Meet the Author

John Clayton's stories have been published in many major periodicals and have been anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize Stories. His second collection, Radiance, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in 1998. Its title story, "The Man Who Could See Radiance," was read at Symphony Space in New York and has been aired often on NPR since fall 2001 as part of the Selected Shorts series. His third novel, Kuperman's Fire, deals with criminal evil, Jewish heritage and the miracle of survival.

In his fiction, Clayton has long taken on sensitive issues such as religion, ethnicity and gender, though he is not entirely comfortable with his territory. Clayton came to "Voices" with a long-standing interest in psychology and psychoanalysis, and a layman's knowledge of medical psychiatry. He based Sam's practice in part on a friend's experiences working in a clinic in Springfield, Massachusetts.

In "Voices," he channeled his own uncertainties about writing a relationship that spans differences of race, sex and class into his psychiatrist-narrator's attitude toward a difficult client. Clayton reflects, "In a sense, Sam's difficulties in communicating with Barbara are the same as my difficulties in writing about their relationship. I feared being false, sugary, phony, patronizing, feared making her some kind of symbol. I know even less about black women living in poverty than Sam does. What I was able to do was write about Sam's struggles by using my own unease and desire to break out of my class restrictions, gender restrictions, race restrictions. And so my unease and ignorance actually became useful."