SOURCE: Bass, Rick, and K. C. Johnson. “What the Woods Would Expect of You: An Interview with Rick Bass.” In Delicious Imaginations: Conversations with Contemporary Writers, edited by Sarah Griffiths and Kevin J. Kehrwald, pp. 142-49. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1998.

In the following interview, which took place on 7 February 1996, Bass discusses the art of the short story, his nonfiction writing, and his environmental activism.

Rick Bass is the author of the noted fiction collections The Watch, Platte River, and In the Loyal Mountains. He is also the author of seven books of non-fiction: The Deer Pasture, Wild to the Heart, Oil Notes, Winter, The Ninemile Wolves, The Lost Grizzlies, and, most recently, The Book of Yaak (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). In 1997, Houghton Mifflin published his collection of novellas entitled The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness.

Born in Houston in 1958, Bass studied at Utah State University and then worked...