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Charles Baxter was born and raised in Minneapolis. He received his BA from Macalester College in Saint Paul and his PhD in English from the University of Buffalo. He has taught at Wayne State University in Detroit and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where for many years he directed the MF A Program in Creative Writing. He currently teaches at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the Warren Wilson Program for Writers in Asheville.
Baxter is the author of five novels and six story collections, most recently the collection There's Something I Want You to Do (Pantheon, 2015). His novel The Feast of Love (Pantheon, 2000) was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also written two books of criticism and three books of poetry, as well as having edited several anthologies.
During the late 1990s, Charles Baxter was Jeremiah Chamberlin's undergraduate creative writing instructor and his thesis adviser at the University of Michigan. In the years since, Baxter has served as a mentor. They've also collaborated on a panel at the AWP Writers' Conference and conducted an earlier interview, which appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Glimmer Train, following the release of Baxter's previous collection, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, in 2011. This conversation took place in early August of 2015, prior to Baxter's departure for the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, where he is a regular faculty member.
jeremiah Chamberlin: One of your first published stories, "Harmony of the World," appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review in the Spring 1981 issue. It would go on to be selected for both Best American Short Stories, 1982 and the Pushcart Prize VI, as well as to serve as the title story for your first collection. Can you talk a bit about what you found yourself most interested in in those early stories? What drew you to fiction from, say, poetry? Also, how did you see your work in conversation with what was going on at the time?
charles Baxter; Like many young artists trying to establish themselves, in those days I had trouble getting a foothold-finding a voice, a subject, all that. So I tried everything. As many young writers do, I wrote a fair amount of bad work, which was...