Reader's Circle.

Most of your readers know you as a novelist, but you have actually been a short-story writer for longer than you have been a novelist. Can you talk a little about how and when you first started writing stories?

I went to Williams College, where I signed up for Jim Shepard's Introductory Fiction Workshop. I showed up the first day to find the room packed. Jim (Professor Shepard to me then) told us we could submit one story, and he would choose the members of the small class and post a list on his office door. Many of the other students had folders of stories, neatly stapled, but although I was an avid reader, I had never written a story before. I was reading Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver at that time. I typed all night on my Brother word processor, creating a story about a speed-addled trucker on an all-night run. I think the trucker ended up in a "wall of flames." I wasn't hopeful, so I didn't even check the list on Jim's door. When a friend congratulated me, I had already missed the first class. I showed up the next week, and Jim said, "Now where ...