What is your earliest memory of being enchanted by words?

My favorite aunt taught me to read when I was four. Though I then was able to read alone, we still read together — poetry, fairy tales, Kipling. My stage-struck mother played and sang show tunes. My father sang Russian lullabies. It was an enchanted and wordy household.

When did you realize writing could be a way of life?

In college. Some of my professors of English literature were also fiction writers. They taught small seminars in fiction writing and I saw them apply their love and understanding of literature to the literature they and we were trying to create. I fell in love with the enterprise. I also fell in love with the lushness of Colette’s prose and tried — in vain — to emulate it.

You had deeply appreciated literature throughout your computer programming years, and postponed writing till later. How did you keep that desire alive?

I never stopped reading; and reading meant that I was part of the project of literature. I felt I’d have my chance to join the project as a worker as well.

In retrospect, has writing later — and now — offered something unexpected?

Yes. I would describe that something as a way of seeing the world as rich, eventful, tragic, comic, and ultimately inexplicable; and a conviction that everyone — even people who seem dull or sluggish or small-minded — can be observed and gotten to know and eventually lend part of themselves to some composite character or incident. When I first started to write I wrote mostly about people I knew. My population is more varied now.

On “the rendering of calamity,” you’ve remarked that it “requires distance and calm.” For a short story, which is compact in so many ways, what helps you ensure that a story isn’t overwhelmed?

The sadder the story the more careful the language has to be, not only melodrama avoided but even metaphoric words that suggest melodrama. For calamity I do prefer a frame — someone else telling the story, which puts the calamity at one remove. But I do admire bloody battlefields rendered directly. Tolstoy says if you’ve seen a street fight you can write about a war — someday I’ll give it a shot.