A feast of love for Charles Baxter

Charles Baxter looked around at the crush of people inside Micawber's Bookstore, a standing-room-only crowd, and he suggested that maybe he should cut his talk a little short. All those people standing, in winter coats and boots, it can't be comfortable.

Nobody seemed to think that cutting things short would be a good idea.

Baxter, winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story and a finalist for the National Book Award for his novel "The Feast of Love," was at Micawber's to launch his new book, "There's Something I Want You to Do."

Baxter wrote the book—a collection of ten stories, five about virtues, five about vices—after going through what he called a "dry patch" when he wasn't writing much of anything. "I started going through some old notebooks," he said, "and I came across some old pages from 30 years ago. This is how old they were—they were typed."

The pages were from a story he had started and discarded, and as he read it he thought it was one he could finish now. He changed the locale from Michigan (where he had lived) to Minnesota (where he now lives). One of the characters used the word "loyalty" to talk about his father, and that became the name of the story.

The next story ended up being called "Bravery," and, "I thought that was very odd," he said. "I seemed to be writing stories about virtues." He talked to his editor about writing a collection of stories called "Virtues," and his editor said, "I think that's a very bad idea."

In the end, Baxter put together a collection of stories about both vices and virtues. Not all vices and virtues, and not necessarily the most common ones. "Just the ones I'm interested in," he said.

Baxter looked out at the crowd and met the eyes of his brother, who was in the audience. "Since my brother is here, I can tell you that that phrase is also one that my mother used, over and over and over again." And everybody laughed.

When he read, Baxter didn't first read from the book but from an excised scene from one of the stories, "the equivalent of the DVD deleted scenes," he said, or the director's cut of a movie. The scene, originally in the story, "Chastity," was both funny and poignant, an encounter between the main character of Benny and Benny's mother, a cigarette-smoking-yoga-practicing woman whose divorce either "liberated or destabilized her, Benny wasn't sure which."

It was the following scene—a scene that takes place on the Washington Avenue Bridge, a scene that remained in the story—that was pivotal to Baxter. He read aloud the key sentence: "Irony was the new form of chastity and was everywhere these days. You never knew whether people meant what they said or whether it was all a goof."

"And that's the sentence that made me know I had a book," he said.

And then questions, answers: He discussed that "dry patch" ("I like to think every writer experiences this. It feels a little like depression," he said, when no topic or subject seems appealing to write about. "It just feels like luck when a subject arrives and you think, 'That's something I can do. That's something I want to do.'") and themed collections ("You write these stories and you find out sort of belatedly what you're writing about. My second collection, 'Through the Safety Net,' was about people who have had the rug sort of pulled out from under them. Though I didn't realize until I was about three-quarters through it that that's what it was about") and about which is easier to write about, vices or virtues ("Oh, vices. Vices are much more interesting. Misdeeds—they interest us").