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According to NPR, there was not a man in America who had a job. Long-faced unemployed auto-factory workers stood in unemployment lines with doctors sprung loose of shuttered hospitals. Whole towns collapsing in economic horror. City blocks boarded up and empty. America as ghost town. The politicians were not calling it a depression but it was clear from the reports that the descriptor still applied to the men.

I sat in a Starbucks, reading the newspaper and working on notes for what I hoped would be a novel, secure in the knowledge that I was, apparently, the last man in America who had a job. I had been — and still am — an English professor at a local community college, but with the summer off I looked just like every other man in the dim room, frantically working on some project that would offer no method of feeding our families as we followed our bliss down the road to starvation and ruin.

Some of the men were clearly looking for work, paging through the Sacramento Bee's ...

Everyone tells you not to judge a book by its cover, but the fact is the cover is the first thing a potential reader sees, so it's tremendously important, and now, because books are so often bought online, the cover has to work online too. I can't say enough good things about the art department at Pantheon. They came up with many, many covers, most of which I didn't even see (my editor only passed on the ones that seemed possible), and although some of them were clearly wrong for the book, they were all incredibly well done and looked professional. Here are five that I was shown but that in the end didn't make the cut.

Toward the end of the process we were focused on a very type-driven cover, with both my name and the name of the book in bold. Both my editor and I loved the type in this cover, and there was something beautiful about the image too — it was a watercolor painting on a matte background, but the image was of a bare tree, ...

Monday, June 4. 5:10 a.m. I sit in my truck parked in front of the Fishermen's Memorial in Newport and watch a clammer gearing up to depredate the low tide. My black coffee tastes good. Light is coming. Rain threatens. A few sprinkles reconnoiter for an imminent invasion.

A mix tape from the Analog Stone Age blasts some classic rock through the speakers: Who are you? asks Roger Daltrey with such urgency that it compels you to answer... unless you can't.

I think about the lyrics from "Who Are You?" by The Who and how it embodies my philosophy of teaching writing to students. Virtually everything I do in class at Newport High School, where I teach, orchestrates young people to ask the question Who are you? of themselves and to try to answer it through as many modes of communication as possible: essay, poetry, fiction, memoir, music, photography. I join them in the process and derive virtually all of my writing from the experience.

A car passes and parks in front of me. A vintage Mustang. That would be Matthew, a senior at Newport High, on the last Monday ...

Okay, today I want to talk about teaching because, though I'm a writer first and foremost, teaching for me isn't just a way to make a living. I'm passionate about it, and I think you have to be in order to do a good job. I direct Brooklyn College's Fiction MFA Program, and, at the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, I can't imagine a better job. In a typical year at Brooklyn College we get 500 MFA fiction applicants for 15 spots in our incoming class. So you're dealing with some of the very best young writers out there. In the last few months alone, five of our recent graduates have gotten book contracts. There are writers who wouldn't know how to teach; for them, writing is an intuitive process and they aren't fully conscious of what they're doing. For me, it was the opposite. I could read someone else's short story and figure out what wasn't working long before I could make things work in my own stories. I needed to learn how to become a more intuitive writer, and critiquing other ...

Writers on book tour are often asked questions along these lines: "What were you trying to do by making X happen in your book?" Or "Were you planning that this would happen?" Or "Did you map your book out?" In response to these questions writers often look befuddled, in large part because they are. One issue is the simple problem of lag time. A novel can take five, 10 years to write, and then it goes into production and finally comes out, at which point the writer is often on to the next book and the book that he's being asked about can seem like a distant memory. What were you doing on page 274? And the writer thinks, Huh? I wrote that?

But I think the issue goes beyond that. Flannery O'Connor famously wrote in her wonderful book of essays Mystery and Manners: "There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without," and I agree. A novelist can be too smart for her own good.

Another way ...

If you look at a globe from a couple of decades ago, you'll find it dotted with the names of major cities that you'd expect — Casablanca, Moscow, Vancouver — but you'll also find a dot marking a tiny town in the far north of British Columbia, Canada, called Fort Nelson, a town most people, even in B.C., have never heard of. I learned this about a month ago when I was on a book tour up in this region, which is known as Peace country, after the Peace River that runs through there. I heard the story from a guy named Marl in the Fort Nelson museum. "Check it out next time you see a globe," he said. Marl had a long silver beard and a glint in his eye that made think he was pulling my leg. But I said I would.

For the book tour, we had flown in to Dawson Creek, mile zero of the Alaska Highway, then the next morning we got in the car and took the highway north again. I was traveling with children's illustrator Rae Mate ...

The title of today's blog post best describes the question I get asked most about The World without You, though it's rarely stated so directly. It's usually stated more like this: Your book is written from the points of view of many female characters. Is that hard for a male writer to do?

My answer is that it's a challenge for a male writer to write from a female perspective but no more so, it seems to me, than for a young person to write from an old person's perspective, a poor person to write from a rich person's perspective, or a gregarious person to write from a shy person's perspective. I don't see why gender should be a more insurmountable barrier than others. I believe good fiction can transcend difference, that it can take us out of our own experiences and allow us to inhabit the experiences of others. It's what happens, ideally, to the reader, and in order for it to happen to the reader it has to happen to the writer too.

A couple of years ago, I gave a reading from an early draft ...

I want to start off on this first day of my blogging to say how thrilled I am to be here at Powell's, the world's greatest bookstore. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but if it weren't for Powell's and other independent bookstores like it, writers would be up a creek. I do whatever I can to buy my books from independent booksellers, and I'm proud to say that my book tour, which consists of something like 25 stops, is filled almost exclusively with independent bookstores, starting with my hometown indie, Bookcourt, where my launch party will take place tomorrow night.

Before I decided to write fiction, I was on the path to becoming an academic. I studied political theory in college, and the only thing that saved me from academia was that I applied for all these fellowships when I was graduating from college and didn't get any of them , and so I needed to rethink things. And it's good that I did because I wouldn't have made a good academic — I hate to do research. That's one ...

I've lived a wandering life. I didn't plan it this way, but somehow I've managed to move every few years since I was 16 — for school, for work, and sometimes out of a sheer itchy restlessness that I can't entirely explain, even to myself. As a result, I spend a lot of time feeling homesick for the places that came before, while simultaneously casting an eye to the seductive destinations that are up next.

I've often feared that this nomadic tendency of mine is a character flaw, or — perhaps just as worrisome, from a writer's point of view — an aesthetic one. After all, isn't the best writing supposed to be colored by the landscape that gave birth to it, infused with its special climate and culture, like wine?

No small part of Faulkner's greatness lies in how vibrantly he conjured Yoknapatawpha County, the entwined personalities and lengthy, tortured histories of its inhabitants. Joyce lived in exile from his native Ireland but every word he wrote is both about and of that country. Alice Munro's stories venture far and wide, ...

Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel, The Age of Miracles, is, as Aimee Bender states, "glowing magic....at once a love letter to the world as we know it and an elegy."

Julia is 11 years old when the earth, suddenly and inexplicably, begins rotating more slowly on its axis, forcing days and nights to get longer and longer. People try to adapt at first, but a division arises once the government switches back to "clock time" and holdouts to "real time" are shunned and ostracized. Earth's magnetic field changes, birds fall from the sky, and whales start beaching themselves around the world. Meanwhile, ordinary life goes on; young Julia's friendships are changing, her family is fracturing, and she might be falling in love.

The Age of Miracles is both an inventive dystopian novel and a beautiful coming-of-age story unlike anything you've read before. Nathan Englander raves, "The Age of Miracles is pure magnificence. Deeply moving and beautifully executed." We are proud to have chosen it for Volume 34 of Indiespensable.

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Jill Owens: How did The Age of Miracles begin?

Karen Thompson Walker: ...