Jayne Anne Phillips video clip, 2009 January 27

When I was beginning as a poet and writing very short fictions, I love the work of silence,
the work that happens between the lines and the work that happens at the end of a line.
I've always said that short fiction shouldn't just be clever little snippets of prose.
They really should act, they really should work as stories and they should have endings
that more or less open up something for the reader that sort of drop the reader off a cliff,
so to speak, and that sort of continue beyond the page.
And I love the idea of sort of making leaps inside a work of prose.
And I think the novel form allows me to do that.
My novel will never exactly conventional in the way that they're put together.
And each book seems to sort of pull me in and teach me how to write it in the same way
that I think a good book teaches the reader how to read it.
I mean, you enter that book and you begin to understand what the writer is doing and
you then go with it.
And that's certainly the kind of writing that I'm most interested in reading and the kind
of writing I'm most interested in doing.
I want to do writing that is revelatory to me in some way.