Today, the MacArthur Foundation announced its 2013 Fellows. Among the twenty-four members of this year’s class is the writer Donald Antrim, a longtime contributor to The New Yorker. I spoke with him over e-mail.

First, congratulations on the MacArthur Fellowship. Did the news come as a surprise to you?

Completely.

I know that you’ve been assembling a collection of stories, all of which have already appeared in the magazine. Are there many more to come?

I’m working toward finishing a final story for the collection. It’s been slow going.

The stories in the book will have been written across a span of fifteen years or so. Do you think that your approach to the short story has changed in that time? Will we see a trajectory in the book, some kind of ongoing reassessment of the nature or purpose of storytelling?

Too many reassessments to count or name. A lot has happened over the years—my life has changed a few times over, and my attitudes toward writing and literature in general, as well as my sense of my own place in the world, have gone through reversals and periods of acute destabilization. For a long time, I regretted ever having chosen to do this work, but recently I realize that I feel more seriously committed to the story, to the novel, and to memoir than, twenty or so years ago, I would ever have imagined possible.

In your video on the MacArthur Foundation’s Web site, you say that you’ve “been called a novelist,” though you’ve “only written three novels.” How many novels should one have to write to deserve the title?

It’s not so much a question of title. In the nineteen-eighties, I was an editorial assistant for a great editor named Ray Roberts. He passed away a few years ago. One day, in about 1985, I referred to one of his writers—we were publishing a first novel—as a novelist. Ray called me into his office, sat me down, and told me that publishing a book, or even two or three, didn’t necessarily make one a novelist. Ray felt that a novelist was a person who had dedicated his or her life to the pursuit—the professional pursuit—of the art form. At the time, I thought that Ray’s opinions seemed curmudgeonly, old-school. Now that I’ve spent some years writing fiction, I am more inclined to see his point, the rightness of it. Maybe when I’ve come along a little further I’ll be a novelist. In the meantime, I remain a writer.

You’ve always had a particular—or, perhaps, peculiar—kind of modesty about your work. You’re very hard on it; you’re very ambitious for it; you insist on the importance of craft, artistry, historical, and literary awareness, among other things, in your fiction. And yet you don’t really expect anyone else to care about those things.

We do what we can.

The world of your novels is, in some ways, a hermetic one. Events occur within a seemingly enclosed space or environment; there’s a kind of dug-in or cramped feeling—people building moats around their homes; a hundred brothers chasing one another around a dimly lit house; psychiatrists flooding a pancake house—and a sense that an emotional or psychological or actual physical explosion is about to blow that space open (though what happens in the end isn’t necessarily that). Do you need that feeling of enclosure in order to envision a plot?

I suppose that certain constraints—the physical realm defined, as it were—give me a sense of concreteness, of dimension in space and historical, personal time. The story I’m working on now is set outside, actually—the narrator is driving a car through the mountains in a storm. He’s stuck. So, in fact, business as usual.

Since writing your last novel, “The Verificationist,” you put out a memoir called “The Afterlife.” Do you think that this journey into nonfiction has changed, or will change, your approach to fiction?

Have you got a few days or a week? Let’s talk.

Photograph courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.