I'm a professor in the MFA in Creative Writing program at North Carolina State. I've taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Tufts University and Brandeis, where I was the Frannie Hurst Visiting Writer. I was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Creative Writing at Harvard for five years, where I also served as chair of the creative writing program. I was one of the original core faculty members of the Bennington College MFA program and I frequently teach at the Sewanee Summer Writers Program.

I'm a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and it happens that I published my first two novels on the same day in 1984. Since then, I've published three other novels and three collections of short stories. Five of my eight books have been named New York Times notable books. My stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Southern Review and Bomb Magazine, among others. Two of my stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, and several have been collected in New Stories from the South. My  story, "Intervention," is in the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.

I received the New England Book Award, The John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Aside from published fiction, my essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Books Review, The Washington Post, The News & Observer, Southern Living, Real Simple and the American Scholar.

I live with my husband in Hillsborough.

How did you get to where you are now?

I feel incredibly lucky and grateful to have been in the right place at the right time. I know how difficult it is out there to get a foothold, and I was really fortunate.

Louis Rubin, who started Algonquin Books, was one of my college writing teachers and someone who left the door wide open for me to keep sending my work to him after graduation. Such a gift right there.

I had no idea he was in the process of starting his own house. Algonquin at that time was a shed in his backyard. So everything came a long, long way from that. I really was very fortunate in that regard to have had him as a teacher and to have benefited from his generosity.           

As a result, I had quite a bit of work under my belt before I had children and the demands of full-time work and kids and running a household -- all of those important parts of life that do get in the way of someone’s writing life.

How do you see yourself differently now than you did 10 years ago?

Ten years ago I would have had an 11-year-old and a seven-year-old. And two lively very young dogs, both of which I have lost in recent months.

It’s a very different kind of household when you’re carpooling children. And I’ve always taught full-time, so it’s been years of juggling a teaching schedule and kids and being a part of a community -- a very different kind of community when your children are young, because you’re actively involved in school things and various events.

So, as I look back 10 years, I think, "Wow." It was just a very, very busy, busy time. My dad died quite young (he’s been dead 16 years), and I sort of think of that death as kind of a big marker.

And my mother was much more active and lively than she is now. She was still driving and doing and was somebody who could come visit and have the whole house spic-and-span (if I was willing to hear what a terrible housekeeper I was! I figured out it was better to bite my tongue and let her keep sweeping). Actually, she still loves to come visit and clean. I don't take it for granted at all. I love it, in fact. Now she lives in an assisted living facility not far from me.

A lot of years have passed. I heard myself saying to someone that I was now crossing the threshold of the second half of my century. I was thinking about this recently because my first two books came out when I was about to turn 25, and much has happened in 25 years both in my life and in the whole publishing industry. All this stuff that’s online now, it’s a whole new world I’m having to learn with this new book.

When my first books came out, I was a single person living in this little rental house and teaching at UNC. And, of course, I’m still teaching creative writing and I’m still writing; that’s the constant.

But I’ve got two kids who now are college age, and I lived almost 20 years in the Boston area. It was just a whole other life from what I had grown up with. I returned to North Carolina only about four years ago.

And in that process, I was divorced, leaving Boston and time alone with my kids and reestablishing and then remarried last spring.

I think most of my major life changes have come in the past few years. But I feel very settled and I feel like I’m just where I’m supposed to be. As a matter of fact, my best friend from childhood who was also my college roommate came to visit this summer because our birth dates are a week apart and we just turned 51. And we were talking about how we would never go back, because it feels really good to be right where we are.  

I really feel like I’m home. I feel very content. During a lot of the transitions that brought me home, my writing life suffered somewhat because I didn’t have the luxury of the kind of focus that I have always liked to give it. And I feel like I’m back in place with my writing life, too, which is a wonderful feeling.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

I always knock wood when I say, "second half of my life." I hope I make it a long way.

I’m hoping that 10 years down the road there’s just more of what I have right now, more of these days. I’d like to think that I will have more and more time to write. I love teaching. I don’t know that I want to teach full-time until I drop over, but for now it’s great. And summers and vacations are much easier now that I'm allowed the writing time. So, I can imagine having more and more time that is maybe a little more relaxing, more about what I’d like to do.