I’d always loved Hemingway and all through grad school had been doing some version of a Hemingway imitation. If I got tired of that, I did a Carver imitation, then a Babel imitation. Sometimes I did Babel, if Babel had lived in Texas. Sometimes I did Carver, if Carver had worked (as I had) in the oil fields of Sumatra. Sometimes I did Hemingway, if Hemingway had lived in Syracuse, which always ended up sounding, to me, like Carver.
