That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

I'm sorry I'm not able to be here. It is this attention of yours that has helped me to flourish for the past couple of decades, as an unapologetic writer of short fiction.

The Love of a Good Women.

Sometimes I read one of my stories, maybe one that I wrote thirty years ago, and I think, Now I'd go and do it differently. Or I think I would just alter a phrase that seems to me a little too polished or too sharp or too smart-aleck or something. Or too ironic. Irony was so big then that it got under your skin and you sort of didn't recognize it.

When I'm doing the first draft, I have a so-much-a-day schedule. But when I start putting it on the computer I can get carried away, and I try to go as far as I can every day, as if I were going to die in the night or something.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.