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You have a wonderful ear for dialogue, for conversation. Where does that come from? Do you hear voices in the night?

Well, first I have to hear the voices in the grocery store. I'm a horrible eavesdropper -- ask any of my friends. It's really embarrassing, because I'll be in a restaurant and trying to attend to the person who's talking to me, but somebody over here is saying, "It took 40 of them to get it out of there!" You really want to turn around and say "What? What?" I do find that I can't write about any place that I haven't been, where I haven't spent time. First, you have to know what it smells like, you have to know what plants are blooming there. But you also have to know the language. The importance of that, I think, has everything to do with my growing up in the South.

Kentucky has, in common with the rest of the South, that captivation with language, that use of story in everyday life. You don't just say someone's "ugly", you say she's "ugly as a mud-stick fence." I grew up hearing that poetry that I didn't even recognize as poetry. I thought it was just the way you talked to people. When I moved to Arizona, I found myself trying to write stories set in Arizona, but they always ended up back in Kentucky, or some reasonable facsimile, like West Virginia. And I didn't know why that was and found it very frustrating. "The Bean Trees" finally began to work when I imported characters from Kentucky and put them in Tucson.

I had this idea for my second novel, "Animal Dreams". I really wanted to write that novel set in that magical place that I could picture in my mind, Grace, Arizona. And yet, I couldn't write it because, as I now understand, I didn't yet know the language.

But I was working as a journalist in the '80s and spent a lot of time in the little mining towns of southern Arizona, covering this mine strike. Spending all those hours talking to people in their living rooms, I learned the language. I just got it in my ear -- the wonderful way that Spanish inflects on the English and the way people turn phrases around and say, "Don't go sticking your neck out on a limb." After a while, I started to hear it. I found I could write "Animal Dreams" after that, because I understood how people talked.

What do you read now?

This is a scary question, because it's like being asked to name your relatives in 45 seconds. After you're done, you think, "Uh oh, I left out Mom." In general, I would say I love to read contemporary fiction that uses beautiful prose to deal with issues of morality. I try to read things that I wish I could write. Writers who come to mind are Doris Lessing, Russell Banks, John Irving, Annie Dillard, Annike Steele, Linda Hogan and thousands more. I also read dead people with alacrity. I read "Middlemarch" a lot. I like to just keep reading it; you can sort of pick up in the middle after a while and find new stuff in it.

The nature of writing books is solitary. Yet it seems that the reading public demands more and more that authors present themselves in public. How do you balance these things?

I balance it by saying no as much as I can, and telling myself and people who organize publicity for my books that if people love my books, they really ought to let me write another one.

More interesting than how I handle it personally is why this is happening at all and what is means for literature. I keep thinking, how would Flannery O'Connor do in 1995? How would Carson McCullers do this? Some writers don't want to leave their houses. Or they're not physically able, or they can't travel. That affects a writer's sales now. This trend of celebritizing authors is having some sort of skewing effect on literature, and we should think about that when we think about what we expect from our favorite authors.

It's hard to talk about, because one seems ungrateful. I am grateful that I'm able to support myself as a writer, and I'm also appreciative of a chance to come out of my hermitage once in a while and meet people who have things to tell me about what my work has meant to them; and who remind me that it's a circle, that I'm not working in a vacuum. Literature is a collaborative act -- especially fiction -- more than any other art form I can think of. When I've written a book, it's half done. When a reader takes it, reads it, forms the pictures in his or her mind and has an emotional response to it, that's the moment of art. That's when it's finished.