You’ve compared writing short stories to guerrilla warfare. Please explain.

In guerrilla warfare you get in fast, do what’s necessary and get out. As opposed to the more massed forms of warfare, which entail elaborate strategies and entire armies. The analogy is meant to illuminate the relative alacrity and economy with which short stories operate, as opposed to novels, where it sometimes feels like there’s a lot of groundwork that must be laid before you get to the main body of the narrative.

The New York Times recently saluted you as “master of the historical short story”. You teach creative writing. Why don’t you follow the classic dictum to “write what you know”?

I’m always looking to expand what I know. I’m always looking to get to know the world better. I’m always looking to expand the scope of my empathetic imagination. I think that’s part of why we get into the arts in the first place. And I also think that writing about other things, if you’re doing so in the right way, is a great way of tricking yourself into writing about stuff you most care about. It can be a back door into difficult emotions. Especially if you’re a guy, you might have difficulty dealing with particularly vexed emotions to begin with. And particularly vexed emotions are the sort that power literature. Not many of us like to sit down and say: Well, what’s really eating at me now?

What is historical fiction? It sounds like an oxymoron.

It’s certainly not my term. Critics are always looking for some way to help book buyers and readers put you in one category or another. What I think critics mean by historical fiction is fiction that takes, as some part of its subject matter, history as we understand it. To me, it’s not an oxymoron because, as any historian will tell you, history itself is a contested narrative. In any given historical situation, there’s a lot that we can’t know and there’s also a lot that people disagree about, so there is a lot of room within which fiction writers can manoeuvre.

It seems to me that people read fiction and history for different reasons. Do historical short stories promise the pleasures of both in one bite?

They do feed the hunger that readers have for nonfiction in fiction. When I first started reading literary fiction, I was struck by how much I was learning – not only about the human heart, which is traditionally what literature is supposed to be about, but also about how the world worked and the way the world was. So when I read Ernest Hemingway’s [short story] “Big Two-Hearted River”, I felt I was learning not only about Nick Adams’s interior but also about fly fishing. And when I read War and Peace, I felt that I was learning not only about the emotional intricacies of the central characters, but also about the Napoleonic Wars in Russia.

The sense that you get of encountering the world in a more intimate and visceral way is one of the main pleasures that fiction can deliver. History very often has to step back and say: This is our best guess as to what really happened, and what it was like. Fiction can completely commit, and convey at least one person’s vision of what it was like to be immersed in important incidents in history.

Before we get into Matters of Life and Death, can you sketch a short history of the short story in the post World War II era?

I’m not sure I can. What I can tell you is that when I started writing short stories, in the 1970s, people would often say: “Well that’s wonderful, but you’re going to need to do a novel.” In the 60s and 70s, you’d even find yourself needing to explain why Flannery O’Connor was a major figure. That really did change in the 80s with the advent of writers who specialised in short stories, like Mary Robison and Raymond Carver. I think they permanently transformed the literary scene. Around the time that Matters of Life and Death came out, in 1983, the short story was heading into its heyday in terms of literary prestige. People were finally starting to believe that somebody who wrote mainly or only short stories could be the equal of a novelist.