On Writing, Teaching,
and Her New Novel

Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of two short story collections, Fast Lanes and Black Tickets, and three novels, Motherkind, Shelter, and Machine Dreams. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim, a Bunting, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. The American Academy of Institute of Arts and Letters awarded her the Sue Kaufman Prize (1980) and an Academy Award in Literature (1997). She is director of a new MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. An excerpt from her recently released new novel, Lark & Termite, appears in this issue.