I spoke to Adam Haslett on the Monday evening before Halloween. He was finishing his fifth day at Yaddo—a writers' retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York—and looking forward to another month there. For most of the fall, Adam had been promoting the paperback version of his well-received collection of short stories You Are Not a Stranger Here. I had a lively conversation with Adam, who, game and funny, spoke with me for almost an hour from a payphone vestibule in Yaddo's main house.

Folio: To start, I really do appreciate your making the time to talk with us. The collection is called You Are Not a Stranger Here, and that seems to me to be a little bit in conflict with what the stories are about. Where did the title come from? What does it actually mean to you?

AH: Well I guess I think of the title as an invitation, or a welcoming declaration to people whose experience, I believe, for one reason or another, may not be often represented in a lot of other media. So, to me, the "you" in the title is to people who in some ways, whether surrounded by lots of people or not, are nonetheless isolated in their experience.

It's sort of a recognition of forms of experience, or ways of looking at the world, or particular kinds of suffering that are not usually the subject of most TV, film, or popular culture.

Folio: So the invitation is to people who don't get to see themselves represented. That's great. And how did you pick the order of the stories in the book?

AH: The task, as it turned out, was mainly the job of keeping certain stories away from other stories. I knew I wanted the first one first and the last one last, and between them it was just a kind of checker game to group them—there were just certain ones I didn't want to follow hard on others. And so it turned out to be three American, four British and then two American again. But that was more coincidental than anything.

Folio: Do you have a favorite story in the collection?

AH: I don't really have a favorite. I think the one that I'm still probably closest to—and even that is now beginning to fade a bit—is the last story in the book (ed. note: "The Volunteer"). It's the one that I happened to write chronologically last (although the rest of the book is not chronologically ordered) and I think that I remained, you know during the time the book was out, closest to it just because I'd finished it most recently. My mind was still sort of inside the characters, so I felt the desire to read that one more than others but I don't know that that really amounts to a favorite.

Folio: The New York Times review by Craig Seligman talked a lot about the desolation and despair in your stories. What draws you to that, and how do you maintain—this is assuming you do maintain—your own equilibrium when writing? What draws you to dealing with those issues, mental illness specifically, and how do you maintain your own day-to-day when diving into them?

AH:There's several things I could answer there—several dimensions to the question. On the one hand, the second story in the book—"The Good Doctor"—is actually (although in retrospect—I don't think I realized this when I was writing it) the closest I came to writing a story about a writer. At one point I actually make a simile to the effect that his relationship to his patients is like a writer's relationship to his characters. And so I think there is this sense in which fiction is a way to order the world and make sense of things that don't make sense. And so, one of the answers is: I write. One of the ways I manage the material and get on in the world is that I write about it.

As to the mental illness stuff, yes, there was mental illness in my family, so, there's some of that from personal experience, though a number of the stories—the last one in particular—the mental illness dimension really kind of came later in the process. That is to say, I got interested and began writing about a character who was hearing voices, who had lost a child, and at a certain point in the process—in terms of plausibility when I was setting it—I realized this woman's going to have to be diagnosed. So it wasn't so much like, oh, now here's the schizophrenic story. Though it's obvious in retrospect, and people are certainly fair enough in pointing it out, it did take me back a bit the degree to which mental illness became a kind of headline. Just because I certainly at no point thought to myself "Oh, I've written a collection of stories about mental illness." I mean some of them aren't. But there we are.

Folio: Following up on that, your characters are incredibly distinct. In particular, you said earlier that you knew the first story, "Notes to My Biographer," had to be the first story, and there is such momentum to the prose and the character and the voice in it. And the narrator is, yet again, another character with a mental illness of a sort. So here's the question: Where does the story come from, both in the case of "Notes to My Biographer" and in general. Does it come from that character idea?

AH: A lot of the stories, and that one in particular as the most obvious example, come, somewhat randomly, from the rhythm of the language that I for some reason, one day, found myself writing. I mean, it's sort of like I'm going along, scraping away, trying to put something on the page, and —you know, I actually wrote the first paragraph of "Notes to My Biographer," more or less as it is now, in one day, and the man was just on the page. I mean, there he was. What he would do. Once I heard that rhythm, he started talking—that sounds too literary—as if I actually heard his voice—but the language had such rhythm that it suggested more of itself.

Folio: I think a lot of writers can identify with that. The characters start to tell you who they are.

AH: Right. You hear it. And to me, specifically, even beyond character within a story it can be—it's like scoring music. I hear a certain rhythm or cadence in the language and the task of the next sentence is to sort of fall in line in some measure. To keep that rhythm and not break it. Because that's so much of the power you have over the reader: to lull them with the rhythm beneath the level of the semantic content.

Folio: Which is an accomplishment.

AH: Well, it's the goal. For me, at least.

Folio: You are on fellowship at Yaddo right now. You mentioned McDowell Colony. You studied at the Iowa Writer's Center, and you did a Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachussetts. Which of those, or what about individual elements of those are the most valuable to you? What has been the most valuable to you as a writer, and toward accomplishing your goals as a writer, and why?

AH: Well, I suppose Provincetown was seminal because it was the first thing, and you know, it was long and it gave me a huge amount of time. I mean, all of them—and it's trite almost to say it—but basically the key is that they all give you time. And a lack of distraction. And they're not in a huge urban center. So, they kind of allow you to block out a lot of stimuli. So, I suppose I have a particular fondness for and attachment to Provincetown as a kind of place that gave me support very early on. But they're all places where I've just been allowed to focus.

Folio: What teachers or authors have been of great inspiration to you?

AH: Both Marilyn Robinson and Frank Conroy were very good teachers, I think. In very, very different ways. Marilyn being much more intellectually oriented and Frank much more practically and technically oriented. They were both also inspiring—good teachers are—by the example of the kind of life lived. You know, which is not without its ups and downs (laughter). But, I guess they were a kind of model of a certain kind of dedication and devotion to the task that served as a kind of inspiration.

Folio: Favorite authors? Favorite book? I know it's an awful question. What are you reading right now?

AH: Right now I'm reading Mrs. Dalloway, which I haven't read since college. When it comes to short story, the two people I return to most regularly, to sort of learn things, are William Trevor and Joy Williams. These are two people who manage in the short story—you see it more often in the novel—to get the path of their subject and their characters right down into the grammar. That's more difficult to accomplish in the short story but they both do it.

Folio: What about the novel? Your short story collection was obviously a great success, and you are now beginning a novel. What's the most exciting part of that? The scariest? How do you find it different from writing short stories?

AH: Well, the most exciting part is being able to—and this is the most obvious—just have a bigger canvas, and not having to always cut so mercilessly and you know, feel that everything has to be exactly in line with the ending. So, I think that sense of space is what's exciting. What's frightening is that I have no idea what I'm doing, and it's something I've never done before. I'm not somebody who has three unpublished novels in my drawer or anything. I've just never done it. I think the fears are sort of the basic ones. Fear one: the inadequacy to do what you're doing.

Folio: And how do you do it? What's your writing process? What kicks you off on a story—the cadences you mentioned? Do you have regimen?

AH: When I'm working it's 9a.m. until 2 or 3p.m., six days a week. And, I mean, I don't know. I just sort of sit there, I think. I spend a huge amount of time staring out the window. I'm not somebody who tends to write a great deal down and then edit. I tend to edit sentences in my head multiple times before writing them. Typing them.

Folio: What about writer's block? Is that the staring out the window you described?

AH: I don't know. It never sort of struck me as such, which is not to say that there aren't periods when I don't write, but I guess when I'm not writing it's as if there's some problem inside of what I'm doing. Which is not to say there aren't miserable stretches of time when I'm jailed outside of the work. But "block" isn't the way I think of it, exactly. Anyway, semantics.

Folio:Do you instinctively prefer first or third person narrators?

AH: Prefer is not exactly the word, but I think instinctively I hit the third person. I sort of default to third person. I do think there's something terribly liberating about first person, but I often find it too much.

Folio: I'm terrified of third person. Whenever I attempt it, it becomes a journal entry.

AH: It's one of those things that appears like it would make everything easy but in fact it makes things more difficult.

Folio: Still, you've got this incredible range of characters. You've got young people, old people, gay people, straight people, people who are surviving, people who are falling apart. Do any of those lend themselves more obviously to first or third? Are any more difficult to write?

AH: Well, I think "Notes to My Biographer" would be either impossible or dull if it were not in the first person. You know it's being inside his head which is the conjuring trick. So that story, the first person voice is integral to it. And again, I think it's that rhythm thing. If something strikes you and the rhythm is in a first person voice, then that's the internal mystery-slash-necessity within the piece that you're trying to unravel. But, if it comes in third, it comes in third. Again, it's very rarely planned in advance.

Folio:Which brings us to the last few questions.

AH: Yes!

Folio: Not to belabor the point, but there's a great deal of resignation and hopelessness in so many of the stories. The last story, however ("The Volunteer") seems to offer a real sense of redemption; there's the beauty of when she goes off the meds, and the darkness too. And then there's this young kid who's this really good kid and not necessarily screwed up. Was "The Volunteer" placed there simply because it was chronologically the last story you wrote, or was it intended to leave the reader with a note of hope?

AH: Well, I think one of the reasons it was put there is because of Hester's last line, which is: "You and all the inheritors of wealth who think life is a matter of perfected sentiment. You are wrong." That felt to me like the closest I was going to get to a sort of internal comment on the form of short story. Because I think of the short story in some ways as the labor toward the perfected sentiment. And I wanted to kind of stab back, so to speak.

But, yes, I think it's the most novelistic of the stories and it's sort of where I was headed. A good kind of place to depart from. Yeah.

Folio: Isn't Hester's statement kind of the opposite of hope?

AH: I guess I don't think in those terms. If there is, you know, a locus of hope, it comes in the reader's identification or acknowledgement of certain things within their reading of the story. Which doesn't necessarily mean that the plot has to turn out well. To me, the hope actually takes place in the act of the reading and the reader's act of recognition, and not in the literal story. But there seems to me to be something literal to imagining that the hopeful story is one that ends hopefully. You know, stories that end in a saccharine way can make you feel more lonely than anything else.

Folio: And finally, what is your biggest challenge as a writer? Start with the worst part and end with what's best.

AH: I suppose the worst part is just that it's isolating and difficult, intractable, and there is that normal sort of failure on the page in order to get to something worthwhile. And there's sort of no guarantee that on the other side there will be anything other than more failure. You know, it's just not friendly to a sense of stability.

Folio: You certainly get the highs and the lows.

AH: Yeah. I think that would be the hardest. And the best? Umm…Well, I've never done anything else that has the capacity to incorporate the past, take place in the present, and have some possible life in the future. I mean it's this incredible act of integration that at least, sort of, holds out the possibility of granting meaning to things in my life.