This essay is adapted from the preface to “T. C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II,” which will be published this week by Viking.

To me, a story is an exercise of the imagination—or, as Flannery O’Connor has it, an act of discovery. I don’t know what a story will be until it begins to unfold, the whole coming to me in the act of composition as a kind of waking dream, and it might begin with the exploration of a subject or a theme or a recollection or something as random as my discovery that the wild creatures in Tierra del Fuego were going blind as a result of the hole in the ozone layer that opens up there annually or that the Shetland Islands is the windiest place on earth. The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don’t know and find something out. And it works. Or can work. After all, a story is a seduction of the reader and such a seduction can so immerse him or her that everything becomes plausible. And so with “Swept Away,” the wind story, which appears in my new volume of collected stories. I’d never been to the Shetland Islands, though I’d been near enough—on a fishing boat off Oban, where I nearly froze to death—but the story came to me as if I’d been born and raised there in some other life. After it appeared in The New Yorker, I heard from the editors of The Shetlander, the magazine of the islands, who wanted to know when and where I’d lived amongst them.

Still, we are all products of geography to one degree or another, and my immediate environment—what I see out the window and along the streets and beaches and hiking trails, in the bars, restaurants and theaters—has played an inevitable role in the subjects and settings of my stories. To that degree, I suppose I am writing what I know, at least in terms of exploring the history, ecology, emotional temperature and socioeconomics of whatever environment I find myself in, and this includes the many stories that I’ve set in the Sequoia National Monument (formerly “Forest”), a place to which I’ve been escaping since I first moved to the West Coast. The recent story, “My Pain Is Worse Than Your Pain,” for instance, grows directly out of an incident I’d heard rumor of up there in a microcosmic community I like to call “Big Timber” by way of eliding the real and actual. The incident occurred in the wake of a drunken party, after which a man returned home with his wife and then crept back out, dressed all in black and donning a black ski mask, to climb up the side of a cabin belonging to a single woman and peep through the second-story window. Unfortunately for him (and fortunately for me) he was discovered and unmasked and the repercussions began to play themselves out. Now, I don’t know the people involved in that incident and I don’t want to know them. All I want, from that story or any other, is to hear a single resonant bar of truth or mystery or what-if-ness so I can hum it back and play a riff on it.

Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, the Sierra Nevada, the desert, the chaparral, the sunstruck chop of the Pacific, jagged agaves and wind-ravaged palms—until I was in my twenties I’d never been west of the Hudson, and when I did go west it was first to Iowa City and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then, finally, to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. To say that Northern Westchester County, where I was born and raised (in Peekskill, thirty miles up the river from Manhattan) is provincial might seem surprising, but it was when I was a boy, at least in my parents’ milieu. I was raised in a working-class household in which we didn’t have books or the tradition of them and didn’t know much of the outside world, not even the City, with all its cultural glories, which seemed infinitely remote to us. We had TV, and TV dominated our household, the gray screen coming to life when we arrived home from school/work and flicking off when we went to bed. Though the local schools provided a sound egalitarian education, I was pre-literary in those days, a hyperactive kid playing ball and roaming the woods and mainly staying out of trouble. My mother read to me when I was young—it was she who taught me to read, in fact, as I was too impatient and immature to sit still in class—but my earliest memory of the thrill of fiction comes from my eighth grade English class at Lakeland Junior High, where Mr. (Donald) Grant would read stories aloud to us on Fridays if we were good, and we were very good indeed. Mr. Grant was an amateur actor and he really put the thunder into chestnuts like “To Build a Fire” and “The Most Dangerous Game.” We’d leave his class trembling.

Darwin and Earth Science came tumbling into my consciousness around then and I told my mother that I could no longer believe in the Roman Catholic doctrine that had propelled us to church on Sundays for as long as I could remember. To her credit, patient woman, she set me free from all that, and I suppose I’ve been looking for something to replace it ever since. What have I found? Art and nature, the twin deities that sustained Wordsworth and Whitman and all the others whose experience became too complicated for received faith to contain it. At seventeen I found myself at SUNY Potsdam, the New York State university system’s music school, where I had gone as an ardent disciple of John Coltrane and lightning-fast technician of saxophone and clarinet. Unfortunately, I had no feel for the sort of music we were expected to play and I flunked my audition. But still, there I was in college, and I fell directly into the cold embrace of the existentialists on the one hand and the redeeming grace of Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, Saul Bellow and the playwrights of the absurd on the other. If I had to choose a defining moment it was when I first read O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” for an English class: here was the sort of story that subverted expectations, that began in one mode—situation comedy, familiar from TV—and ended wickedly and deliciously in another. And I’d thought there were rules.

I lived then in a rooming house on a canopied avenue of trees, enduring Potsdam’s Arctic temperatures, the gales that battered the storm windows and the rain that froze over everything in a glistening sheet so that the world became crystalline and treacherous. Once the temperature hit twenty below, no car would start, even when plied with ether sprayed generously into the steel maw of the carburetor. It wasn’t a problem, or not at first, not until I began to discover romance and the vital significance of the back seat. We lived—variously six, seven or eight of us, males exclusively—in three upstairs rooms of a frame house owned by a widow who had been Potsdam’s Homecoming Queen in 1911 and referred to us as “my boys.” The rooms were dense with ancient furniture that gave off an odor of times long gone, but they were adequate to the purpose, and it was here that I began my first rudimentary assays into this form—the form of the short story—that would come to dominate my life. That said, I have to admit that I was not a good student or a dutiful one. Still, I read vastly, read what was current rather than what was prescribed, and came away with a spotty education (a double major in History and English, with a junior-year swoop into Krishna Vaid’s creative writing class), but with a real fever for art. What do I remember of that time? A fear of the nausea that Sartre dropped in my lap and a gnawing unformed desire that had me haunting the high steel rafters of the partly constructed library building, alone, in the spectral hours after the bars had closed, trying to taste the future on a sub-zero wind.