In a UMNews profile this week, Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing Charles Baxter talks about the pleasure of discovering fictional characters and the importance of fear and failure in fiction. "I'd say you need to be able to imagine, and want to imagine, what people do when things begin to go wrong," he notes. Baxter is the author most recently of the story collection Gryphon, which was named to the New York Times' "100 Notable Books of 2011" list. He is currently working on a collection of short stories based on virtues.
