How did you become a writer?

I've wanted to be a writer ever since I learned to read, and thought of myself as a writer from an early age. But I don't think I really started becoming one until I began working in journalism, initially at my college newspaper. That's where I learned to write quickly (though never quickly enough) and for an audience (though it's never big enough!).

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

I think I've been influenced, or at least inspired, mostly by the books that I've loved. They've shown me what can be done with the written word. I go back to them sometimes to remind me that yes, someone put these words on a page for the first time. My favorite writers include Proust, Nabokov, Calvino and Roth. I often reread Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel," about an imaginary library whose books contain every possible combination of letters, and I tell myself that whatever I'm struggling to write is already there. So are my answers to this interview.

When and where do you write? 

I have an office in my house to which I go after breakfast. I turn off the fucking router and work on a Windows XP desktop with a 1980s-era word processing program called XYWrite. I'll spend most of the day there. 

What are you working on now? 

Can I let you know when it's done?

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

I'm not entirely sure what it is. But I've been stumped by a lack of imagination. I've also been distracted, sick of what I've written, and at a loss for the right words. I think I've suffered and continue to suffer most kinds of writerly frustration. I dissect these frustrations in my short story, "The Un-," in my most recent collection, Coup de Foudre: A Novella and Stories.

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

I don't know. It's possible that's what missing from my life and my work is the right piece of advice at the right time.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Turn off the fucking router.

Ken Kalfus is the author of three novels, Equilateral (2013), The Commissariat of Enlightenment (2003) and A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award. He has also published three collections of stories, Thirst (1998); Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (1999), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Coup de Foudre: A Novella and Stories (2015). Kalfus has received a Pew Fellowships in the Arts award and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He's written for Harper's, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. He lives in Philadelphia.