Ken Foster founded The KGB Bar Reading Series in New York City in 1994, and in 1998 he edited The KGB Bar Reader, which Harper's called "one of the strongest collections of new writing available." In 1999, he published his first short story collection titled The Kind I'm Likely to Get, a New York Times notable book.

A graduate of the Master of Fine Arts Program at Columbia University, Ken Foster has taught at The New School, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival at The University of Iowa. He currently teaches writing at Florida State University. His numerous fellowships have included a residency from the Yaddo Corporation, a New York State Council of the Arts Fellowship, Scholarships to the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a residency at the Julia and David White Artists Colony in Costa Rica.

In 2002, he edited an anthology of essays titled Dog Culture: Writers on the Character of Canines. He also writes book reviews for The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Don Strange is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.

One of your first accomplishments in the literary world was running the KBG Bar Reading Series, and subsequently editing the KGB Bar Reader, which included stories from writers such as Michael Cunningham, A.M. Homes, and Rick Moody. How did the series get started and how did you manage to transform it into what it became?

Well, it got started because the bar itself was looking for someone to run a reading series for free. It seemed like the perfect opportunity, although I had no idea what I was doing, having not done that kind of thing before, and having no familiarity with New York or New York writers or the literary world. And yet it ended up being sort of a crash course in all of those things for me. I think people sometimes make the mistake of not really being interested in what they're doing, and they wonder why it doesn't succeed. But I think I was sincerely interested, and there were a lot of people that wanted to hear people read as well, and I combined different kinds of writers -- writers at different levels in their career -- really famous, established people, with people who were just becoming so called "hot," and people who were just publishing their very first stories. I think that created a dynamic that created a community that existed around the reading series as well.

What was the literary community like in New York City during that time?

My sense is that there was a real community there. People were eager to hear each other's work, not just around KGB, but in New York at that time. And I don't know if it was because I've grown up and moved away, and a lot of the people that I knew that were part of that community have grown up and have had families, but I don't personally feel like there is such a community anymore. And I think that maybe some other things play into that like the internet, which people didn't actually have when I started that series, which is hard to believe because it was only ten years ago, but if people wanted to connect they had to go out. And, especially writers, who spend so much time alone, were eager to find some kind of common ground to connect in. I think now people connect on blogs and over email and things like that, not that people still don't go to readings. Also I think, "Well, maybe it's just that I'm not part of that scene exactly anymore, and I'm like some old, bitter man. It's not like it was when I was young!" (Laughs). And I think there probably is a community out there, just not the same community I was in, so I don't recognize it. Especially like from '94, there was a lot of attention being paid to literary writers in the mainstream press, and so there was a sense of excitement about being a short story writer, or something like that. And I don't even see the same kind of media attention or respect paid to writers that there was at that time.

Did you know that the KBG Bar Reading Series and The KGB Bar Reader were going to be so successful?

No. And again, I think that is what made it successful. There wasn't a sense of anyone paying attention or anyone watching, so there was room to sort of fail. And it's only when you feel that freedom -- whether you have it or not is another question -- but it's only when you feel that freedom that you can really achieve something great. And so when it became such a huge deal, I was sort of taken aback by it, and also I think I wasn't really prepared to be at the center of something that was deemed important. And then suddenly, I kept on getting desperate phone calls, and people would send me their manuscripts from all over the country, because they were certain that if only I'd read it, and let them read at the KGB Bar, they would immediately get a publishing deal, which isn't the way it was for anybody.

You've been granted several fellowships, including ones from the Yaddo Corporation, Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Julia and David White Artists Colony in Costa Rica. Most of which have residency. Do you find that the sort of community that those fellowships offer is integral or at least helpful to being a writer?

Absolutely. I got into Yaddo, and I don't even know how I got in at the time, because it was when I had no clue what I was doing with my writing. It was my final year in the MFA program at Columbia, and I was there the month between the fall and spring semesters. I literally laid out page by page everything I had in front of me so I could look at it simultaneously, and that's when I figured out what I wanted to do with my collection of stories, which eventually was published. I looked at the ones that were strong, and the ones that weren't necessarily bad but were maybe doing a little too much of what had already been done. Then I tried to think of things that were missing, that would bring the whole book together. I'm sure I would've figured it out, or would've figured something else out without that experience. But the truth is that experience really was what brought that book together and got me out of graduate school and eventually got me published. But the Sewanee Writers Conference . . . I'm always telling my students, "If you can go to a conference, go, because it's great." You get two weeks or ten days or whatever that's sort of half vacation and half an intense immersion in the work of a bunch of different writers, both professional and aspiring, and you get to meet with editors, agents, and things. There are people that I met through that conference that I'm still in touch with years later. And then going to Costa Rica was just amazing in too many ways to mention. I was there for three months, didn't know any Spanish when I went there, so it was kind of crazy. I lived on this gorgeous farm, and this is where I became obsessed with dogs, because there were dogs everywhere you went in Costa Rica. Because I became obsessed with dogs when I was in Costa Rica, I obviously now have dogs, which makes it really difficult for me to consider going to another place like that again. I'm constantly searching online for a colony somewhere that lets you bring your dogs.

I guess since we're starting with dogs already, maybe I'll just ask you about Dog Culture, the most recent anthology that you've edited, in which you have again brought some great writers together, including Chuck Palahniuk and Chris Offutt, to write about the character of canines. Can you talk a little about the book and also about your fascination with dogs?

Like I said before, I didn't pay much attention to dogs at all until I went to Costa Rica, and there were these great dogs, and I just became enamored of the way dogs behave, and the way they bond with humans, and the way they sit next to you when you're typing on the computer. I thought, "They're so simple, and they're so more social than we are," because human beings spend so much time actually trying not to be social, where dogs are always trying to interact in some way. So when I came back to New York, I got a dog. We had a really great routine, which included my writing time. We would get up early in the morning and go to the dog run. We would come back. I would write until about noon. We would go out again, come back, I'd spend some time writing in the afternoon. Go out, come back, do whatever in the evening. It was great because it also gave me a reason to take a break from writing, instead of locking myself inside until I went completely mad. And one of the things that happened was my editor from my first two books had gotten a dog, and so we would see each other in the dog run all the time. We were both obsessed with our dogs, and at the same time, sort of mortified at how obsessed we were with our dogs. So she said, "Do you want to do a book about dogs?" At first I was a little hesitant, and I thought, "Me? Dogs? I have no expertise whatsoever." But then I thought, "Well, how great is it to become obsessed with something, in this case an animal, and have the opportunity to write about it?" We talked. Did I want to write my own book about dogs, or did I want to write an anthology? And I think mostly because I didn't recognize how much I could actually talk about dogs on my own without any help, we should do an anthology. I thought Chris Offutt, just because of his background growing up in Kentucky, would obviously have a different take on dogs than somebody who grew up in the city might. I had been in touch with Chuck (Palahniuk) and knew that he had just got a dog as well. He must have something interesting to say about dogs, because he's such a distinct writer. And then we needed illustrations, and of course I had been obsessively taking pictures of dogs in Costa Rica and Cuba and back in New York. I got to squeeze my own dog into as many pictures as possible. (Laughs).

So if your editor asked you today if you would want to do an anthology or write your own full-length book about dogs, which would you choose?

I would do my own full-length book, and it's funny because I have a whole bunch of essays that I've written that aren't literally about dogs, because they are each on a different subject, yet dogs come into them in some way. And so I've been thinking a little bit about maybe seeing if I can pull that into some kind of a book. Because they deal with different things that have occurred within my life and in the country's life, like September 11th, a death of a friend of mine, and a few other things, where I was writing about some larger issue and yet inevitably a dog plays a role in it, at least from my vantage point. But for now I'm trying to work on some other things, trying to get out of the dog market briefly. (Laughs).

What are you working on now?

Well, I'd written a novel during this whole period of time in Costa Rica and with the dog and afterwards, and I finished it literally right before September 11th. And then after September 11th in New York things were crazy, and I don't think I realized how crazy that whole period of time was until I left New York, and then suddenly I looked back and thought, "Well, that was crazy." My agent sent it out to a few places. Some people really said that they thought it was great, but it was short, and there was this concern that essentially they couldn't charge a lot of money for a short book -- it's not perversely short, just not long -- but nobody thought that it really needed to be longer. And I think my agent got discouraged and stopped submitting it, then I got discouraged and was distracted by the fact that at that point in time, given the events in the world, I didn't really feel like I could make the case that my book of whatever length was the most important thing in the world, because it really wasn't. And then I realized that I probably needed to leave New York because of my financial situation, which has always been slightly precarious as a writer, and was really bad after September 11th, because there was very little freelance work, which is what I had been relying on previously. I moved to Florida to teach at FSU, and then I started thinking that I wanted to get back to the novel. But then once I got here (Florida) a whole bunch of other life things interfered. One was that I broke my collarbone, and I never realized that when you hear people say that they are in extreme pain how painful something can be. You think, well I've stepped on things before and it hurt, you know? (Laughs). And a broken collarbone is so excruciating you really can't think about anything else.

How did that affect your writing?

Well, I guess first of all I was in extreme pain, and they gave me painkillers and that made me even more annoyed, because they don't really kill the pain, they just make you not care that you're in pain, so the pain becomes like this separate curiosity. (Laughs). So I stopped taking the painkillers, but they told me it was completely broken in half, and they don't set it, they just tell you to call them if it breaks through the skin. And it took months to heal. The little bit of writing that I needed to do I was doing left handed, which was an interesting experience. And then, once that healed, a friend of mine committed suicide back in New York, which was upsetting, and then a couple of months after that another friend was killed in a plane crash, which was really upsetting, because it's the kind of thing that happens, and there's no way of rationalizing it or explaining it, because it's just a horrible, horrible accident. I was also teaching full-time, which was something new for me. But I realized, having come through this year in which two people close to me died -- there's a death in my novel which I'd never really tried before, to kill a character -- and I realized having experienced the grieving process two times in a row within a few months that I'd totally short changed it in the book. So I went back and filled in the emotions that I didn't write about previously. And I've just started showing that new version to people, but still sort of slowly and tentatively, which pisses me off, because I'm guilty of doing all the things I advise my students not to. I'm always telling them, "Just go ahead and send your stuff out, don't worry about getting rejected." And then I think, "Well, how long has it been since I've submitted my work?" And I've also been writing short little segments of what will be a novel about Costa Rica. And I've just recently printed out all those pages, because I didn't have a sense of what the plot was going to be, but I had an idea of scenes. So now I'm going to look at those scenes, sort of in the same way I did with my collection of stories: look at what I've got, what's interesting, and then start thinking, "What's connecting these things together?"
         I've also been working on a nonfiction anthology proposal that somebody else came to me with, a female writer that graduated from the MFA Program here, and she's also a rape survivor. She had come across, somewhat randomly, several essays by men on the subject of rape. One was a man who'd been raped by a teacher, and the other had been a classmate of hers who was writing about questions of intimacy while dating a woman who had previously been raped, and she said that she was so incredibly moved by these stories, that were about rape, but not written by women, that she wanted to try to put together an anthology. So we've been working on this proposal together and approaching writers. Everyone thinks it is a book that should be done, and yet the next part of their answer is, "I absolutely cannot write about this myself, but somebody else should."

So it seems like you've been going against the industry in some ways or that the industry has been going against you. How has that affected your process of writing? Do you think, "How am I going to make this more sellable?" Or does that never cross your mind?

You know it shouldn't cross my mind, and I think for a long time it did, and I think when I was writing this novel that hasn't yet been published, it was on my mind a lot. And I was constantly making sure it felt like something was happening on every page. When I wrote my collection of stories, I didn't imagine them being published, and just like I didn't know what I was doing when I ran the KGB series, there was a freedom in that to really just go for broke, because I didn't necessarily think that anyone was going to read them. But having been published and reviewed, and well reviewed . . . it's possible that being well reviewed is more inhibitive than being poorly reviewed, because you're constantly thinking, "Am I doing the thing they say is the Ken Foster kind of thing. Should I be doing that? Should I not be doing that?" And so I'm not thinking too much of that now, which I think is a good thing. I think having done the second book, which may or may not eventually be published, I've learned a lot. And it was the longest thing I've ever written, even though apparently not long enough to be a $25 book. And so now I feel sort of liberated again, and I'm not sure necessarily why.

How do you feel that writing a novel differs from writing stories or a collection of stories?

I think it's completely different. And I'm a little surprised that I'm writing a novel again. Because the first one . . . I really felt like I was doing it just because everyone said, "You have to write a novel." And I've always been more of a short story person, and I still love reading collections of stories, and frequently when I read novels I feel like their flaw is that they're a novel when they shouldn't be, or that they're not the particular length they need to be to tell the story that they're telling. There always seems to be 60 or 100 pages in the middle that I think could be yanked out, and you wouldn't even know. And yet, I was really compelled to write about Costa Rica in some fictional way, and there was no way of saying everything I wanted to say in just a short story, although lately I've been reading all these great short stories and pining to get back to writing them myself. I'm sure I will at some point, but I'm kind of overflowing with different projects right now, and I can't possibly do it all at once, because I'm not Joyce Carol Oates. (Laughs).

What are you reading now?

I've read and I've been using in class the McSweeney's Anthology, Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, and there are a couple of stories in there that I really love, including Dave Eggers story "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly," which I love because it's a long short story. It's written from a female point of view, and he doesn't overdo it, which I think is so often the problem when people write from the opposite point of view. It's a great teaching piece, which, of course since I spend so much time teaching now, is often what I look for in a really great piece of writing: Can I show this to students and tell them what they can learn from this? And the other great thing about that anthology is that there are some stories in it that I don't think work at all, because I think we can learn as much from discussing why a story doesn't work from discussing why another one does. Too often we look at things and say, "This is a masterpiece." And then you sort of don't learn anything at all.

I know that you were teaching part time at the New School before going full-time at Florida State. How has teaching writing affected you as a writer?

My students in New York came to the class having read books before and having tried some degree of writing and being determined to try to learn something, because they were doing it on their own dollar and their own time. Whereas in Florida, I have some really, really fantastic students, but I also have a huge number of students, and some of them are just taking the class for credit because it fits their schedule. They haven't really read a lot. There are very few authors I could name that they would have ever heard of, and that's nothing about Florida; I think it's just typical of students at a certain age. And it's mainly changed my approach, not just to teaching but also to the way I look at writing, because it reminds you that there is a world of readers and potential readers out there that aren't part of the literary world that are looking for something a little bit more interesting than just plain writing. I make them keep a journal where they write their responses to everything we read, and you can really see them develop critical powers, which I think are the most important thing to have as a writer, not just so you can be appraising in a positive or negative way other people's work, but so that you can then eventually critique your own. The hardest lesson I ever had to learn as a writer was how to push out that first draft, then completely tear it apart and start over again.

The usefulness of MFA Programs -- whether they provide assistance, or serve as a hindrance to developing writers -- is often debated. As an MFA graduate and a current teacher of creative writing do you think that writing programs are valuable?

I think there's a bizarre amount of resentment towards writing programs from people who imagine that there is some sort of conspiracy, that there's this club that only MFA people are a part of, and that the only way people can get published is to be a part of that club, and it doesn't operate that way. I think also there are people who go to MFA programs thinking that that will be the key to being published and it isn't. But it is an opportunity to spend time working on your own writing and on developing the critical skills that are necessary to being a writer, and also they require you to finish a manuscript. So I think an MFA program can do a great number of things for somebody. But I think sometimes people either mistakenly think that [MFA programs] can't do anything at all, which is totally false, or they are disappointed because they expected something that an MFA program can't do, which is to make you a writer. You really have to make yourself a writer. And also I think one of the great things is there is this sense of community in an MFA program, and you're exposed to other aspiring writers and established writers that you might not ever interact with otherwise. I remember that one of the things that was great about Columbia was we had all these seminar courses where you read a novel every week, but a lot of them were novels that I just didn't like, and yet at the same time I learned from having read them because I learned, "This is not the kind of writer I will be. It's not what I'm trying to do." And it helped me clarify, "OK, so what kind of writer am I then?" So I'm not Philip Roth. Which I'm not. (Laughs). So I think those things can obviously be helpful.

In many of the stories from The Kind I'm Likely to Get, the characters are firmly rooted in specific places, although they also seem a little detached from them. Does this kind of complex relationship between setting and character naturally find its way into your work?

It's interesting because I realized it slowly, and I'm not sure I realized it at all when I was doing that collection, but a sense of place is a central part of what I write in my fiction. And often times, I'm writing things in one way or another that are commemorating a place that means something to me personally, even if the story itself has nothing to do with me. And so I think part of the displacement of my characters in my short stories, that sense of, "Am I in the right place? And is this where I should be right now? Is it this city? This house? This coffee shop? Would things turn out completely differently if I were to go somewhere else? And does that mean I should go? Does it mean I should stay?" It's that ongoing restless questioning that people have, particularly me, apparently. So the sense of displacement definitely comes from that. One of the things I did in completing it was think of the places I hadn't yet written about, and also to create, oddly enough, a sense of unity between the stories, by the fact that in each story somebody is wistfully considering one of the other locations in the book. But the novel is set in New Orleans, and it's about people that have come to New Orleans to disappear, to get lost from their world, or a relationship, or from who people think they are. And, similar to some of the linked stories that are part of my collection, these four characters, as much as they want to think of themselves as being lost and disconnected, are actually completely connected to each other, and anything that happens to one of them affects the other, whether they realize it or not. And now I'm working on this Costa Rica novel, which is very much about Americans in Costa Rica.

A specific American character?

Well, it's funny because I don't want it to be autobiographical, and one of the struggles I've had is trying to come up with a fake me, or a non-me, who is in Costa Rica under some temporary circumstances. Yet my experience was so peculiar, to be invited to come, all expenses paid for three months, and to stay on a gorgeous farm outside the capital, and I didn't want it to be some odd variation of that. And I was there during the last presidential election here, so there were a lot of odd little elements that I felt I could do something with. There's sort of a challenge about writing about a foreign place, writing about something that may to some degree have to do with politics, at least in the background, which I think becomes a hard thing to do without becoming necessarily political. So I think in each successive piece I work on, I sort of throw in some things that I didn't know I could possibly do. I was struck by the Americans who do live in Costa Rica. A lot of people have gone there to retire, and a lot of them have gone in protest of what they feel this country has been doing wrong. And yet all they do is sit around talking about America. So there's this very weird sense of, "If you really think something's wrong, do you try to change it, or do you get up and leave?" And these people have gotten up and gone somewhere else, where they sit and talk still about the same problems, so they still haven't gotten away from it, and again that's not necessarily the central part of the novel, but it's definitely something, that if you're writing about any American that goes to Costa Rica, you're going to notice that about the place.

So the problem, on one hand, is staying true to the experience in the place.

Yeah, and sometimes when I need to come up with that fictional character, I begin with the place, then I think, "Who would be the person who would come here? Who have I met? Who have I not introduced yet that logically would be part of this population?" And of course, there's this dog involved. (Laughs).