Last year Stuart Dybek was interviewed by Zulkey.com. The first two exchanges:Read the rest of the interview.When you do readings, how do you choose what you'll read?
The choice of what I read is sometimes planned out depending on what I know about the audience and sometimes instinctive based on the sense I get once I enter the auditorium and get a sense of who the audience might be. Or sometimes I've written something new that can be read in an half hour or so and want to give it a try.
Have any of the characters in you stories have had impact on your real life relationships? Meaning that, if somebody recognizes themselves in one of your stories, how has that impacted his relationship with you?
Despite the fact that I'm writing fiction and have taken the liberties that fiction allows for, people have at different times recognized themselves in some of the characters. Mostly the reaction has been favorable. I had one old friend who appeared in a story called "The Long Thoughts," who would give the book that story appeared in to people as gifts so that they could read about him. There was an instance however when a dear friend who saw himself in one of my stories -- a version of a story that he told to me -- was offended not by his portrayal but that I would use a story he'd told to me in private. I should add that the story he told to me was fantastical and I changed it further and made still more fantastical. Still, he treated it not as my stealing something but as a broken confidence.
Dybek put his novel-in stories I Sailed with Magellan to the Page 99 Test.
--Marshal Zeringue