To write from inside her skin, I needed to feel what she was feeling: sorrow, bliss, rage When I was writing from the perspective of Trudi Montag, a dwarf woman in Nazi Germany, I was her height, felt her feelings. Since then, readers have told me, 'I thought you were a dwarf.' Megan, the central character in Intrusions, is six feet tall, and I figured if some readers thought everything in my fiction was autobiographical, I didn't have to worry about that question: 'Did this really happen to you?' Instead, when I was invited to give a reading, the woman who introduced me said, 'I thought you'd be much taller.' It begins with two sex scenes, and I imaged people coming up to me in the grocery store or at my children's school, saying, 'You've had those thoughts, pervert you?' or: 'How could you? You're a mother!' I was terrified in the months before my first novel, Intrusions, came out. It comes from our families: are you writing about us? From readers who want to know you beyond the words in your book or story. A question that can keep us from writing. It's a question most fiction writers dread. She teaches in the MFA program in Writing and Literature at Stony Brook, Southampton. Ursula Hegi lives with her husband in in New York State. She has served as a juror for the National Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle. Hegi's work has been translated into many languages, and her awards include the Italian Grinzane Cavour, an NEA Fellowship, and a PEN/Faulkner Award. Set in Burgdorf, a fictional village in Germany, they are part of the Burgdorf Cycle, which also includes Hegi's latest novel, Children and Fire, due out from Scribners in May 2011. Several of her novels, including Stones from the River and Floating in My Mother's Palm, explore German and German-American identity in the 20th century. Her first published novel, Intrusions, was her thesis when she was in the graduate writing program at the University of New Hampshire. Ursula Hegi was born in Germany in 1946 and immigrated to the United States as a teenager.

Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi