Joan Frank, author of In Envy Country: Stories (University of Notre Dame Press, 978-0-268-02888-6)

When did you start reading, and what did you like to read as a kid?
I began reading very early, and quickly fell down the rabbit hole. It became a lifelong need. I read anything I could lay my hands on, and made trips to the library with the heightened anticipation of a lover. I read biographies, Dickens, E. B. White, Madeleine L’Engle, all the usual suspects.

When you were growing up did you have books in your home?
We did: my late father was a professor of humanities, philosophy, and literature, and I was surrounded by riches in books and music. He’d built a den featuring floor-to-ceiling shelves, packed with all manner of works. I could go wandering and find mysterious adult titles. I remember puzzling over Borges, Autobiography of a Yogi, Two Years Before the Mast—staring and staring, constructing the world.

When did you think about becoming a writer? Was there someone who got you interested in writing?
I loved it from the beginning. In grade school, as an assignment, I remember creating a little fable with a punchline about a pony sprouting wings: “And to this day there are horse flies.” I thought this wildly clever: some sort of sonorous, finalizing authority bound up in the phrase “and to this day.” I even drew a little illustration. Later, in high school, I had a marvelous teacher, Jack Pelletier, who lit the fire. He’s my oldest friend, and still cheering.

How do you write? Do you have a daily routine? What’s good about it? What do you hate about it?
Writing’s something that feels built into my DNA; that has provided, all my life, an almost embryonic sense of well-being. Desk, paper, books, pens, and keyboard (once a typewriter’s, now a computer’s) let me feel I can breathe. I don’t have to write every day, but I need to have something to be mulling in mind. The difficulty is in clearing time. The joy is always in discovery.

Do you have any particular story to tell concerning the writing of this book?
It took a very long time to get each of the stories in In Envy Country accepted into literary journals. Those journals are inundated, of course, and must exercise a kind of collective preference. Then it took a very long time to get the collection as a whole accepted: ultimately, it won a literary competition. This experience (repeated with my earlier books) taught me to grow a tough skin, in terms of not internalizing editors’ judgments.

What’s some advice that you could offer young writers?
This may sound rough, but anyone who’s been paying any attention knows the publishing world’s in frantic crisis, “to the point where it often seems completely disenfranchised from the world of reading and writing,” quoting an anonymous friend deep inside that world. If you want to write because you feel you have to, then do it. Study with writers you admire. But always have a day job or other income stream, and guard your health like an Olympic athlete. If you’re looking for fame and fortune, seek elsewhere.

How did you find the publisher for this book?
Because story collections tend to be treated like poison by larger commercial publishers (unless there is some novelty or buzz associated with their authors) I’ve often entered literary competitions, and been fortunate to win some of them. I can’t sing enough praise for the labors (undersung and certainly underpaid) of small literary and university presses, their editors and staffs, who bravely continue to publish and honor fine new literary fiction. I owe these publishers for the life of my own published body of work—and for some of the most urgent and beautiful contemporary fiction we have.

What are you working on at the moment?
Something odd and different. I can’t talk about work in progress, because that inevitably chases its spirit away. But I’m thankful to have something going on. It helps me feel moored while I tend to the chores and events and travel of this year. I’m also trying like mad to find homes for two novels and an essay collection!

What are you reading?
I just devoured a collection of brief, memoiristic pieces called Safekeeping, by Abigail Thomas, and Janet Frame’s posthumous Towards Another Summer. I loved Lori Ostlund’s story collection The Bigness of the World and Robin Black’s If I Loved You I’d Tell You This. Zadie Smith’s essay collection, Changing My Mind was delicious, as was Frederick Reiken’s recent novel  Day For Night. And I was enchanted by a lovely novel about the late poet Elizabeth Bishop by Michael Sledge, called The More I Owe You. I often review literary fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle, which brings me to works I’d not otherwise have found that, inevitably, delight and surprise. That thrill never diminishes!

Visit Joan’s Web site at www.joanfrank.org. Learn more about her in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

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