Well, isn't it always the goal to have the reader keep reading?

Well, I guess.

I mean, it always bothers me when I visit a fiction workshop where a student will say, well, you know... you don't have to make everything important, and I'll say every word is important, that kind of thing.

So whether it's a long piece or a short piece, every word is important.

So saying that, in a short piece, I think that, you kind of have a sense of a kind of strike at you, that somehow what you're meant to get is meant to startle you.

I think a very short piece can be startling.

I mean, obviously Lydia Davis's work relies on that sense.

Well, again, I've got a ton of questions from the audience that I'll weave in as well.

Well, isn't it always the goal to have the reader keep reading?

Well, I guess.

I mean, it always bothers me when I visit a fiction workshop where a student will say, well, you know... you don't have to make everything important, and I'll say every word is important, that kind of thing.

So whether it's a long piece or a short piece, every word is important.

So saying that, in a short piece, I think that, you kind of have a sense of a kind of strike at you, that somehow what you're meant to get is meant to startle you.

I think a very short piece can be startling.

I mean, obviously Lydia Davis's work relies on that sense.

Well, again, I've got a ton of questions from the audience that I'll weave in as well.

And I wondered whether that was in any way kind of interesting or visible to you at the time that you started writing fiction, or were you drawing on such very, very different influences and cultures, perhaps especially around art and music and so on, that that particular kind of literary tradition wasn't either on your radar or was beside the point? Because it's kind of really striking that your experimentalism is at times like even a more extreme version even than like some of the greats of that period, like Donald Bartelme or somebody.

I came to hate the metafictionalists because I began to feel that their attitude toward the reader was so condescending.

You know, I'm going to fool you now.

I'm going to do something that really plays with your mind in a certain way.

And it just felt condescending to me.

And so that, even though I think I'm guilty of having written some metafictions, particularly early on, I think that I was more interested in a form of communication that wasn't laboring under the idea of I have to fool you.

You know, I have to do something that you have to figure out, you know.

I was wondering if you've moved towards different projects in your writing in terms of what you're trying to achieve.