India, May 9 -- 1What was the genesis of this collection? These were the only good stories I wrote over a period of about 15 years. They were written one by one, with no sense of what they would look like together. By now - I will be 71 this year - it is clear even to me that I have a limited number of subjects and landscapes. Each story in the book is in some sort of dialogue with other work I have done. The first story, for example, The Journey to Galway, is about Lady Gregory, who is also the subject of Silence, the first story in The Empty Family. She is also the subject of my short monograph Lady Gregory's Toothbrush, and my play Beauty in a Broken Place, and my opera libretto Lady Gregory in America. I think Sleep is a kind of companion piece to my story One Minus One. Maybe Summer of '38 could be usefully read with my first novel The South and The News from Dublin could be put beside my novel The Heather Blazing. 2How important is it for a writer of fiction to understand the complexities of human relationships? It is essential for me that nothing is simple, no desire is simple, no motive, no interaction. I work with complexity, to see how much energy I can get from a single emotion, how much ambiguity and nuance. 3Why do the ideas of uprootedness and dislocatedness dominate your stories? The secret history of Ireland since the mid-19th century is dislocation, as so many people went to the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. It is something I have done. I lived in Spain between 1975 and 1978. And then I have lived mainly in the United States over the past 20 years. What interests me is not merely dislocation but the emotions around returning, what it means to come home, if home is the word. 4What's home to you? Do these stories reflect your personal loss of home? This is a difficult question. The first answer is that I live in my head and my head is my home. But that is too glib. I am Irish, or, more accurately, I am from Enniscorthy in the south-east of Ireland. I have a house on the coast there. Maybe that is home. But I am not there as much as I am in the US. The US is not home; it is not my country. I am not at home here. But I am, oddly, at home in the two rooms I inhabited in New York - a room to sleep in and a room to work in, with some books, some CDs, a small kitchen and a small bathroom. I spend my day quite happily here. But Ireland? Most of my family are dead now. Maybe it is a place of memory, but I like being in Ireland. I read an Irish newspaper before I go to sleep each night. Home is a vague word, too vague maybe for me. 5What are the challenges of writing short fiction? Very few ideas I have work for a short story. You try them and then they fall away. Every so often you strike what might be gold. The main thing is to avoid easy plotting or too much action or confrontation. But something has to happen, even if it feels like nothing, or nothing much....