I’m a novelist and short story writer. While lately it’s been all novels all the time, I’ve published stories in The New Yorker and quite a few literary journals. The stories are mostly about people in small towns–I grew up in one. In my childhood I believed I would end up a poet who also wrote plays, or a playwright who also wrote poetry. I ended up in grad school on the way to a PhD in Lit, but I stopped at the Master’s. Why? Because without realizing what was happening, I’d started what became my first novel. I woke up to the big news that fiction is about telling stories that have elements of poetry and elements of plays. So fiction took over. Many novels later, I’m still at it, still finding out that I will never stop discovering new things about writing. I feel so, so lucky for that.
I live in Maine on the Phippsburg peninsula. It’s a coastal, rural, watery world: the ocean close by to the south, the Kennebec River east across my road, a large freshwater pond northwest. A dirt driveway. Woods. Lots of sky.
Maine was supposed to be a getaway place from my busy, crowded life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I taught creative writing for a long time, at Boston College, Northeastern University, the Harvard Extension School, the (former) Radcliffe Seminars, and most recently as Writer in Residence at MIT.
But after a little while of Maine as the getaway place, I didn’t want to go back. The getaway became home, like early drafts become an actual book.
Dogs are here–I have two–and it’s quiet when barking isn’t happening. I’ve come to know that silence has lots of levels. When I’m at the keyboard writing anything that isn’t fiction, I hear the click of the keys. When it’s fiction, I hear the words.
