Writer Peter Ho Davies consistently takes readers spelunking through the depths of cultural displacement. Through two story collections, The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love, and his debut novel, The Welsh Girl, he has wrought out commentary on race, class, and cultural divides from the commonplace, whether the scene involves Thanksgiving dinner or the slip of "a sweet but rather too boisterous fart."

The idea of bridging cultures and of exploring the nooks and crannies of the gaps between them is something in which Davies' is an expert by experience. His background offers a lesson in globalization: his mother is a Chinese woman raised in Malaysia; his father, a Welshman; they raised Davies in England; and now, in the U.S. for the past decade, he is raising his own family.

But just as it's impossible to classify his culture, it's too limiting to view Davies strictly as a writer of culture. Like the stories of Lorrie Moore, his narratives have a sly humor, and reveal much about the way people, regardless of their backgrounds, interact with one another. Like Raymond Carver, he's able to plumb personal moments and carve out nuanced relationships through subtle details.

With The Welsh Girl, set towards the end of World War II, Davies accomplishes all this in novel form. Through the story of a Welsh barmaid who first falls for an English soldier and later for a German P.O.W., Davies illustrates not just the difficulties moving against one's cultural allegiances, but also how such decisions shape us. Another strand of the book follows Joseph Rotheram, a German refugee living in England and now part of the English Army. As he tries to crack whether Rudolph Hess, a high-ranking deputy under Hitler who has come to England, is fit to stand trial or insane, he's repeatedly confronted with the idea of being a mischling, a half-Jew, an aspect of himself he prefers not to acknowledge.

Busy at the end of his term directing the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Michigan (the position rotates every three to four years), Davies took some time to correspond with writer Vikas Turakhia over email about his career thus far, the inevitable discussion his background raises about his writing, and the advice he gives his students.

VT: Where did you get your impulse to write, and what direction did it take you at first?

PHD: Star Wars! Seriously. I was a teenage sci-fi geek and not only devoured the books and movies, but in the way of fandom became really interested in how the movies were made, who made them-- from that it's a small step to wanting to be a maker. I found a book called Who Writes Science Fiction? around the same time-- a volume of interviews with writers-- and that became a real touchstone.

You have a degree in physics. What pushed you to move in that direction academically? Did you feel a simultaneous pull towards English and writing, or did that come later? How has that science degree, and education, played out in your life and your writing?

"I always felt a tug between physics and English Lit."

The British education system makes (or made) you specialize from high school on, but I always felt a tug between physics and English Lit. I chose to study physics because at that time (the Thatcher years when unemployment was exploding) it seemed a more marketable degree. Problem was that while I could keep up with the math, and was good at exams, I didn't really have a gift for physics and my consciousness of that made me think about the study of literature and how it had always seemed to come easily to me... all of which resulted in me doing a second undergrad degree in English. As for how the science impacts my writing now, that's a complex question, but to take one relatively simple example, I think wave-particle duality (the idea that light or matter can be understood by two apparently mutually exclusive concepts) probably informs the way I think about characters, who of course can often be understood in multiple and conflicting ways.

In your early writing days, did you think you were good?

How do you judge your own work, meaning, how do you know it's good enough, or complete?

I know it's complete when I finally feel like I understand it, and understand why I wrote it-- which is hard enough. The question of if it's any good, I should perhaps leave to others.

I read that you published your first story when you were 21, but didn't publish another one until you were 26. I'm fascinated by that gap. What was going on in that five-year span, and in what ways did you change as a writer and a person?

The story I published at 21, I actually wrote at 18, and for a time it seemed as likely to be an end as a beginning. I finished my physics degree in that time, then did a BA at Cambridge in English, then worked in publishing for two or three years, and while I would keep circling back to writing, I was trying to see if I could do other things. It was the fact that these other avenues, while sometimes temporarily satisfying, didn't feel like things I wanted to do for the rest of my life, that kept me returning to writing. I wrote perhaps only four or five more stories by the time I was 25, and used two of those as my application to grad school.

In your periods of struggle as a writer (especially with that five-year gap), how did you keep writing? Or, if you stopped, how did you come back to it?

"What brings me back to writing is having a story to tell."

"Periods of struggle" feels a bit grandiose for what I've gone through. I have been a sporadic writer at times, but those periods might best be described as "periods of distraction" or "periods of dullness." What brings me back to writing is having a story to tell.

Can you take us through the process of getting that first story published? With that in mind, what's the process of publishing like for you now, and at what point, if any, did you become comfortable with it?

It took 2-3 years between writing and publishing the story, and in a way that remains my impression of publishing-- its slowness and the concomitant feeling that when the work appears it was written to some degree by another (younger) self.

Where do you see you fiction having a place in the grand scheme of things? How do you want it to function? Do you want it to reflect your experiences in the world? Thinking about your portrayal of Rudolph Hess in particular here, do you use it as a way to explore what is unknowable?

I try not to see my fiction in the grand scheme of things-- at least while writing it--since that seems a sure way of making it impossible to write. Of course, out of the corner of your eye you do steal glances at the big picture-- it was difficult in the writing this historical fiction about war and prisoners of war, not to think of current events, and I'd like to hope the novel will resonate on that level for some readers, but whenever I was tempted to force that connection it seemed... well, forced.

What was your reaction to Granta magazine naming you in its "Best of Young British Novelists" list, especially since you hadn't published a novel yet? Was that a blessing, curse, or a prediction?

Making it on to such lists, like most literary honors, is something of a crap-shoot. You hope to put yourself in the running, to be "there or thereabouts," but the difference between making the top 20 and maybe being 25 on the list is just down to the taste of the individual judges-- luck, in other words. That said, it meant a lot to make the Granta list-- when I was a teenager I remember the first such list coming out and being inspired by it. As for a blessing or a curse, I'm not sure it was either. These kinds of things tend to make the writing easier for a week at most in my experience (and I'm not sure they can make it harder). The fact that I hadn't published a novel at the time of selection didn't bother me overly-- there have been several folks selected over the years in that situation, the rules allow for it and indeed there were other folks on my list who hadn't published at all (I at least had two collections out). If I felt any awkwardness about the selection, it was about my qualifications as "young" (I was in my late 30's) and "British" (having not lived in the UK for 10 years).

You established an enviable reputation as a short story writer. For you, besides the time involved, how was the process of composing your novel different from the way you write your stories? Also, how did writing short stories first prepare you for the demands of writing a novel? Did that experience with short fiction work against you in any way with the longer work?

I had to work on the novel every day (or every couple of days) to keep the whole in my mind; whereas with stories I often work in short bursts, and set aside drafts for long stretches. Probably, too, there was an aesthetic reorientation. I think of every word in a story as essential, every part contributing pretty tightly to the whole. The novel is, as is often noted, a looser, baggier form, which is freeing in many ways, but was also an adjustment.

In another interview you've given, you said that your parents, while not all-out storytellers, used to give snippets and details about their past, but now even that contribution has fallen because they worry that something they say might end up in your writing. This is something most writers, and especially their families and friends, have to deal with. In the past, what's migrated into your work, and what was the reaction of the person originally connected to that detail?

Actually, I think I was joking when I said that of my parents-- my father in fact was very generous with his childhood reminiscences of Wales during the war for The Welsh Girl. As for the reactions of friends to their occasional appearances in my work: they've generally been positive, or if not, they've never said (this might be British reserve coming to my help). Increasingly, where I've used details from a friend's life (and I've rarely used more than details; I don't generally base characters on real people) that friend is also a writer, and has the same recourse to use a detail about me in his/her work. My friend Chang-rae Lee "got me back" like this in his last novel, Aloft, though the fact I'm telling this story at all suggests I was flattered by the allusion.

Anytime I ask this question, I always think of the New Yorker cartoon where an interviewer asks the author of a massive book to sum it all up in a sentence, so I apologize in advance, because this question falls in line with that one. What do you see as the central idea of The Welsh Girl? For me, it falls into the push/pull of culture on life's decisions, and questions culture creates about personal identity, but other critics have seen the story as an illustration of the nature of communication and its barriers. What is it for you?

Both those readings seem fair to me, and reflect some of the things I was thinking about, but any good novel hopefully has several ideas at its core-- it's part of what I think of as the "density" of good fiction, it's why we reread such books finding new things in them. Perhaps, too, it's one of the ways in which the novel feels like life, that it resists such encapsulation.

You've captured a wide variety of voices through your short stories. Still, did you feel like you were taking risks with the characters of The Welsh Girl, where you inhabit the mind of Rudolph Hess (one of Hitler's top deputies), and that of a 17-year-old girl who tries to define what constitutes rape to her?

I've certainly talked about such things as "risks" but probably "experiments" is the best way of describing them, since "experiments" suggests you can try them in the lab (or draft-form) and move on if they fail. "Risks" always makes me think of bungee-jumping (something that if it goes wrong you don't get a do-over).

Among your own stories, can you choose three favorites (at least favorites of the moment), and talk about why those stories stand out to you?

It's as impossible as asking someone to choose their favorite children (in my case since I've only the one son, it's actually harder to pick favorite stories). "The Hull Case," with its alien abduction, often comes to mind though, probably because it feels like it's a return, albeit glancingly, to my early SF stories.

In 1995, the first story you published in the U.S. was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, and your collections have been met with a good deal of acclaim and awards. The novel has been well-received, you've received fellowships, including one from the NEA... With all this in your background, can you make a living on just your writing now?

I could probably make a living from my writing, though not a great one, especially with a family to support, but I teach for reasons more than simply financial-- the fellowship of other writers, primarily, which is certainly a benefit to my work.

How has becoming a father affected your writing?

It's taken time from it, inevitably, but it's also made me use my remaining writing time more efficiently, I hope. More than that, of course, it's had an impact on my material. I've always been interested in child-parent dynamics, my last collection Equal Love is centered around such questions, but Equal Love was written before I was a father (in some ways it was my effort at a rehearsal for parenthood!) and I think some questions that are in the balance in that collection have been answered for me, and that's reflected in The Welsh Girl.

The unavoidable and oft-asked culture question: Culturally, you're impossible to categorize--Welsh father, Chinese mother (who was raised in Malaysia), growing up in England, living in the United States for the past decade-- where do you see yourself culturally?

I like "British" as an identifier these days-- though I wouldn't have claimed it growing up there as a child-- because it seems to mean something increasingly culturally diverse. In general though I'm wary of labels, and probably feel comfortable with "British" because it seems vague and in flux, and therefore provides a kind of cover.

I'm interested, I suppose, in a kind of elective cultural affinity-- the ability to choose aspects (but not the whole) of the UK, of the US, of Chinese and Welsh culture, and make of them my own. I was going to say brew, but actually the right word is story.

And how do the cultural shifts affect your writing and your perspective? Looking from your first collection, The Ugliest House in the World, to Equal Love, there seems to be more of a shift towards the American in you, but with the novel, you go back to Wales. How difficult is it to move between these spaces in your writing, especially since you've spent the past decade building a life here?

A few years ago, I did start to fear I was losing touch with British idiom and feared that my characters were starting to sound like the Artful Dodger-- all "Gor Blimey, Gov'nor. Lor' luv a duck!" The idiomatic usage was "over-egged," as one UK editor brilliantly put it. I'm less worried about it now, having reconciled to the fact that it's not something that will come completely naturally any more, but can be still be achieved with just a little work. Having BBC America on cable helps!

As an Asian American, one of the ways The Welsh Girl spoke to me was its portrayal of Esther's forbidden relationships. She crosses cultural lines by getting involved with an English soldier (whom her father would classify as an oppressor), and later she's in a relationship with a German POW. How, if at all, did your parent's interracial marriage give any insight into the complexities of a relationship like that?

I've touched on interracial relationships in stories in the past and while I've never approached my parents' own marriage directly, inevitably it's an informing factor. Rotherham, the German-Jewish refugee in the novel, a mischling who's actually half Jewish, is the product of a mixed marriage and as such probably the figure I identify with most in the book.

As the director of the University of Michigan's MFA program in creative writing, you run into budding new writers and those still struggling to find their voice. What do you tell them to do as a group to boost their skill? Do you point them to any particular writers to read for guidance, not in regards to writing guides, but as examples of simply great authorial achievements?

"...patience is the one thing young writers don't have in abundance..."

It's very hard to generalize-- the advice I'd give one student wouldn't necessarily apply to the group as a whole, and the writer I'd recommend to one student might not be a relevant guide for another. But if there's a single thing I try to teach them, it might be patience. This isn't original ("talent is long patience" as Flaubert says), but patience is the one thing young writers don't have in abundance (other skills they have plenty of), but which they need in order to revise a story, or just wait for it to speak to them, and which they really need to weather the publishing process.

Tell me about the writing you see coming up from your students. Are their struggles and subjects much the same as yours when you were in a similar place? Or do you see their writing (and maybe all writing, in general) as being reflective of their particular experiences and time? How so?

Again, it's impossible to generalize, beyond the humbling observation that they're nearly all more skilled than I was at their age.

As a writing teacher, how do you react when you come across work from one of your students that is especially dreadful? What do you do to help that writer?

I've always been lucky enough to have terrific grad students, which is not to say that talented writers aren't capable of writing lousy drafts, but it's an article of faith with me that they have the ability to improve those drafts. Usually, I'll start with the story's intentions; it may not be achieving them yet, but they're nearly always worth achieving and frequently genuinely exciting.

Can you point to any life-changing books? Not just books that necessarily affected your perspective as a writer, but books that affected your view of the world?

Vonnegut's work.

Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Who or what are you reading now? Who are some of the current writers that amaze you, and what makes them stand out to you? In a similar vein, are there any writers you used to enjoy but find yourself no longer drawn to? (I'm asking this not in the sense of wanting you to bad-mouth someone, but more as a reflection of the changes you've undergone as a reader/writer/thinker.)

Among contemporary writers, Philip Roth and J.M. Coetzee seem especially remarkable to me. Both, in different ways, have wrought such marriages of intellect and feeling. Coetzee is just so unflinchingly steely, the mind looks into the darkest, bleakest feeling. In Roth, at his best, thought simply becomes an emotion, a passion. They're the writers now who I feel I want to read everything by; in the past, from my teens on, Hemingway, Vonnegut, John Irving have all occupied those places, though I'm not sure I still feel that urgency about them today.

Vikas Turakhia, a book critic in Cleveland, teaches English at Copley High School in Copley, Ohio.