AUTHOR NOTE: Nothing beats a chat with a smart person, especially the unpretentious type. This is what I got when I asked author Katharine Weber a few questions about her new novel, "Triangle." She admits that history is only as authentic as the storyteller’s memory of it. She looks institutions squarely in the eye and seems to reply, “Oh, really?” Keen on taking her readers on an adventurous stroll into the intricacies of storytelling, this is the theme to her newest novel.

Katharine: I have had a lifelong awareness of the Triangle factory fire of 1911 because my father's mother worked in the Triangle in 1909, finishing buttonholes. She had left before the fire took place, but it still seemed like a close call, and I grew up in New York City knowing that something like 146 people, most of them young women just off a boat, women just like my grandmother, died that day, trapped with their sewing machines.

Two events in 2001 brought the fire into focus for me as the possible central element of a novel, just as I was writing my third novel, "The Little Women". The first was the death at age 107 of Rose Friedman, an outspoken and colorful survivor of the fire, in March of that year. The second was September 11th. Not since the Triangle fire had there been such a horrific event in New York City, with people making the instantaneous decision to jump to their deaths instead of burning to their deaths.

MaryAnne: The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire was the impetus for many important social changes regarding working women in America and safety in the workplace. The novel also seems heavily themed on the process of storytelling, and how our memories of a particular event are used in the retelling of it, whether they are authentic or imagined. Are these themes important to you and if so, why?

Katharine: Indeed, this is the heart of "Triangle:" How we tell our stories, how we listen to our stories, how the teller and the listener both have an agenda, and how history is shaped as much by those agendas as by actual event. As a novelist, I tell stories. Human beings need stories. We depend on them to make sense of the world. Sometimes we tell stories that compete against or contradict or overrule other stories. The best storyteller wins. That's how history is formed.

MaryAnne: What is your perception of academia and why does Stewart O'Nan identify your story as an academic farce as well as a real-life tragedy?

Katharine: I am a non-academic who has spent time in the ivory tower, including eight years teaching fiction writing in the Yale English Department. I am, however, very much an outsider. I love teaching, I love working with students, and I love the feeling inside the hive of learning and genuine inquiry that a university can be. But I despise the power structures and the self-perpetuating, self-referencing sensibility of much that is academia. One of the characters in "Triangle," Ruth Zion, a grim, obsessed scholar of the Triangle fire, has an agenda that blinds her to the truth that is under her nose. She is a fact-obsessed, gender-issue-obsessed parody of a certain kind of PowerPoint wielding scholar who, to borrow from Wilde, knows, in effect, the price of everything and the value of nothing.

MaryAnne: You are experiencing what many authors would think of as a successful writing career. "Triangle" is your fourth novel, your debut short work was seen in The New Yorker, your byline has been seen in cream of the crop publications and your flash fiction has been anthologized. To what do you attribute your success? And how do you handle rejections?

Katharine: The more willing you are to take risk, the more rejections you accumulate, to be sure. The safest thing for the writer who loathes rejection is to stop sending your work out. But we all want to be read, we all want to get to the next level, no matter what level we are approaching. I have applied for teaching jobs I didn't get, I have been passed over for all sorts of literary awards, and who can say with any certainty what the future holds, even for someone like me who is lucky enough to be well-published by one of the great literary imprints of our culture, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Rejection hurts. If you know you did your best possible work, and now here it is, back in your mailbox, rejection is confounding and discouraging. A certain amount of success makes you aware of the very fine line between success and failure. Sometimes it is certainly about good enough and not good enough. But sometimes it is about taste, and luck, and what the editor read just before he read your story, or what the college student summer intern had for lunch before she took your story out of the slush pile.

I think that my success depended on my being willing to be lucky. And I think you make your own luck to a certain extent. In practical terms, I look back and see that my writing became clearer and it started getting published. It stopped suffering from that subtle problem I see all the time in decent yet unpublished work -- writing, which has a quality of being clotted by elements in the tone or the language or the circumstances of the story that mean far more to the author than they could possibly mean to any other reader.

MaryAnne: As a former writing instructor at Yale, a workshop leader at WICE writing workshops in Paris and this spring you were the Kratz Writer in Residence at Goucher College, what value do you place on the need for higher education as a necessary ingredient for success as an author?

Katharine: I think that in order to write well you need to know things. You need to know things about the world and you need to know things about yourself. How you get that knowledge depends a lot on who you are and what your circumstances are. I skipped twelfth grade to go to college at 16, and then I never finished college. So I have neither a high school diploma nor a college degree. I mention this not because it is the model for anything, but because it is proof that you don't need to be certified to write novels people will want to read the way you need to be credentialed to fly a jet or perform brain surgery. There are many paths, most of them crooked, to writing novels. And I think it is a mistake for writers to believe that an MFA will somehow provide them with the credential to be taken seriously and get published. I urge students to go into the real world after graduation, not just straight to an MFA program. You want to write? Drive a taxi. Be a person on whom nothing is wasted, as James advised. The cloister will always be there when you want it. Be in the world first.

Being in an MFA program does certainly offer a writer an extended period of time in which to take herself seriously, and in that sense any MFA program has value, because it may be the interlude that allowed the work to get done. And there are certainly elements of the craft of writing that can definitely be taught, at every level, which facilitates the work getting done. As a writing teacher I can help you develop what you've got in some very practical ways, and I can help you do better work, but what you've got is what you bring with you to a writing workshop or an MFA program--it won't be given to you there.

MaryAnne: How has writing flash fiction helped you as a novelist?

I like the flash story because it forces you to consider the essential elements. It's like packing just two t-shirts for an Outward Bound trip. What do you really need for the trip? And when you write novels, years elapse between publications. It is very satisfying to complete something and see it into print, and that is certainly one reason I love writing stories, some of them flash stories.

MaryAnne: What do you tell your students about this super-short form and its merit in the world of literature?

Katharine: In teaching, I don't talk about flash stories so much in the context of the world of literature as I use the flash story as a tool, a writing exercise that demands that the writing student pay attention to the most essential elements of his story. Control is essential, and control is usually what writing students don't have in abundant supply.

MaryAnne: As an author, how would you like to be remembered? If a song were to be written about your life, would it be a complex classical piece, a folk song strummed on strings, or something else?

Katharine: It is comforting to imagine that my novels will be read for a long time, that people might read my novels after my lifetime. Isn't that what every writer hopes? Hillaire Belloc wrote, "When I am dead, I hope it is said, "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." I don't have any scarlet sins, maybe some pale pink ones.

Some friends surprised me with a song written about me, actually, at my fiftieth birthday party last November. So it's been done! Called, "Brilliant," it is a rather mocking and very funny song imagining a series of ludicrous ways that I might set about writing a novel. I can't imagine anything better than that.

MaryAnne: I can’t either. Thank you for sharing your refreshing perspective with us. And I only have one more question – what’s next?

Katharine: This has been fun. I thank you for the conversation. I have two projects ahead. I have begun to write a new novel, and while it is about many things, one of them is chocolate. And I have a nonfiction book forming slowly, as well -- a very personal memoirish meditation on writing which I am calling Symptoms of Fiction.