1Edward Paul Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C. Though his mother, the head of his family, was uneducated and their life was a struggle, he did well at school. He attended Walker Jones Elementary School, Shaw Junior High, Cardozo High School, then the College of the Holy Cross and the University of Virginia. He is best known as the author of two collections of short stories, Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), and of a novel, The Known World (2003). His short stories mostly deal with the experiences of Southern-born African Americans in Washington D.C., while his novel focuses on a Virginia plantation run by a black slave owner. Jones has earned many distinctions for his fiction—twice shortlisted for the National Book Award, he received the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Lannan Literary Award for Lost in the City and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the International Dublin Literary Award for The Known World; he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005 and a PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story in 2010. He has worked for magazines, taught creative writing at various universities, and since 2010 has been on the faculty of George Washington University.

2Jones was kind enough to grant me the following interview for this Special Issue on his short fiction in a Paris-Washington Skype in 2022. In my call for papers, I had mentioned the transformative power of his fiction, and I felt that by broaching questions on change in his life and work I might plumb a rich vein. Though forthcoming about his eventful life, Jones did not seem to agree with my premise that change is at the basis of both his experience and his craft—but he did point out how far from his original expectations his writing has taken him, saying that when he was young, he “never thought about writing fiction.”

A.M.: Some of the things I am going to ask you have already been discussed in previous interviews. I hope that you won’t mind going into them again for readers who are new to your work.

You were born in Washington D.C. in 1950. Your life has been one of change: wasn’t your childhood marked by it?

E.P.J.: Well, change in that by the time that I was 18, we had lived in 18 different places in Washington. So just about every year, every two years or so, we were moving. And that was because my mother had low-paying jobs, and then we would move into some place, and the places almost always had flaws, so we would have to move out and find something that we thought might be better; but inevitably that new place turned out to be nasty. After that, things were not as bad, [and] I went off to college.

A.M.: You went to Holy Cross: you had to move to Massachusetts.

E.P.J.: Yes, and I was rather homesick for about two weeks or so, and then I decided to flow with it. … In the first semester I switched from Math to English, and there were one or two Creative Writing courses.

A.M.: Could tell me about the creative writing courses at Holy Cross? What did you learn that was of value?

E.P.J.: I had one fiction writing course at Holy Cross College. Professor Maurice Géracht, who was born in France and, I believe, spent time in a concentration camp as a boy. (I may have that all wrong, the camp part.)

This course was in the fall of 1969. The college had never had a creative writing course, and Géracht was a scholar of 19th century British novels. He did not write fiction, so it was all new. I can’t say I got a lot from the course, because I was just starting out, finding my way. The important thing I got from Géracht was that I had talent, that writing fiction was certainly something to pursue.

A.M.: When did you first hope to become a writer?

E.P.J.: I don’t think I ever hoped to. I think it was just a matter of… When I got to college, I increasingly began to understand that there were things that I could do, and there were things that I did not want to do. I took the first full-fledged Creative Writing course when I was a sophomore in college, and the professor had nice things to say about what I did. But even with that, I wasn’t really serious about any sort of a writing career. One of the things that happens is that with poor people, you don’t have a situation where…Your parents, if they’re professionals, they bring for dinner writers, doctors or lawyers, you know, and you’re sitting across from these people at dinner and they’re talking and talking about their lives, and somewhere along the line, as a child, you begin to think, ‘Oh, I might want to be a lawyer one day.’ That never happened with me and my mother and my sister. We didn’t have that kind of life. There are many people in this country who grow up with parents who have gone to college—I had a mother who couldn’t even read or write. So you don’t enter into a world where there are a lot of possibilities. Maybe you think about being a postman, maybe you think about being a policeman, but beyond that, no. Thinking about being a doctor is never anything that ever crosses your mind. Once I went to college, I think even with the writing course, I didn’t think about becoming a writer; I’d think maybe about being a journalist, perhaps. And I did apply to some journalism schools, and I think I got into one or two, but I never followed up on that. So, once I left college, I got some temporary work working for the National Park Service—and my job was just to write press releases. They would bring in the national Christmas tree to be on the National Mall, and I would write about how tall the tree was and where it came from and all of that. And so that was my life from ’72 to ’75, when my mother died, and then I went to Philadelphia.

A.M.: Didn’t you change jobs quite a lot?

E.P.J.: Not really. I had been with my mother after college from ’72 to ’75. And then she died, the first day of ’75, and I went to stay in Philadelphia. And I was there for about a year or so, then I came back to Washington, and I stayed in Washington until ’79 at the same job. And then I went to graduate school.

A.M.: What was the job?

E.P.J.: It was for the Association for the Advancement of Science. And in all those years, all I did was, I was on the telephone, and I would call up these scientists and ask them, would they look at these papers, see if they had merit enough to be published. And then I went to grad school and I came back in ’83. And I had the same job at Tax Notes [an industry publication for tax professionals] from ‘83 to 2003 or something like that, I was there for over 20 years.

A.M.: And you wrote your first stories…

E.P.J.: Actually, I wrote the first story [“Harvest”] in 1975. And I sent it to a Black woman’s magazine, Essence. I’d sent [the story] when I was in Philadelphia, so Essence magazine had the address in Philadelphia, and when I moved back to Washington the people in Philadelphia failed to send on notices from the magazine. So, the first thing I knew about the story being published was in the month that it was published. It was a nice surprise, of course, but I would have liked to have known earlier. So, they published the story without my permission—even though of course I guess permission is granted because I did send the story in to them. That was ’76 when the story came out. … And when I was in Philadelphia … I worked for this community center, and they wanted to write a history of this building, because it had been built in the 1800s or something. So I would travel outside of Philadelphia to the library at some college looking for material about when that building was first built and all the people that lived in it until it became the community center. … I didn’t do any more writing until I got to grad school.

A.M.: At the University of Virginia…

E.P.J.: Yes, that was in 1979.

A.M.: Please tell me more about the creative writing program at University of Virginia, what you found valuable there.

E.P.J.: By the time I got to the University of Virginia, I was 29 years old and had been writing since I left college in ‘72. I had had one story published (Essence). I had, then, a sense of how I wanted to put things together, fiction-wise; I was well on my way to developing my own style. I got praise from the fiction writing professors, but I can't say I learned a great deal—I was an adult and not some kid just starting out. I hope that makes sense.

I got far more from the literature courses. I took advantage of the opportunity to read things I never had. The Bible as Literature is especially worth noting. I read bits and pieces over the years, but the course allowed me to read just about all of the Bible, and the course was taught by a professor who knew his stuff. When it came time to write my novel, I knew enough of the Bible to use it in the book.

I had a Chaucer course and one that dealt with American southern literature. If you are going to write, you should know as much as possible about what others have written.

One thing—a creative writing teacher can’t “teach” that. The professor can only be an editor or a kind of cheerleader, can tell the student what is working and what is not. So much that a writer comes to know is “learned” through the work of other writers.

And then there is something the world might call talent. A teacher can’t teach that.

A.M.: How did you go from writing for grad school to writing Lost in the City?

E.P.J.: Well, when I got out of grad school in 1982, I continued to live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I did some teaching at the University of Virginia. And then finally in 1983 I moved back up to the Washington D.C. area, and I got the job at Tax Notes. But from that time in ‘83 to something like ‘89 or ‘90, I didn’t do very much writing that I can recall. And then what happened is that there were two men at Tax Notes who both wanted to be writers and they died. And I felt it was foolish to live my life without writing when there were two men dead who really would have liked to become writers. So I started working on the stories in Lost in the City. And in ’92, the book came out.

A.M.: Lost in the City was well received, but with your novel The Known World, you attained fame: the Pulitzer Prize. That must have been a big change.

E.P.J.: Yes, some nice things happened with Lost in the City, but in America, if you’re a new writer, and if you have a little book of stories, you don’t get the kind of recognition that might come with a novel. From ’92 or ’93, I got the idea for The Known World and what I told myself was that I had to research, because the book is about slavery in Virginia in 1855. So I had all these books that I intended to read about American slavery and I just never got around to them. And after about 10 years, when I realized I would never get to the research, I just started writing—because over ten years, it had built up in a very general way in my head. And I just decided to start writing and use the knowledge that I had of that world in 1855, and not bother about reading the books. While I was writing the book, I lost my job at Tax Notes that I’d had for about 20 years. And then I wrote the book, and then of course nice things started to happen.

A.M.: Were you surprised at the recognition that the book brought?

E.P.J.: Yes, I was, because I know that in this country there are people who have worked hard and who have many, many books, and who never get any sort of recognition. So yes, I never, ever, not once, not even one second, thought that wonderful things would come to me because of the novel. That’s not the way I think. I tend to be on the negative side in my thinking. So yes, I was wonderfully surprised.

A.M.: And the second book of short stories, All Aunt Hagar’s Children?

E.P.J.: In the early 2000s, I believe, I started getting ideas for the second book of stories. And I started working on them when I was still working on the novel—I thought it would be nice to have a change in the course of writing the novel, come back to the business of the novel with a bit of a fresh mind. So I worked on those stories, and then All Aunt Hagar’s Children was published in 2006.

A.M.: Were any stories told in your family? I know your mother was very busy, but did she ever tell you stories?

E.P.J.: They weren’t stories, they were just about her life growing up in the South. She had a hard life, and she was moved from family member to family member. Her parents had I think, seven or eight children, and they didn’t always have the money to take care of them. So she remembered a life—I don’t know how long it lasted—with a particularly cruel grandmother, and then there was another grandmother, I don’t know if it was the paternal or the maternal grandmother, who she remembered with great fondness.

A.M.: What was the effect on you of these recollections that she shared?

E.P.J.: I didn’t think much beyond the fact that I knew what her life was like, and I didn’t set them aside in my head to remember them at a time when I might be writing fiction, because I never thought about writing fiction. But the things that she said, what food was like, and everything, I suppose I did store them away in my brain, just because I have that kind of memory.

A.M.: You’ve said that you also stored up her speech mannerisms.

E.P.J.: Yes, she had, of course, this Southern way of talking, and I think that I try to use that, and it’s very difficult to describe, because it’s not like I ever recorded what she said, but Southern people have, at times, a fanciful way of talking, at times poetic. And I try to use that in writing, especially when I come to the way people talk in dialogue.

A.M.: Did you imagine stories when you were a boy, as well? Did you use to make up any sort of stories?

E.P.J.: No, that never happened. The only thing I can remember is that in high school, I wrote some sort of half fictional piece for an English class, and I think it was about some guy in like 1880, who for the first time experienced canned peaches. And I don’t remember anything more about that, but he was enamored of being able to, whatever time of the year it was, to be able to open the peaches and enjoy them.

And when I was a senior in high school, there was a program on Saturday mornings for some high school students. I think that was the first real full-fledged fiction writing that I did. Prior to that it was just things like the guy with his can of peaches. I wrote a story about a boy who gets on a Trailways bus (Trailways and Greyhound at that time were national buses) in Washington I believe it was, and then he goes to sleep, and when he wakes up he’s in East Berlin. And I didn’t have any reason for that happening, that’s just what I did. And I don’t remember what happened to him after that. I think it may have been a two- or three-page exercise.

A.M.: When you began reading books, what did you think of the writers?

E.P.J.: I think I read the first book that wasn’t a comic book in 1964, and it was a British mystery. And I think up until then the books that I’d read were mostly comic books, which of course were full of drawings, and also fairy tales, folk tales, and all of those came with at least one picture. So when I came to this British mystery, I think what fascinated me was the fact that I could picture these people just based on the words that the writer wrote, which had never been the case before.

A.M.: Would you say that despite all the change that has come to you with the success of your writing, there are constants in your life?

E.P.J.: Well… Because of all the moving around when I was a child, I’m not inclined to move very much. So I was in Arlington, Virginia, across the river from Washington from 1983 to, like, 2004. And I’ve been here in Washington now since 2004. And, I don’t know, if something comes up, then I might well move, but things are not so bad here. The only problem is that the apartment is an absolute mess, and my mother, if she saw it, would be ashamed of me.

A.M.: Well, I have a question about that. You live in the city, in what you have often described as relatively Spartan surroundings. Yet you write so well about nature and about comfortable home situations. I am thinking about the country in “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” about the family dinners in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” and the cooking and gardening in “Adam Robinson,” and even about Roxanne’s comforting morning in her room as the snow falls in “Blindsided.” Do these passages come naturally to you?

E.P.J.: Well, I am not sure about naturally, because these people are all made up. It’s a struggle to get the words out. I think if I were writing about myself, or about friends or family, it would come a little more easily, because the stories are already there, and you just have to put them down on paper. But when you are imagining people who never existed, then it becomes a bit harder. I think that once the people take shape, then it becomes your job to make the world they live in live for the reader. In the case of Roxanne, this woman has been struck blind, and she’s not a very nice person to begin with, so the story is about her struggle to come to terms with the blindness, and the comfort she feels at the end comes after a certain amount of struggle and heartache, so it’s a kind of earned pleasantness.

Almost all the adults that I knew in Washington growing up were people from the South, including my mother. They’d grown up in a rural area of the South, and I never knew that, except through books that I read about the South, or what they told me as a child. So a lot of that is simply made up.

A.M.: Yes, your daily experience was different from what they had known. The African Americans that you write about in your short stories are people who have originally come from the South, like your mother. Do you base them on people you have known?

E.P.J.: They’re all made up. With All Aunt Hagar’s Children, what I endeavored to do was have people in those stories come from a variety of Southern states. The people are from Mississippi and Alabama and everything. But in fact, most of the people, if not all of them, that I knew, had come from North and South Carolina, and maybe Virginia—so they came from a particular area. But with the fiction, I wanted to step beyond that.

A.M.: And you are putting them in a situation of change to begin with, aren’t you, as they come to D.C.?

E.P.J.: Yes. You have at the end of All Aunt Hagar’s Children the story “Tapestry”—this woman comes from Mississippi. And she knows in that train ride that she’s entering into a world and into a life that is far different from what she knew in Mississippi. And in all the other stories, like in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” these three girls come from Alabama, and the reason why they travel from there is different from what happens to the woman in “Tapestry.” In the story “Common Law” there is a woman who had killed her abusive husband. She arrives in Washington for a different reason, to escape whatever law there is that might be looking for her…

A.M.: Miss Judy, yes. And when they’re in D.C. it’s a change for them. You complexify each personal story, and you have a population that is in a state of change from their origins.

E.P.J.: Yes, and it’s an inevitable situation in that so many of them come when they are still young and still new to the world. So they’re plucked up from places where the nearest neighbor might be many, many yards away and they live by candles or kerosene lamps, and then [they] come to a city where there are streetlamps, something they are new to, and for many of them—like the woman in “Marie,” in Lost in the City, she has this notion that so many wonderful things can get done in Washington because it’s the capital of America. And even though she doesn’t have the best life, America still stands for something, so there’s the possibility of wonderful things happening.

A.M.: You were talking about streetlamps. Your stories are often set in the past. Is there a reason for this? Is it linked to what the current overall situation for African Americans in D.C. is today?

E.P.J.: No, I think it’s just because I was born in 1950 and the world began coming at me in those years, in the 1950s and 1960s. So much of what I am was planted in my brain in those years, so if I think of some woman walking down the street, there is a good possibility that she is walking down it in the 1950s or the 1960s. And again, so much came to me, growing up, in those early years before I was 18. So things are quite clear and solid in my head then, far more than the years after I was 19.

A.M.: Your D.C. setting is realistic, as many commentators have pointed out. Do you ever make up street addresses and landmarks?

E.P.J.: No, no. If I say someone lived on French Street, for example, just around the corner from 10th Street where I lived—I never lived on French Street, but I know it’s a narrow street and it just goes from 10th to 9th Street and that’s it.

A.M.: Do you have a map of the city in your head?

E.P.J.: Yes, but a map of the Northwest section. And it’s rare that any characters live outside of Northwest. “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” for example, she does live in Northeast, but she just lives a few yards beyond the street where you go into Northeast. But almost all of the other people live in Northwest, and that’s because that’s where I lived growing up. In the story “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed” these four girls travel far, far into Southeast, Anacostia, but that was because I didn’t have a place far enough in Northwest to make them go and then have this journey there and a journey back, but all of them are Northwest girls.

A.M.: How much artistic license do you give yourself to transform real-life data?

E.P.J.: Well, I want to make certain that if I give a number, an address, that’s a real place. In the story “Blindsided,” the woman lives at 1708 10th Street, and that’s where we lived. I think it helps, and I would never really ask myself how this comes about, but I think I just need to see these people in real places. The young man in “The Store”—that was a real store, I’d gone there as a boy, bought candy, so I knew the layout, as soon as you’d go in, to the left there was a little pipe that you’d get kerosene from… And it helps, I think, to put this young man in a place that I knew very well. And I think that I could have forced myself to come up with a store that was not a real place, but it helps to be able to put them in real places, even though they’re made-up people. And … when I did Lost in the City, I wanted characters to wander in and out all the stories, so that ultimately, the reader would feel as if it was one big neighborhood. But … it didn’t happen as often as I had wanted it to.

A.M.: We do get that feeling. Yet for your narrators in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” or “The Store,” the city is the place of transience, of the fleeting. Would you say your characters ever find something of lasting value in their experience of the city?

E.P.J.: I don’t know, because so many of the people are at a stage in life where they have not come to the point where they think too much about the past, so many of the people are not like Marie, who is I think in her eighties and can look back and think about how she got to that moment in her life. So the stories are not necessarily about people looking back, and commenting to themselves about their lives in the city. There’s so much more life to be lived for these characters. And then you come after all of that to a state where you think, ok, had I not been living on this street, I might have become a different person, or had I not met so-and-so at the supermarket, I might have become a different person; they’re not at that stage yet. So many of them are still new to life, still living their lives.

I tend not to think that Washington in itself has given them very much in terms of making up their character. If they had been born in Baltimore, Chicago, San Antonio, L.A., I think they would have turned out to be the same people. So it’s not necessarily the city itself, it just so happens that they live in that city. I think they would have been doing the same things, whether mistakes or not, wherever they lived in this country.

A.M.: In the story “Marie,” for example, you show Washington’s senseless bureaucracy, which infuriates a patient old woman. Would that have been the same anywhere?

E.P.J.: Yes, she goes to the Social Security Administration. If she’d gone to that place in St. Louis, it would have happened to her. If she’d gone to that place in Chicago, it would have happened to her. And given who she is as a person, having come to be in her eighties, she would have reacted the same way.

A.M.: So apart from the promise that some characters feel it holds, why do you set all of your stories in Washington D.C.?

E.P.J.: I don’t know any substantial portion of any other city but Washington. Why place characters in an alien place, a place I was not born and raised in, a place where I didn’t know the people? I could fake it, perhaps, but it would be fake. As for where the characters originally came from, I had no choice but to imagine.

If Washington was known for having plantations, I would have placed my novel there and not invented an imaginary Manchester County.

A.M.: Why do you think that so many commentators see you as questioning the power of the white capitalistic establishment?

E.P.J.: One of the things I’ve always said is that I am not the best critic of what I have done. There are things in what I do that I’m not always aware of. And I’ve always likened it to this: Say you were raised by your grandmother, and she is the most beloved figure in your life. Now this grandmother loves the color blue; whatever she can have—coats, furniture, carpeting, that’s blue, she will go with that. So when you get to the point where you are writing things, you will never have the devil show up in a blue suit. But you don’t always think about those kinds of things—I don’t, at least. In this novel, I made up things, generally. I made up names. So often with me, because these people have lives before I give them names, when you were mentioning characters’ names, I have to think a while, because I know who they are, but I don’t recall their names. The only time I think I consciously set out to give someone a name was in the novel and I named this woman Celeste, because she is the most angelic figure in the book. But I don’t always do this, because I’m not the kind of person who thinks a name is indicative of the kind of character they have, so that’s only in this one instance. So again, you’re writing, and you just know in your head, you don’t know what groove in your mind this kind of stuff comes from, but the central part of your life growing up, the central thing in your life that made you the man or the woman that you are, is the grandmother who was in love with the color blue. Or you like certain foods, say, and you don’t know where that came from, it’s just something that’s in you and you will dislike other foods. It’s just a part of your makeup, your DNA.

A.M.: Among the national and international events that you have lived through, are there any that had a particular impact?

E.P.J.: Well, Washington D.C. of course is the capital of the United States. But the workings of the Federal Government in this city really didn’t have any impact on me as I grew up. The workings of the Government were far away, you know, blocks and blocks away, and my life involved primarily going to school, and coming home and playing with my friends and doing my homework, and then the next day going back to school… And then during the summers, playing and playing and playing. In 1963, when they had the great march on Washington, when Martin Luther King gave his speech, “I Have a Dream,” I remember coming in from playing, and we had this used black and white TV, and I turned it on and they had the march on TV, and it didn’t interest me. So I went outside to play. So these events of the world and of this country were happening, but they were not at all having any impact on me. It was only when I got to college that I began to see things in a worldwide view. The Viet Nam war was going on, and so you could not help but be swept up in all of that. I went to many, many marches in college—but marching before college was something that I had never even considered.

A.M.: Well, that makes sense, when you consider how young you were.

E.P.J.: Yes, I was a child, of course. Yet my mother worked at a French restaurant that was maybe ten blocks away from that march on Washington in ‘63. But my mother struggled every single day to make a living for herself and her children, she didn’t have the luxury of being able to get involved in politics, and she didn’t read or write, so she was not really caught up in any great sense in what was going on in the rest of the world. She was too busy trying to make a living.

A.M.: Of course. I’d like to ask about a characteristic feature of your prose—what have been called the deictic shifts, especially the “fast forward” passages in which you announce what changes will befall the characters. For example, at the start of “A New Man,” you write of 52-year-old Woodrow L. Cunningham, who is the chief engineer at the Sheraton Park Hotel, and you say when he is going to die. “He would be in that same position some thirteen years later, when death happened upon him as he bent down over a hotel bathroom sink, about to do a job a younger engineer claimed he could not handle” (Lost 203).

E.P.J.: Yes. Again, that I think, is the kind of thing where you can’t say exactly where that comes from. … I think somewhere along the line, I suppose I had the idea that a character’s life is a line, and you pick things, the past, the present, the future, whatever it is, to inform the reader. So it just so happened that with Woodrow, it seemed important, in that first paragraph, to say how he would die. And you can say those kinds of things as long as you don’t confuse the reader.

A.M.: Do you feel that you make different points each time you use this technique?

E.P.J.: No, you come to a character and that’s just the way it is.

A.M.: You use it at the end of “Common Law,” for example, with Georgia.

E.P.J.: That was because she has gone through a lot, and it just seemed that it was important for the reader to see these leaps in her life. And again, I can’t give you a proper and logical assessment of why that is, it’s just that you write, and you write, and write, and then you come to this moment where it all has to end, and so this is what you do, that’s what you say about this character. And I think because she had gone through so much, especially with this guy in her life, that it was clear and proper that I say all those things about her. And another aspect of this is that you learn certain things in the reading. I tell my students that the best foundation for becoming this writer thing is reading. So you learn, most of the time, over many novels and many short stories, reading, that this thing is possible, this thing you can do. So in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” for example, there is this long paragraph about what she does with the pigeons from day to day, and I think she first began to raise pigeons when she was 8 or 9. And it seemed when I got to the end of that, that there was a need for something more. And so I ended that paragraph, and began a new paragraph and said, “She turned ten. She turned eleven.” Where that came from, I don’t know, but it seemed good, again, proper and right, that I should do that.

A.M.: Are you aware that much of what you write is both amusing and tragic? That the reader comes away with conflicting emotions?

E.P.J.: Again, I’m not the best critic of what I’ve done. I think—ultimately, of course, you want to be entertaining. And I think the one thing I’m most aware of is that the language should be as poetic as you possibly can make it. And then, the story should be engaging. And my thought process leans more toward the tragic, probably. Because I think if I’d been born and raised in some sort of idyllic world, where you never had to worry about paying the rent, you never had to worry about the next meal, then my outlook probably would have been better, but that’s not the way it was. I saw my mother walk to this job—mostly she worked for many years at this restaurant—and she was ill a lot of the time, and I think she probably suffered from depression, but she would not have been able to articulate that. So when you see this poor woman in this world struggling day after day after day, then you don’t have the most positive outlook. So if the stories lean toward the tragic, that’s just the way I saw the world growing up.

A.M.: Despite all this, do you believe that in a constantly changing life, some positive qualities can be acquired as we learn along the way? Some of your stories suggest that.

E.P.J.: The guy in “The Store” certainly isn’t the same person at the end, and there is a kind of positive feel in that he begins college in a place that is in a different world, a different part of Washington D.C., and I always thought that was a positive end to the story.

A.M.: And I’m thinking of “The First Day,” “Old Boys, Old Girls,” or “Adam Robinson”: We get the feeling that something favorable is taking place.

E.P.J.: In those instances, it’s just, again, the way I saw the stories working out. I think probably, from the first sentence, that’s the way I see it. It’s always moving towards the last paragraphs. And there is an inevitability about it—it’s going to happen that way no matter what. I mean “Adam Robinson” is going to end up with these two loving grandparents, and a loving sister. And that is the way it’s going to be from the very first line, when we see his grandparents are going to pick him up.

A.M.: Do you always have the ending firmly in mind when you begin a short story?

E.P.J.: I try to. And when I talk to students, I tell them, if you have an ending in mind, then when you make the journey towards the ending, you are kept honest. If you don’t have the ending, then you’re all over the place. And always believe that the ending you come up with isn’t necessarily the one that the reader thought would happen. I liken this to someone getting in a car and traveling to Baltimore from Washington—Baltimore is about 40 miles away—and if you know your destination is always going to be Baltimore, then you can travel on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, and if you see a sign for a town you’ve never heard of before, you can take a detour and spend hours in that town, but you know you’ll always get back on the road to Baltimore. But if you don’t know your destination is Baltimore, then you’re in that town and things are not the way the reader thought they would be. I tell students this, there’s a writer in the U.S. called Mary Gordon, and the first thing I read by her, I think it was called Answered Prayers, it was in the 1970s and I think it was her first novel—and the first two-thirds I thought were wonderful, and the last third just was not worthy of the first two-thirds. And I’ve never met her, but I suspect that maybe she just woke up one morning with a good idea for a novel and decided to take the car on the road, and didn’t have a clear idea of how everything would end up. You get lost along the way if you don’t have a clear idea.

A.M.: Do you think that literature plays a role in changing individual insight? Have you found this to be true in your case?

E.P.J.: No, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that said to me, You should maybe reconsider what you’re doing every day.

A.M.: Or what you think?

E.P.J.: No. I think my ideas have always been sort of solidified, and nothing puts me on a different path, that I read.

A.M.: Because for many, you are an architect of change through your stories. Does this strike you as surprising?

E.P.J.: Yes, because it’s not anything I ever thought about; again, it’s just a piece of fiction. I never write anything in an effort to change anyone’s mind. I never write anything that has an agenda. These people are characters, and they are not out to change some reader’s mind.

A.M.: You teach fiction writing at George Washington University. Do you find yourself giving guidelines to your students about the need for change in their fiction, in the plot, for example?

E.P.J.: Yes, I tell them that whether it’s one character or two characters, that there should be a difference made at the end. So again, in small ways or large ways, the character at the end shouldn’t be the same as he or she was at the beginning. Sometimes, of course, that changes, and it’s a situation where the character realizes that they will never change. So in a sense, that’s a kind of change.

A.M.: Consciousness…

E.P.J.: Yes, you’re going on the wrong path, and you know that you can never get off that path.

A.M.: How do you recommend changes to their work?

E.P.J.: It all depends on the individual story, so there’s no hard and fast rule, you can only go with whatever character you’re dealing with in that particular story. I don’t use any literature by other people, and when I think that maybe the semester might call for it, at a time when we might need to read other people’s work, I generally recommend only one or two stories—one is Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation,” and the other is Alice Walker’s “The Flowers.” In “The Flowers,” which is only two pages, there’s this little girl, picking flowers for her mother. And she comes upon this skeleton. And it doesn’t bother her, at that point. But what changes her entire outlook is the fact that she sees a noose around the skeleton’s neck. I think it says she puts down the flowers, and the last line is something like “And the summer was over.” So the little girl who set out that morning to pick flowers is not the same at the end.

A.M.: Do you ever tell them about the writing ultimately making a change?

E.P.J.: Only in the character, that’s it. In terms of a change in society’s mind, no, I don’t bother about that.

A.M.: And how about a change in oneself?

E.P.J.: I suppose I don’t really put too much store in a work changing anybody.

A.M.: What is next? You have said in interviews that you were considering writing stories set in the South. Does that still appeal to you?

E.P.J.: Yes, the thing is that you have to come up with ideas. Again, the stories have to be entertaining, and they have to be solid, to be acceptable. And you have to make sure that most, if not all of the lines are a pleasure to read. I don’t get up every morning thinking about what I should do. In fact I do laundry, that’s the first thing I do.

A.M.: About the lines being a pleasure to read, I have read that you had them run through your head before you write them down.

E.P.J.: I don’t know if I’d still do that if I sat down tomorrow and started writing. But I used to read stuff a lot.

A.M.: Is that to get the sound of them just right?

E.P.J.: Yes. But I think I’ve gotten over that, I don’t think I’d probably do that anymore. It’s enough to just read it in my head.

A.M.: Please say a little more about how you go about crafting your prose. Do you wait for the inspiration for each line or do you try several alternatives? How do you work? Do you rewrite a lot?

E.P.J.: This is not easy to answer. I do make every effort to have my sentences read as poetically as possible. Now and again I will read things out loud. The reader should have a good, solid story to read, and it should be pleasurable—like reading poetry.

If you have nothing to say, then there is no use forcing it, so I suppose I do wait for inspiration. The important thing is knowing what the ending of the story will be. I don’t like sitting down and asking what should come next. The ending is already in my head, and it's just a matter of writing and traveling to the ending. The trip can be a hard one.

I rewrite as much as is necessary.

A.M.: Would you like to add anything for European readers?

E.P.J.: I never thought that I would get this far, in terms of writing. You start out and you hope that something good will happen but … I don’t think okay, I’ll write this and wonderful things will happen. So everything is a surprise all the way down the line. I’m happy, of course, that people are reading what I’ve done, but … I never sat around daydreaming—that’s not the way I live my life.