When Quick Fiction asked me to interview one of my favorite short story writers, I jumped at the chance because I was too giddy to remember I’d never interviewed a writer before. “I can do this,” I said to myself. Ron Carlson’s stories are honest, tender, sometimes bruised, always generous. I reread “Phenomena” and “Hartwell,” “Towel Season” and “The Hotel Eden,” to again feel the concern and vulnerability in his husbands, fathers, sheriffs, and professors.

I have a friend who paraphrases something Carlson says about staying in your seat when the refrigerator’s calling, because the stuff that wants to be interrupted is what you need to pay attention to. Whenever I run downstairs for Cheez-Its, or to make a cup of tea, I think about Ron Carlson and I try to hurry back to my chair. I’m preoccupied with what I imagine to be his concentration, his work ethic. The medium of e-mail was awkward for me. I feel kind of shaky academically, but pretty confident in conversation, especially in person. I missed the eye contact. With every answer that Ron Carlson gave, my brain started firing in too many directions. He’s a brilliant, composed writer whose words about the act of writing admit, bolster, and prod.

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Pia Z. Ehrhardt: You tell consummate, full-throated stories in two pages, four pages, five pages. Many of your stories in A Kind of Flying are under ten pages long, and I‘m wondering if they started out much longer or if you have a kind of internal pacing, or tempo, that propels the piece as you’re writing it?

Ron Carlson: I start with a notion or event or image that is so provocative that I know it will have my attention long enough to drive me into the story until I can’t touch bottom. It will lead me out past what I know, which is where the next thing is always waiting. I mean this literally. But also, when I start a story I do not know or project or imagine the length. I also think that if you write stories for years, you do develop or sense a rhythm, and when I sensed that my stories were all rounding the corner at about four thousand words, I changed that rhythm.

PZE: It sounds from the forward to A Kind of Flying like you’ve written some of these stories, start to finish, in one continuous sitting. Do you stay put until most of your stories are finished? Do the shorter stories require more intense, more ruthless concentration, a quieter house, wife and kids on long, long errands? And if so, can you lose a story if you don’t mind it?

RC: When I go into a story, start writing, I keep it before me. I don’t write a story in a sitting—though I sometimes have—but I don’t let it out of my attention. I think all stories, long and short, require astonishing attention. The gift of attention is what every writer needs to bring to her work. Attention is the ruler of craft.

PZE: Have you ever lost a story because of inattention? When you have to sleep, or take a kid to a baseball game, or teach a class, where does the story’s urgency go? Do you write stuff on slips of paper, or are you absent-minded when you’re working on a story?

RC: If you go away from the story completely for whatever occasion or reason, you will come back and find the pieces on the ground, and how would you pick up and start juggling again? How would you find all the pieces? Generative energy, the energy you expend to start is significant and I don’t want to lose that, so I keep the story in my head, even away from the page, bumping it forward sometimes little bits at a time. Best is to follow it for days or weeks until you get a draft, then you are more safe.

PZE: It’s a beautiful notion to think of a story leading you past what you know. How do you know when you have arrived there? Does something in your head click? Or does the story feel exhausted, spent? Why doesn’t the story keep dropping out bottoms?

RC: The moment you break into the unknown is the moment that writers feel quickened and surprised, and it can be a moment you want to leave the room. If you stay, with all of your attention, something will be revealed to you. I don’t mean that to sound like magic. It is the center of the work. It is work. You have to tolerate not knowing; you have to tolerate ambiguity.

PZE: You write movingly about loving children. Did you write about the stun of this kind of love before you were a father? Did you need to after you became a father? I’m carrying around the images in your stories (“Blood” and “Milk”) where the father is stuck to the baby (and vice versa), where the father steals away the twins and has a private drive with his boys. These scenes, for me, insist on a man’s love for his children, separate from the woman’s love, or the couple’s love, although in the endings of both, the children are passed back into the woman’s hands. How is a father’s love for his children different than a mother’s love for her children?

RC: You write closely with full attention to the moment before you; we’ve established that. The imagination is many times simply, fully, effective empathy. You write about experiences whether you’ve had them or not; and you can do that by not referring to the last character in a book or movie who was in that situation (father with children in car, et cetera) but by imagining/occupying that character now and working to invent the moment for the first time. Your question, you can see, is about personhood as much as it is about writing, and I’m not sure about approaching it. You can write about love—of any kind—before you’ve blundered through its gardens. The writing is more about being awake and alive to the moment than delivering data from your personal research. A mother’s love for her children is immeasurable, selfless, and fierce. A father loves his children with his whole heart.

PZE: I think I’ve romanticized how I imagine you writing some of the stories that seem intimate not only to the characters. But I don’t think I’m the only reader out there who thinks, “Damn. Ron Carlson loves like this.” My stories get uncomfortable when they stray too far from personal experience, so these questions to you are really projections of my own insecurities about feeling worthy enough to walk in the shoes of someone I’ve never met. Or maybe it’s the responsibility that then comes with knowing and understanding that much about someone else, the stewardship?

RC: I’m not sure there is a question here as much as a comment about the responsibility of the writer, about which much has been written. I have always tried to say what I mean in my stories or what I think the character might mean, and I have tried to keep it simple. I need to believe what I am writing in order to press on with it; I don’t know who my readers are (though I’ve met folks who claimed that title), and I never ever think of the reader or of how a story might be received. The act of writing is the experience I am after. I have written about affection I have experienced and I have written about affection as I’ve wished hard it to be.

PZE: No question, just an attempt to have a conversation with you through a medium I’m finding awkward and affectionless. How do I thank you for writing so many wonderful stories? That’s what I’d like to do. And to thank you, also, for answering questions over these last two days. You’ve given me so much to think about regarding my own work, my work habits, staying put when the urge is to bolt.

RC: Pia: Not affectionless. At our best we work down in our fiction, which is to say our dreams I think, and we tap into a current that feels so personal that it is only ours, but that is not true. It is a very private place where we all have a share. Sometimes I talk about how much of writing is about control and how much is about letting go. Well, letting go doesn’t seem a legitimate approach, yet it is. We set off thinking we’re prepared for this journey and then we break down and meet strangers and strange moments and then the writer needs to be one thing in that strange place: present. It is so odd and thrilling and true. I’m speaking too generally here. Today, my writing day felt like pushing a big rock that was flat on every side, and heavy. Oosh. All I can say is: here’s my shoulder once again.