Tobias Wolff

I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else.

Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.

Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.

Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.

I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into.