SOURCE: Canin, Ethan with Lewis Burke Frumkes. “A Conversation with Ethan Canin.” The Writer 113, no. 5 (May 2000): 19-21.

In the following interview, Canin discusses how his medical knowledge affects his fiction, the origins of the stories in Emperor of the Air, and his creative process.

[Frumkes]: Ethan Canin, whose most recent novel, For Kings and Planets, is published by Random House, is widely regarded as one of our finest writers. For Kings and Planets is an extraordinary coming-of-age story. I want to begin by asking where the title comes from.

[Canin]: One of the characters in the novel, Orno Tarcher, is a Midwesterner living in New York. He's a rather serious, hardworking, intelligent man seeking contentment in his life. He finds himself in the company of a wild, energetic, creative, artistic New Yorker named Marshall Emerson. That's sort of what the book is about—contentment versus ambition.

Orno ends...