This week, Christina Baker Kline asks Roxana Robinson five questions on style, technology, and motherhood.

1) Your work is often praised as an exemplary example of traditional realistic fiction. Do you feel constrained by this categorization, or does it feel true to you? Are you ever tempted to try a more experimental style—magical realism, say?

I don't feel constrained by the categorization because I never think about it. I write what I want, and don't think about how I'm expected to write. There are times when I read someone else's writing—Jennifer Egan, for example, the very elegant post-modernist, or Lydia Davis, who's undefinable—and I think, hmm, this is so interesting, this form, or that voice change, and the possibilities they open up. I'd like to explore them.
But then another idea appears in my head, and I have to get it down, and it turns out that, once again, the way I want to write about it is very straightforward and realistic, the way I always write. I want my writing to put more emphasis on the content than it does on the voice. My intention is to engage the reader deeply, at all levels—intellectual, moral, emotional. I feel that, for me, this engagement happens most powerfully in traditional, realistic writing. So, as long as the way I write does what I want writing to do, I'll keep on doing it.

(I have recently written two less traditional stories, odd, short-form pieces: one called "Honey," that will appear in The American Scholar, and one called "The Bureau," that will come out in a literary journal called the H.O.W. Journal. But I'm at work on another realistic novel.)

2) You are a novelist, short story writer, biographer, essayist, and book reviewer. How do you make decisions about dividing your time as a writer?

I also write OpEd pieces when something really rouses me, usually an environmental issue. As to dividing my time, I usually write fiction in the morning. I can write non-fiction any time, and more or less anywhere, but fiction needs a more controlled and specialized setting. So on days when I'm not at home, or when for some reason I can't write in the morning (the plumber is coming, or I have to go to the dentist), I'll write non-fiction instead, in the afternoon. And if the novel is stalled, or if I need some information that I don't yet have, I'll work on a short story.

3) You seem to have a complicated relationship with technology. You have a website and use the Internet, but choose to use dial-up instead of a high-speed connection. Why?

I just read a comment by a writer who said that no serious writer has an Internet connection in her workplace. His position is a bit extreme, but I absolutely know what he means. For me, the Internet is a serious distraction. I use a dial-up connection because I can disconnect my laptop and move it into another room to write, where there's no connection, and no risk from the siren call of the Internet. By nature I tend towards being a Luddite, and I don't have an easy relationship with technology. I have a Facebook site but I don't really know how to put anything on it—links, pictures, and so forth. Technology is mysterious to me. It never seems to work in a predictable way. However, I feel as if we're all being swept into the new age. A story of mine ("This is America") will appear next month in The Atlantic on Kindle. I don't own a Kindle, so I won't be able to read it there. That seems weird, but I like the idea of being part of a big e-experiment.


4) You wrote stories and a novel before having a daughter. How do you think that being a mother has influenced your writing?

I actually didn't publish anything until after I had had my daughter, though I'd always written. Of course becoming a mother changes your life, but as to its influencing my writing, it's hard to say exactly how. I think that everything you are influences your writing: your gender, your age, your marital status, your health. You start off knowing about your own experience, and then you expand outward from there, exploring other kinds of experience as you are able to understand them. I think that the family, and our connection to it, is central to our understanding of the world. The way we experience family determines the way we relate to the world. So, in answer to your question, I suppose that becoming a mother influenced my writing just as every important experience does. It deepened my understanding of connections, of responsibility, of trust and obligation—all the many things that make up the complicated relationship between parent and child.


5) In a favorable review of your latest novel, Cost, the New York Times mentioned that you have been "reductively tagged as a chronicler of WASP life." How do you respond to such a characterization?

I was pleased that the reviewer (the thoughtful and elegant Leah Hager Cohen) contradicted the characterization, pointing out that the label was reductivist and misleading. But I'd be even more pleased if the label vanished altogether, and the word WASP stopped appearing in reviews of my work.

It's partly my own fault: I used to write a lot about WASPs. John Updike once advised me against it, for this very reason—he said I'd never escape the label. I kept on, though, because I didn't believe him, and also because it's a world I know well, an interesting one, distinctive and complex. I thought it deserved attention and respect, and that it should be recorded, the way any writer's world deserves recording. I loved the particularities of those characters, the way they saw the world, the formal, outmoded way they talked, for example, using "luncheon" for "lunch," "motoring" for "driving," and so on. As is always the case with one's own culture, there were things I admired and things I deplored about it. But it was a very rich cultural presence, one I enjoyed exploring.

I've more or less stopped writing about it, now, though. This is partly because that world is vanishing, and partly because critics always seemed to feel obliged to raise the subject. The word WASP often seemed to be used dismissively, and so the whole issue began to seem intrusive, and to interfere with the process of reading and understanding the work. I don't think responses to a writer's ethnic group should define the responses to the work—at some point those should be simply about the work itself.

A review of one of my books appeared under the headline, "It's Not Easy Being a WASP." It seemed like a strange way to introduce a book. What if Philip Roth's reviews were titled, "Angst among the Jews," or Toni Morrison's, "More Trouble for Blacks?" As Cohen pointed out, that kind of labelling is reductivist, unproductive and distracting. Let's just look at the work.