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Contributor to the New Yorker and Chicago Public Radio's This American Life, humorist David Sedaris has just published a new collection of short stories called Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. I talked with him recently over cake at Cozy Corner in Oak Park, Illinois.

Books&Culture: Why do you avoid reading reviews of your books?

David Sedaris: With every previous book I've called the publisher and said, You can't let this book come out. I'll give you your money back, please don't let this happen. But I didn't this time, and I think it's because the majority of the stories were published in the New Yorker. I don't trust myself but I do trust them. It's just given me great confidence. I got a bad review yesterday and my publicist warned me not to open this magazine that I'd never open anyway. I went a radio program yesterday and I was thinking about it the whole time I was getting interviewed. And then I thought, Wait a minute, I write for the New Yorker. That somehow made it OK; if they don't like my book, they'll just have to take that up with the New Yorker.

You've resisted being labeled a "writer," going as far as to list "typist" as your occupation. Do you still?

I'm OK with it now. I think with your fifth book you can use the label. The thing is, when you write humorous stuff people just kind of assume that you dictate your stories into a tape recorder. They don't really think that you chose this word over this one, that you really struggled with the construction of this as a story. Sometimes I want to say, Excuse me, but I rewrote that 16 times, and I put a lot of thought into using that word as opposed to that one, and you may notice that I've not used the same word twice in that paragraph, and there's a rhythm to these sentences. But if people are going to buy the book or show up at the bookstore for the touring stops, how much do I need?

You taught writing courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. How did you like teaching?

Most of my students were planning to be painters, not writers, and they just had to take a certain amount of English classes and were looking for an easy A. I had one student who was incredibly talented, and she deserved a better teacher than me, because I wasn't a teacher. I don't know why a story works. If something's awful, I don't know where to start. It takes a very patient person to say, let's work on the sentences for a while, then let's work on the storytelling. But I don't know those tricks.

There's a story I wrote in [my latest] book about drowning a mouse. My editor at GQ said, 'You need to cut out this stuff about the townspeople talking about the skeleton in the attic, because it doesn't really go anywhere.' And then Ira [Glass, host of This American Life] said, 'Oh no, you need to keep that, because that establishes that you're a logical person. You did not believe the story about the skeleton, and then when you're afraid of zombies and drown the mouse and people think, "But he was logical on page one!"' My editor at the New Yorker said the same thing. And I didn't know that; I probably would have cut it like my [first] editor told me to.

I've never had a natural talent for writing. I started writing when I was 20 and knew enough to keep to myself the horrible garbage I was writing. If I write something that works I can't think, I need to do that again,

because I don't know how.

How has doing public readings and recordings changed the way you write?

It changes the rhythm of the sentences. I look at stories in Naked that I never got a chance to read out loud. And now when I record the book on tape I think, 'When did I expect to breathe in this sentence?' It's not built in. And in this [latest] book the breath is always built in. There's a new story I haven't read out loud yet, I'll probably read it in a bookstore tomorrow. I had to turn it in already to be published in an anthology, and I hated to turn it in before I had a chance to read it out loud, because when I read it tomorrow, I'm going to find out so much. I'm going to learn that this doesn't work and this doesn't work and I need a new ending, and I need more dialogue here, and I don't need that, I've already made that point.

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