How did you become a writer? 

I grew up with books and music, and the public library was my church. My parents were English teachers. I did not start until way late, after everyone was dead whom I'd have feared to offend or disappoint. It seemed genetically ordained.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers).

E. B. White was perhaps the earliest, with Charlotte's Web. Later, White's essays. Later, To Kill a Mockingbird. My beloved high school English teacher. Later, Thaisa Frank [no relation], Bob Hass, and Stephen Dobyns. Later, everyone who has ever intensely toured interior anguish in prose that makes distilled, wrought, irreducible, shapely music. I've loved the English, the Russians, the French; James, Woolf, McCullers, Mansfield, O'Brien, Porter, Moore, Silber, Munro, Colwin, Maxwell, Toibin, McGahan, Van Booy. There are many, many "sleepers" who mean inexpressible amounts to me—like tiny golden keys to an otherwise terrifying territory—and for which I hold permanent shrines in my heart, like J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country. Anne Michaels, Joan London. I write the still-living authors letters to thank them; invariably they are gobsmacked and delighted, because we all live in the tortured vacuum of our own heads. There are so many, many names to whom I owe a loving debt of gratitude I cannot possibly gather them all at a single bidding. So I keep a constantly-expanding written list of them, many pages single-spaced, and hand over that list or e-mail it to people when they ask. People are, of course, horrified.

Where and when do you write? 

When I worked a day job [most of my life] I wrote wherever and whenever I could steal two minutes. I stole time ruthlessly for years. Now, usually mornings until about 2 p.m., in a little studio converted from an old garage in our backyard. But the notes are always being scribbled and the mind churning.

What are you working on now?

A collection of essays for writers. 

Have you ever suffered from writer's block? 

Sometimes. I just try to accept it quietly and tell myself nothing matters anyway so if the writing comes, it comes, and if not, I'll hang out (in a state of relaxed attentiveness) until it does.

What's the best writing advice you've ever received? 

Various people have said it different ways. The gist is, shut up about everything else, kick fear aside (we're all gonna be dead soon anyway), and gather all your tools and resources and blind rude chaotic instincts to say what must be said. Also: annihilate expectations attached to its reception.

What's your advice to new writers? 

Shut up about everything else, kick fear aside, and gather all your resources to say what must be said. Also: annihilate expectations attached to its reception.

Joan Frank ( www.joanfrank.org ) is the author of eleven books; eight of literary fiction and three essay collections. Her newest novel, THE OUTLOOK FOR EARTHLINGS, appeared in Fall 2020. Prior recent works include WHERE YOU'RE ALL GOING: FOUR NOVELLAS (Sarabande Books), which won the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, and TRY TO GET LOST: ESSAYS ON TRAVEL AND PLACE (Univ. of New Mexico Press), which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. She lives in Northern California.