In 1994, having just moved from New Orleans to attend Columbia's MFA program, Ken Foster noticed a flyer from the KGB bar in Manhattan, looking for a volunteer to help run a reading series. By the time he left his position in 1998, the series had gone from monthly to crowded weekly events. In his Harper's essay, "Unlikely Stories: The Quiet Renaissance of American Short Fiction" (October 1999), Vince Passaro pronounced the anthology Foster edited, The KGB Bar Reader, "one of the strongest collections of new writing available."

In 1999, Ken Foster published his first collection of stories, The Kind I'm Likely To Get, a New York Times notable book. He has received an MFA from Columbia, a residency from Yaddo, and a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and, for a time, ran the NightLight readings at the Drawing Center in Soho. His fiction has appeared in Bomb, McSweeney's, and the anthology The Ex-Files: New Stories About Old Flames. His reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Village Voice Literary Supplement. Currently in residency at The Julia and David White Artists Colony in Cuidad Colon, Costa Rica, he spoke, in September, via email from Iowa City.

Whit Coppedge: Many of the stories in The Kind I'm Likely to Get involve a former couple, John and Mary, after their breakup. Were these stories originally part of a longer piece or did these characters just appear at your door, uninvited, whenever you sat down to work on a story?

Ken Foster: The John and Mary stories were sort of an accident. I had first written, many years ago, a version of "A Story About Someone Else," which at the time was called something like "The Truth About Lying." No one in the story really says, directly, what they are thinking, and certainly not to the person to whom they should be telling. It was the first story I'd ever written that actually had a sequence of events in it, and I worked it over and over and over to get it right. Then Mary Gaitskill published a story called "Kiss and Tell" in which very similar events take place: a writer chooses to write about a relationship gone wrong and gets punched in the face for not revealing any of his own liabilities in what transpired.

WC: How did you respond to this coincidence of creation?

KF: In her story, the sexes were switched and, in mine, because the man does the hitting, he more or less confirms that he is a jerk. The Gaitskill story was weirdly closer to the actual events that had inspired my own story; hers was a better version of something that had actually happened to me. I put the story aside, and after living in NYC for about a year, began to feel restless about not being mobile; I'd been moving around a lot in the previous years. I was getting more done by staying in one place but had this falsely romantic idea that I should go out and conquer some new city. I found myself splitting these aspects between two characters in the story "Indelible" and at some point realized that it was John and Mary again. The third story, "Progress," began as a story called "My Latest Accident," and again Mary quickly announced that she would be the lead. (The mobility question continues in that one as well.) Much, much later, when I was revising the book for publication, I realized that a final story, "Crush," might easily be about Mary after John, and I liked the idea of showing that she does move on, even if it is with a degree of uncertainty.

WC: So, you never were tempted to extend their story into a novel?

KF: Some people suggested I write a novel about the two of them, but I felt they had really run their course. They work better in fragments because their connection and their story together are fragmented. To do a novel would have been overkill, and frankly, even though I created them, I can't imagine anyone wanting to spend the length of a novel in their company.

WC: About this romantic urge to conquer a new city — your work seems to have a strong sense of place, yet the featured cities do not overpower the individual stories. Do you ever feel your cities of residence trying to bully their way into a larger role?

KF: New York can be pretty bullying, in every way, but rather than it seeming to want to take over, it is more that I want to keep it at bay, and make sure that I don't become a New York writer. There are only four "New York" stories in the collection, but for some reason many of the critics insisted on calling me a "New York" writer of stories with a "downtown" sensibility. And nothing could mortify me more. I kept thinking, "What do these people think 'downtown' means?" In most cities, it means the business district, which is not what I'm writing about at all. And more than any other city, the way people live in New York has little to do with the rest of the world, so even if some of the stories take place there, I wanted to make sure that they were about something more universal.

Another aspect of writing about all of these various places was trying to find the right balance, so that if people didn't know the place, they would have a sense of it, and if they did know it already, they wouldn't think I was wrong in some way. I didn't want the stories to become travelogues in which the details of place overwhelmed the subject, so I made lists of details that would work to advance both the sense of place and the mood and the story itself, and then I forced myself to not stray from those elements.