In a career-spanning interview with The Paris Review, novelist and story writer Mary Robison (MA ’77) discusses her fiction, her cohort of era-defining, so-called “minimalists,” and her years at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, where she studied with John Barth and published her first stories in The New Yorker.

With her Art of Fiction interview, Robinson joins a group of distinguished Writing Seminars alumni and longtime faculty who have been featured in The Paris Review‘s interview series. Edward Albee, John Barth, Robert Stone, Karl Shapiro, Mark Strand, Edmund White, J.D. McClatchy, Richard Howard, and Alice McDermott have also given Writers at Work interviews on theater, poetry, and fiction.