When Iā€™m downtown in Orlando, there are any number of excellent independent shops I like to support, but where I live, miles from the city, one neighbor has a horse and another keeps chickens. On cold nights, I hear the chickens clucking. On colder nights, my neighbor brings the chickens in.

Not much, then, in the way of coffee, except for the place by my house. Thatā€™s where I writeā€”or wroteā€”five days a week. Before the arrival of COVID-19, I dropped my daughters off at school, then arrived at my coffeehouse by 9 a.m.

Kevin, the man who most days works the morning shift, would greet me. Kevin plays in a band. Iā€™ve never heard his music, and heā€™s never read my books. Itā€™s not that kind of friendship. Which isnā€™t to say that itā€™s a lesser friendship. Itā€™s a friendship that doesnā€™t require admiration for one anotherā€™s art. Kevin makes my coffee. Sometimes I tip him extra. Sometimes my coffee is free, a perk that comes along with being a regular.

Before the pandemic, my office was the coffeehouse.

Then, most days, I get to workā€”or got to workā€”finding a quiet corner, facing away from the windows and the rest of the customers, firing up my laptop, securing my noise-canceling headphones over my ears, and navigating to one of three audio recordings I keep bookmarked: bathroom fan, airplane hum, summer storm. The white noise blocks out coffee orders, background conversations, and the chug and hiss of the espresso machines. Within minutes, Iā€™m in a trance, the world falls away, and I can dream my way into fiction.

Most of my novel, Lake Life (published in paperback by Simon & Schuster last week), was written at this coffeehouse between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., before I returned to my daughtersā€™ school to bring them home for the day. Now, our home is their school, and my bedroom doubles as my office.

But before the pandemic, my office was the coffeehouse. There, I would drink two cups of coffee, maybe three, dark roast, with cream and a dash of sugar. I like bitter, and Iā€™ve always preferred strong coffee to lattes or cappuccinos that tend to be mostly milk.

After weeks spent on a 2016 book tour across Europe, I returned to Florida and, for a month, drank straight espresso. But I never found anything in Florida approaching the strength of the ristretto shots I grew fond of in Venice and Milan and Palermo. (This, I recognize, is a pretentious-sounding sentence. In truth, I havenā€™t traveled particularly widely, I just got lucky with my last book. And I donā€™t drink dark, strong coffee to feel cool. Iā€™m decidedly un-cool. I rarely drink alcohol. I donā€™t smoke. And, as a matter of fact, the darker the roast, the less caffeine the coffee has. I just happen to have a palate that favors bitter. Iā€™ll take dark chocolate over milk chocolate any day.)

When asked why I donā€™t prefer writing at home or in the office that UCF provides, I have several answers. First, Iā€™m undisciplined. If Iā€™m home, there is the TV. There are walls of books. Thereā€™s the bed. Any number of things are more tempting than sitting down to write for hours. Once Iā€™ve started, found my way into a story, Iā€™m good, on taskā€”but resolving to sit down and write for the day, thatā€™s the hard part. At the coffeehouse, thereā€™s no TV, and I bring no books. I donā€™t even activate the Wi-Fi, so as not to be distracted by Twitter or Facebookā€™s endless scroll. No, if Iā€™m at the coffeehouse, I have one job, and I do it. After all, my afternoons and evenings are occupied by teaching, so if I donā€™t write in the mornings, I donā€™t write.

Then thereā€™s the coffee. Itā€™s always a little better at the coffeehouse than the coffee I make at home. I have a coffeemaker, a French press, and an overpriced espresso machine. I order the best beans. I grind them fresh. Still, I can never match what they do there.

What I miss most about my coffeehouse, though, isnā€™t the coffee or the gift of a place to write. What I miss most, Iā€™ve discovered, is being with people. If itā€™s true that you can be lonely at a party thrown by friends just for you, itā€™s also true that you can feel loved surrounded by people you donā€™t even know.

At the coffeehouse, once Iā€™ve finished talking to Kevin, even after Iā€™ve plugged in my laptop and turned my back to the crowd, thereā€™s a feeling that rises from the floor and tangles up in the rafters, a security that comes from being among others, as in church, each of us struggling in a job or a marriage or just trying to finish a novel, everyone alone, but together, a body of humans, breathing as one, warm, at once, all in one place.

Itā€™s been more than a year since I stopped going to the coffeehouse, and I have yet to return. The coffeehouse is open. Everything, where I live, opened up almost a year ago. But Iā€™m wary. Even masked and vaccinated, it will be some time before Iā€™m comfortable writing among others, breathing the same air. And this is a loss.

I miss Kevin. I miss the taste of coffee made the right way by pros who know what theyā€™re doing. Over a year in quarantine, and my home brew still pales in comparison. Though, if nothing else, Iā€™ve proven to myself that I can write anywhere. A new book is finished, and another is underway, so all is not lost.

But Iā€™d trade this, the books and my newfound productivity, trade it in a second to return to a world pre-pandemic. To sit among strangers and friends, and strangers as friends, and feel safe. To not be afraid of my fellow humans.

David James Poissant is an associate professor at the ŗ£½ĒÖ±²„ where he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.Ā  He can be reached at David.Poissant@ucf.edu.

TheĀ UCF ForumĀ is a weekly series of opinion columns from faculty, staff and students who serve on a panel for a year. A new column is posted each Wednesday on UCF Today and then broadcast on WUCF-FM (89.9) between 7:50 and 8 a.m. Sunday. Columns also are archived in the campus libraryā€™s collection and as WUCF podcasts. Opinions expressed are those of the columnists, and are not necessarily shared by the ŗ£½ĒÖ±²„.

Let me explain: Iā€™m in kindergarten, and our teacher is teaching us to tie shoes. I donā€™t get it. I canā€™t do it. I try the floppy cardboard foot with the laces woven through. I try my own shoes. Either way, the rabbit wonā€™t go around the tree or through the hole, or whatever it is the rabbit is supposed to do. Either way, the laces wonā€™t tie. My teacher chides those who get it wrong, and I donā€™t want to be chided.

Then, it hits me. I donā€™t have to tie my shoes my teacherā€™s way. I just have to make it look like I tied my shoes her way. I tie a knot. I make two loops. I knot those loops, and, voila, laces tied.

Decades later, my fraud would be vindicated when a scientific study, ā€œThe roles of impact and inertia in the failure of a shoelace knot,ā€ (I swear I am not making this up) would prove once and for all that the way weā€™re taught to tie shoes as children is careless, inefficient and leaves laces prone to loosening. My impromptu method, devised to avoid getting yelled at by an impatient teacher, turned out to be the smarter, more efficient method after all. Sometimes stubbornness isnā€™t such a bad thing.

Iā€™m talking about the times your method isnā€™t wrong, merely different, when different can be a good thing.

First, though, let me define my terms. When I say stubbornness, Iā€™m not talking about ambition, grit or the many characteristics under the umbrella of perseverance for which most people already hold the utmost admiration. Nor am I referring to the kind of stubbornness surrounding strict adherence to a suspect or outdated tradition, times when the stubborn individual might be better served by evolution. No, Iā€™m talking about the need, at times, to fly in the face of unfounded tradition. Iā€™m talking about resilience when youā€™re waiting for the world to catch up with your way of thinking. Iā€™m talking about the times your method isnā€™t wrong, merely different, when different can be a good thing.

Maybe shoelaces are a silly example. Here are some better ones:

Swedish pro golfer Jesper Parnevik, one of the finest golfers in the world, freely admits to holding his clubs all wrong.

ā€œMy knuckles go white,ā€ he says in an interview with Golf magazine. ā€œIā€™ve putted with a glove forever, but Iā€™ve worn putter grips all the way down to the metal. Thatā€™s a little weird.ā€ Weird may be the word, but that weirdness hasnā€™t kept Parnevik from netting over $15 million in career earnings on the PGA Tour.

Or consider iconic painter Frida Kahlo. As art historian Gannit Ankori points out in Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation, Kahlo, in her lifetime, was known mostly as the eccentric wife of painter Diego Rivera. She died unappreciated and virtually unknown outside of Mexico before several books and retrospectives resurrected her work and shined a long overdue spotlight on her art. But living in Riveraā€™s shadow didnā€™t keep Kahlo from completing a staggering 143 paintings before she died at the age of 47.

Parnevik and Kahlo are outliers, you might argue. Consider, then, something that most of us do most days: type.

Numerous experiments, including Finlandā€™s Aalto ŗ£½ĒÖ±²„ study ā€œHow We Type: Movement Strategies and Performance in Everyday Typing,ā€ have shown that self-taught typists can type just as fast with as few as six fingers as professional typists, trained under the traditional touch-typing method, who type with 10. What matters, in the end, isnā€™t the ā€œbestā€ method but muscle memory and commitment to a single typing style.

Whether famous or workaday, sometimes we must work against conventional wisdom in order to achieve a desired outcome.

Whether famous or workaday, sometimes we must work against conventional wisdom in order to achieve a desired outcome.

Stubbornness, of course, is risky. Thereā€™s the risk that holding your club your way will injure your back. Thereā€™s the risk that youā€™ll paint your way into obscurity. Thereā€™s the risk that youā€™ll type your way and flunk that typing-speed test. Always thereā€™s the risk that your way is not the better way, that things are one way for a reason, that youā€™re making things harder for yourself than they have to be. Always, always thereā€™s the risk that youā€™re wrong.

As leadership consultant Muriel Maignan Wilkins points out, stubbornness carries with it the risk of Pyrrhic victory. Proving a thing can be done your way doesnā€™t necessarily prove your way was best. In short, if youā€™re stubborn about everything, youā€™re doing stubbornness all wrong. As Wilkins notes, there are times when itā€™s far better to listen to others, synthesize ideas, consider tradition, stay flexible, compromise, and even admit when youā€™re mistaken.

My point, then, is simple but no less profound for being so, I hope. Despite platitudes and T-shirts, movie quotes and what passes for wisdom these days, thereā€™s rarely one right way to do a thing. Where a prevailing method reigns, there are nearly always practitioners achieving at high levels in opposition to the dominant or ā€œbest practicesā€ methodology.

In other words, just because there are many ways to do a thing wrong doesnā€™t mean thereā€™s only one way to do a thing right. And sometimes your way is just waiting to become the new dominant way of doing a thing, as when American athlete Dick Fosbury, dismissed early on as the ā€œworldā€™s laziest high jumper,ā€ won the 1968 Olympic gold medal with his signature ā€œFosbury Flopā€ and changed the face of the sport forever.

All of which is good news for me. After all, at 40 years old, I only use seven fingers to type, and I still tie my shoes my way.

David James Poissant is an associate professor at the ŗ£½ĒÖ±²„ where he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.Ā  He can be reached at David.Poissant@ucf.edu.

The UCF Forum is a weekly series of opinion columns presented by UCF Communications & Marketing. A new column is posted each Wednesday at http://today.ucf.edu and then broadcast between 7:50 and 8 a.m. Sunday on WUCF-FM (89.9). The columns are the opinions of the writers, who serve on the UCF Forum panel of faculty members, staffers and students for a year.

From their early Velvet Underground sound (1987ā€™s Dead Letter Office boasts three covers alone) to their eventual synthesis of post-punk, folk, and garage rock, R.E.M.ā€”a band that picked its name out of a dictionary (the term stands for rapid eye movement, a state accompanying the dream stage of sleep)ā€”helped define the sound that America would come to call alternative.

This was no small feat. Not only was R.E.M. fighting for attention in a crowded Southern music scene, they were fighting an industry and a listenership that, initially, didnā€™t want what R.E.M. had to offer. Still, throughout the 80s, R.E.M.ā€™s jangly guitars and anti-pop ballads continued to sidestep the slick melodies of Madonna, Paula Abdul, and New Kids on the Block, a choice that culminated in Rolling Stoneā€™s December 1987 issue crowning R.E.M. ā€œAmericaā€™s Best Rock and Roll Band,ā€ despite lead singer and lyricist Michael Stipeā€™s assertion, years later, that Ā ā€œWe always wanted to make a rock record. Iā€™m not sure we ever quite achieved that.ā€

The sound R.E.M. achieved is more elusive and unquantifiable than rock.

No, the sound R.E.M. achieved is more elusive and unquantifiable than rock. Trying to define that sound, though, thatā€™s the hard part.

So, what does R.E.M. sound like? After listening, again, to all of their albums, my advice to the casual listener is to seek out the bandā€™s best stretch, those records that came along when R.E.M. toned down the feedback-heavy screech of their early albums and before they traded their unpredictable chord progressions for the electronic lull of a late-90s-infused Radiohead influence (Radiohead opened 24 of R.E.M.ā€™s 1995 Monster tour shows, so maybe something rubbed off). Iā€™m speaking of that revered trinity: Out of Time (1991), Automatic for the People (1992), and Monster (1994).

Out of Time is an unaccountably weird album, its opening track, ā€œRadio Song,ā€ a fun, funky masterpiece. Stipe sings. Hip-hop artist KRS-One raps. For some reason, there is a string and horn section arranged by New Orleans musician and producer Mark Bingham. This is not music-by-committee or some overproduced, studio-squeezed sound. This is collaboration at its finest. Three songs on Out of Time feature Kate Pierson of The B-52s. Peter Holsapple, of the band the dBā€™s, appears on several tracks too, including ā€œLosing My Religion,ā€ the bandā€™s highest-charting single.

R.E.M.ā€™s next offering, Automatic for the People, is an album drenched in grief. These arenā€™t the anger-infused tracks of 1987ā€™s Document or 1988ā€™s Green. Automatic for the People is simply the stuff of raw, unrelenting mourning. Thereā€™s ā€œEverybody Hurts,ā€ a paean to sorrow; ā€œMan on the Moon,ā€ a haunting tribute to the late Andy Kaufman; and ā€œNightswimming,ā€ R.E.M.ā€™s best song (yeah, I said it), a melancholy lament translating the risky, youthful exuberance of skinny-dipping into a meditative, quasi-religious act.

As Stipe sings: ā€œNightswimming deserves a quiet night / I’m not sure all these people understand / It’s not like years ago / The fear of getting caught / Of recklessness and water / They cannot see me naked / These things, they go away / Replaced by everyday.ā€ Sung, that final lyric suggests both the adjective ā€œeveryday,ā€ signaling the mundane, and ā€œevery day,ā€ signifying the banality of the daily trudge, each its own brand of bleak. Even at the age of 13, both interpretations broke my heart.

A good song lets you live a life youā€™ve yet to live.

Listening to ā€œNightswimmingā€ in 1992 left me nostalgic for a feeling Iā€™d never had, before I knew what nostalgia was, about an act I had yet to commit, and that is what good music does. A good song lets you live a life youā€™ve yet to live.

1994ā€™s Monster was not destined to be another album obsessed with death, though the band dedicated the disc to the late River Phoenix (his sister, Rain Phoenix, sings on track eight, ā€œBang and Blameā€). But both ā€œBang and Blameā€ and ā€œLet Me In,ā€ written for the late Kurt Cobain were relegated to B-side status at a time when B-sides existed and very much impacted which songs listeners listened to.

No, on Monster, the mourning is over, the anger is back, and the acoustic sound is out the window. Everythingā€™s electric, grunge meets glam rock meets punk.

Monsterā€™s opening track ā€œWhatā€™s the Frequency, Kenneth?ā€ takes its title from the taunts shouted at Dan Rather during a real-life 1986 beating. The guitar-heavy track kicks your teeth in, and from there, the record is Stipe, in character, embodying a new persona for every song. These are songs of monstrous, sex- and fame-obsessed men, something akin to David Foster Wallaceā€™s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

While each of these albums boasts its own style and theme, there are precursors and holdovers, a connective tissue that links all three. Out of Timeā€™s ā€œLosing My Religionā€ and Monsterā€™s ā€œStrange Currenciesā€ might be more at home on Automatic for the People, while Automaticā€™s ā€œIgnorelandā€ and ā€œThe Sidewinder Sleeps Toniteā€ belong unquestionably to Out of Time.

Taken together, these arenā€™t three albums so much as one masterwork, a musical trilogy, the sound mature, the lyrics intelligible, the music accessible but never simple, nuanced but rarely cryptic.

In total, R.E.M. released 15 studio albums. The six records that came before the big three are imperfect. The band is shedding influences, searching for a sound theyā€™re about to embrace. The six records that follow the big three are imperfect, the band searching for a sound theyā€™re losing along the way.

But, for three albums, R.E.M. never sounded like anyone so much as themselves. They became the proprietors of what Iā€™d call the R.E.M. sound.

But they were more than that. They were the soundtrack of a decade.

David James Poissant is an associate professor at the ŗ£½ĒÖ±²„ where he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.Ā  He can be reached at David.Poissant@ucf.edu.

I am a writer, and writing leads to book tours. These readings satiated my desire to move an audience to laughter or tears. But readings are safe. The author stands behind a podium, anchored to a book.

I wanted more. Which is how I found myself enrolled this year in an improvisational comedy course at the SAK Comedy Lab in Orlando.

Most cities have a comedy scene, but Orlandoā€™s is no joke, and neither is SAK, the site where Whose Line is it Anyway? star Wayne Brady got his start.

Improv, for the uninitiated, is the art of building a scene or song, usually comedic, around an audience-suggested subject. Unlike standup comedy, the material is made up on the spot. Sometimes, the results are spectacular. Sometimes theyā€™re failures. Both are fun to watch. Even if youā€™ve never seen improv, chances are your entertainment has been steered by it for decades. From Saturday Night Live to The Office to The Daily Show, most casts and writersā€™ rooms are staffed with people who got their start in improv.

Improv is the best cure Iā€™ve found for anxiety.

So, why improv? Why would I, a stage fright-prone, spotlight-phobic, generally anxious person subject himself to the torture of standing onstage before strangers without the safety net of memorized lines or written material? Because, counterintuitive as it sounds, outside of therapy, improv is the best cure Iā€™ve found for anxiety.

There are few rules to improv, but here they are: Donā€™t think. Listen. Say yes to everything. And, give yourself permission to make mistakes, because you are not alone.

Thatā€™s it. I mean, there are hundreds of tips and tricks, but all of them fall under the umbrella of those general guidelines, and itā€™s those guidelines that spit in the face of anxiety. Because, what is anxiety? Anxiety is a fear of the future. General or specific, anxiety is the voice that tells you to worry over what happens next. As a friend once told me, you donā€™t have to worry about whether you will die. You will. Make peace with that, and figure out how to live. Simple, but not easy.

So, how does improv training combat anxiety?

First, anxiety is often the result of spending too much time in your head. In an improv, thereā€™s no time to think. And hereā€™s the beautiful part: You donā€™t have to think, because thereā€™s no wrong answer. The only wrong answer is no. Recently, I saw an improv show in which a woman was dancing. Her scene partner interpreted the dance as wing flaps. He thought she was a chicken. But, the scene had already established her as a woman. So, for the preservation of both truths, she became a woman who laid eggs. This happy accident led to material that was 10 times funnier than anything theyā€™d been doing.

All of which is to say, second, that improv is a safe place to make mistakes. In good improv, everythingā€™s incorporated, even the errors. This takes practice, sure, but it can be done. And, even when itā€™s done poorly, improv audiences are remarkably forgiving. Unlike other comedic forms, improv is rarely performed in clubs. The culture of improv is closer to theater than stand-up. Iā€™ve never, for example, seen improvisers heckled.

Third, improv combats anxiety because it comes with teammates built in. Youā€™re never alone. If your anxiety takes over, your scene partners will rescue you. Say you freeze onstage, theyā€™ll even use you to guide the scene. (ā€œLetā€™s get this ice sculpture inside before it melts!ā€)

But, the most anxiety-obliterating aspect of improv is that your answer to almost every suggestion is already written for you. The answer is ā€œYes, and.ā€ (Player 1: ā€œI heard you turned your backyard into your very own Jurassic Park.ā€ Player 2: ā€œYes, and the velociraptors are loose again.ā€)

You donā€™t have time to question your partnerā€™s motivations. You donā€™t have the luxury of overanalyzing the offer or weighing your options. You have no time to wonder whether your response could be rephrased for maximum impact, or whether itā€™s potentially problematic, or whether itā€™s funnier to one political party or the other, or whether itā€™s going to get you in trouble at work, or whether your children are watching, or whether your parents would approve, or whether your answer will showcase your smartest, best, most photogenic self. You donā€™t have time. You freeze, youā€™re an ice sculpture. You flee, you let your scene partners down. So, you fight. You perform. You say ā€œYes, and,ā€ and you say whatever pops into your head, no matter how silly or strange.

How fulfilling, then, to have an outlet like improv, a place to be anyone you want for at least a few hours a week.

And thereā€™s something freeing about that onstage, if not necessarily in life. Life isnā€™t the ideal place for such behavior. How fulfilling, then, to have an outlet like improv, a place to be anyone you want for at least a few hours a week.

Please donā€™t misunderstand. Improv is not a get-out-of-jail-free card to be offensive. Improv is at its best when itā€™s tolerant and accepting of all, when every offer comes from a place of love and celebration, and when the fun we poke is mostly at ourselves. But, if youā€™re someone who agonizes over every Tweet and Facebook post, or how each word will land on othersā€™ ears, you might, like me, embrace a culture where itā€™s okay to mess up, a place where youā€™re given the benefit of the doubt, because itā€™s assumed you want to honor others and make them laugh.

In a world where we tend to think the worst of others until weā€™re proven wrong, itā€™s a pleasure to find a place like SAK where itā€™s safe to take risks and play, no anxiety required.

The UCF Forum is a weekly series of opinion columns presented by UCF Communications & Marketing. A new column is posted each Wednesday at /news/ and then broadcast between 7:50 and 8 a.m. Sunday on WUCF-FM (89.9). The columns are the opinions of the writers, who serve on the UCF Forum panel of faculty members, staffers and students for a year.

The festival will be held from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. in the CFE Arena. Admission and parking will be free.

The festival is hosted by UCFā€™s College of Education and Human Performance in partnership with UCFā€™s Morgridge International Reading Center. Attendees are invited to meet with the authorsā€”whose works are featured in classrooms and libraries around the countryā€”and learn about their creative processes and how they bring their characters to life.

The keynote author will be Andre Dubus III, who wrote The New York Times bestseller House of Sand and Fog. His most recent book, Dirty Love, was released in October.

Other notable authors include Capt. Luis Carlos MontalvĆ”n, The New York Times-bestselling author of Until Tuesday:Ā  A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him, and David Menasche, author of The Priority List: A Teacherā€™s Final Quest to Discover Lifeā€™s Greatest Lessons.

Throughout the day guests can attend author forums, listen to readings, attend book signings and receive free book appraisals.

There are activities planned for all ages, with special events for teens and children. Advanced registration is required for the free teen activities, which include a writing workshop led by UCF faculty and young adult author Kristen Simmons, and a live-action game based on the book Divergent.

Local chefs John Rivers of 4Rivers Smokehouse and Hollis Wilder of Sweet! By Good Golly Miss Holly will demonstrate recipes from their cookbooks.

UCF faculty participating in the festival include David James Poissant and Nathan Holic from the English Department. Authors Ward Larsen and Will Wright are UCF alumni.

To register for the teen workshops, view a schedule of events, or for more information, visit www.bookfestival.ucf.edu.

Poissantā€™s first book, released in March, is a collection of tales about families and relationships published by Simon & Schuster.

This weekend, Poissant will join more than 30 authors from around the country at the UCF Book Festival, which will be held Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the CFE Arena. The festival is free and open to the public.

Read on for more about Poissant, a winner of the Playboy College Fiction Contest whose short stories have appeared in The Atlantic and in the New Stories from the South and Best New American Voices anthologies, among many other publications.

When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

I didnā€™t figure out that I wanted to be a writer until after college. I was in my early 20s. I taught high school English and wrote during the summers. Once I figured out that the summers werenā€™t enough for me, I knew that I needed to make a major life change. I applied to MFA programs, got into the ŗ£½ĒÖ±²„ of Arizona, and my wife and I traded Atlanta, Ga., for Tucson, Ariz. Iā€™ve been writing seriously ever since, about nine years now.

How did you end up teaching at UCF?

After Arizona, I went to the ŗ£½ĒÖ±²„ of Cincinnati to earn my PhD. As I was finishing up at UC, I applied to creative-writing jobs around the country. I was very happy to accept the job at UCF, and Iā€™m thrilled to be a part of the MFA faculty where I get to mentor and work with graduate students.

Whatā€™s your favorite part about being a professor?

The students! Their passion for reading and writing is contagious. And their exuberance helps me to stay motivated. Itā€™s easy to forget when youā€™re lucky, and having students who are so excited about writing reminds me not to take what I have for granted.

Your most recent book, The Heaven of Animals: Stories, is a collection of stories centering on family and relationships. What inspired the subject?

I wanted to write a book about love, but I wanted it to be full of stories that most people would never call ā€œlove stories.ā€

These are stories about guilt and atonement, about hurt and redemption. We love the people who make up our families, but we hurt those same people, too (sometimes on purpose, and sometimes without meaning to), and I wanted to explore both sides of that difficult equation.

Did you face any hurdles in writing the stories?

Every story presented a hurdle in one way or another. Some were easy to write but hard to publish. Others found homes in magazines, but only after Iā€™d revised them many times over the course of four or five years.

For the 15 stories in the collection, another 20 published stories were left on the cutting-room floor, and who knows how many more remain unfinished or finished but requiring a few more revisions. I think that the trick was not to think too much about the end product of ā€œa bookā€ along the way, but to try to make each story as strong as it could be.

What do you like to read?

I love to read fiction, poetry and essays.

The last great book I read was a collection of essays by Ryan Van Meter called If You Knew Then What I Know Now. My favorite poets include Sherod Santos and Louise Gluck. My favorite short story writers include Brad Watson, ZZ Packer, Karen Russell, Chris Adrian, Bret Anthony Johnston, Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Christine Schutt, Rick Bass, Ethan Canin, Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson, and Ron Carlson. My favorite novels include The Great Gatsby, Franny and Zooey, Marilynne Robinsonā€™s Home, Frederick Barthelmeā€™s Bob the Gambler, and Magnus Millsā€™ The Restraint of Beasts.

How do you like to unwind when youā€™re not teaching or writing?

When Iā€™m not teaching or writing, I love to read, and I love movies. I also like to go on long walks by myself or with my wife and daughters.

Whatā€™s your top piece of advice for an aspiring writer?

Read! Sure, youā€™re going to have to write a lot in order to get good at writing, but Iā€™d argue that you should be reading even more. Read everything. Read widely. Find an author you love, then read everything that he or she has written. Find an author you donā€™t love and try to figure out why. Sometimes the fault is with the writer. Sometimes the fault is your own.

Students sometimes worry that if they read too much, theyā€™ll start to sound like the writers they read. Iā€™ve found that the opposite is typically true. The more you read, the more likely you are to find that the multiplicity of voices will coalesce into something youā€™ll one day call your own ā€œvoice.ā€

Whatā€™s next for you?

Currently, Iā€™m at work on a novel under contract with Simon & Schuster. The novel borrows a couple of the characters from the collection and picks up 30 years after where their story leaves off.