Joy Williams

And sometimes you meet very great writers who seem to fit that profile.

I met Joy Williams in Key West and I was like, this is exactly the same type of person.

We were walking past an antique shop and she said, there was a basket here with free silverware in it the other day.

And I was like, and you took a spoon.

And she has to find a different way of being in the world.

There's something that like Joy Williams said, I think, in one of your interviews with her about the short story being a form that's very deadly.

You have to see that main character kind of die in one way or another.

And I feel like the version of Abby that has been polishing her words and in the back like a little elf making shoes or whatever she says is dead.

And there's something I want to talk about, if everyone doesn't mind, which I'm going to talk about Emily.

And I want to just look at the fact that you, in your book Dog Days, you cite a good number of writers, Amy Hempel, Joy Williams.

Virginia Woolf, Alice Munro.

You're looking, especially with Amy Hempel and Joy Williams, who are two American short story writers who deal with various areas of darkness, but not just darkness, sort of magic within darkness.

It's sort of like an effort to not write a traditional short story, that the stories can lunge in various directions.

There's a wonderful moment you cite where Joy Williams has a woman looking at her in a shopping mall, I think, and the woman just keeps looking at the Joy Williams figure.

And Geordie Williams eventually thinks that woman has put a curse on me.

She has put a curse on me.

There are many more.

But I really love Joy Williams.

And she wrote a novel, a weird novel about kind of female friendship and nature and grief and all the things called The Quick and the Dead.

And then she also has a short story collection called The Visiting Privilege, or it's like that's her collected stories.