Award-winning author Carol Windley has worked as a radio station copy writer, a librarian and as a creative writing instructor at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, where she now lives. Her fiction has appeared in literary journals, in The Journey Prize Anthology and, on several occasions, in Best Canadian Stories. Her books include the award-winning collection of short stories, Visible Light, the acclaimed novel Breathing Underwater, and Home Schooling, which has been shortlisted in this year's Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Carol Windley spoke about her latest collection of short stories and the challenges short story writers face.

The short stories in your most recent collection, Home Schooling, are set against the rural landscape of Vancouver Island and the cities of the Pacific Northwest. Why is this so? Is there a particular reason for this?

I've always felt incredibly lucky to have grown up on Vancouver Island. The landscape is in one way quite gentle and benign, but it's also complicated and dense and mysterious - an ideal setting, I think, for fiction.

Some of the stories in Home Schooling are set in Washington State because it's an area with strong geographic and historical connections to [British Columbia] B. C.  The international border adds a note of interest and complexity - another demarcation, like the edge of the sea.

In these stories, what would you say is your main concern?

I wanted to look at how family is the place where we first learn about relationships and community.  Parents hope to give their children a sense of family history as well as certain attitudes and values, and while children are very receptive, very willing to learn, they're also very critical and skeptical.

In a child's imagination, received wisdom can undergo startling changes. And in a family, everything is fluid and mutable, anyway, as a result of personality and temperament and circumstance, so trying to give off a sense of this in the fictional families in Home Schooling became my main concern.

What motivates you to write?

What motivates me, I think, is a desire to capture something of human experience in language. Fiction works like a mirror that reflects our moral and emotional truths and it's one of the few ways available to us to get a glimpse into someone else's interior life.

How long did it take you to come up with the stories that make up Home Schooling?

It took a long enough time that I often felt impatient with myself.  I knew I wanted to grow as a writer; I had some clear objectives in mind. I wanted to get more of a sense of movement and activity in my writing - and plot was always a weakness for me.

I think I managed to learn something about plot. At the same time, I wanted the characters in the stories to connect with each other in a way that was energetic and authentic and touching.

Which would you say was the most difficult story to write? Why is this so?