Diane Williams is the author of several excellent collections of short stories, including Excitability, Romancer Erector, and many others. She is also the editor of the literary journal Noon.

—Kevin Sampsell

DIANE WILLIAMS MICRO-INTERVIEW, PART I

DIANE WILLIAMS: I am often told by people who meet me after reading my books that they are afraid of me. Of course, I understand this, because I am afraid to meet nearly everybody!

THE BELIEVER: Who have you been afraid to meet?

DW: You! You’re one of them. You!

BLVR: How do you think I feel? You’re like an enigma to me. I have often wondered what, as they say, “you’re really like,” since you’ve inserted yourself—or at least the narrator “Diane Williams”—into your fictions.

DW: Inserting myself into my fiction as “Diane Williams” is my way of frightening myself even more so, which apparently has been one of my goals.

PART II

DW: I was once asked by Adam Phillips if I did a lot of readings and I answered that yes, I did, but that these appearances were difficult and I suffered shame. So he said, “Then why do you do them?” And I answered, “I guess this must be perverse.” He said, “I think you want to make something out of your shame.” I still find his comment comforting and illuminating. And then, not much later, at a Q&A at Syracuse University, a student asked me a related question: “Aren’t you embarrassed to walk around if you know that there are people looking at you and thinking about what you’ve written?” I answered him something like this: “Well, you know this is fiction! And I can take the cover that this is fiction! But really, I can take no cover.” I said that literature ought not to be the haven for tea time conversation, for polite speech—that most of us are nearly obliterated by all of our opportunities for polite speech, that without the resources of dreams and literature—and psychoanalysis for the lucky few—the consequences are surely dire. Well, I said something like that.

PART III

BLVR: Your work does warrant closer reading than most fiction, even most flash fiction, to get to a good picture in the mind as to what is going on. What is your opinion of a reader who responds with “I don’t get it”?

DW: The exclamation “I don’t get it!” doesn’t seem to me a pertinent dismissal. We could say that about any of our challenging circumstances. To try to reproduce something I understand would be a big bore.What does it mean? What is it about? These are fair questions. I can’t help asking them. I’d like to be...