Charlotte Bacon is a curious person. Born in New York City, the award-winning author "traveled for years and years" before finding the appropriate outlet for her inquisitiveness. Indeed, while in her 20s, Bacon, who was curious to know whether she could cut it as a writer, wrote a short story as part of her application to graduate school. Writing, it seems, was the right direction. Not only was Bacon accepted to grad school, but the story went on to become the basis for "A Private State" (University of Massachusetts Press), her collection of short stories that won the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction in 1998. And her first novel, "Lost Geography" (St. Martins Press), was chosen as one of the best first novels by the Washington Post in 2000 and included as one of the 10 best first novels in Book Lust by Nancy Perl. The one-time Himalayan tour guide, EMT and obit writer has her latest novel "There Is Room for You" (Farrar Straus & Giroux) due out in paperback in April. In the six years since Bacon burst onto the literary stage, she joined the UNH faculty, married and is now a mother. Bacon says each of these experiences has helped her evolve as a writer. "My work is getting riskier and riskier," she said, which is the result of "getting older and having more experience and realizing that it doesn't really matter if I take a risk and it fails. I like being where I am now as a writer; I feel flexible and strong and ready for stories that are really brave."

Your latest novel, "There Is Room for You," follows Anna Singer on a journey of personal renewal to India. While Anna is an American citizen, her mother, Rose, grew up within the British colonial community prior to moving to America. Being a Brit in colonial India and being an American in post-9/11 India have clear political connotations. How did you deal with the politics of culture clash?

I sought it out, actually. That's one of the reasons the book is set in and deals with certain issues raised in Indian culture. It was actually one of the most interesting themes to deal with in the book: how colonialism has changed in the course of 50 years. But I didn't want to get polemical; I wanted those ideas suggested and to have them related, as I hope they are, to Anna and Rose and how they conduct themselves with one another.

Anna says at one point, "No one likes foreigners to step on the scars of your country, even when it follows policies you find disturbing. Like a mother. Only you are allowed to criticize your own." Was Anna speaking from an American point of view?

She is speaking about her own country to Lev, an Israeli. The point was that both countries, Israel and the United States, are widely demonized abroad, and she is trying to be careful about what she says so as not to offend him because she's a) thoughtful and b) attracted to him. Certain lines get drawn awfully quickly between people.

The real issue is that it's hard to know at times how much of our personalities are conditioned by our nationality and the exact historical moment into which we are born. How much of what I do or say is dependent on or stems from the fact of my being an American, white, female, born in New York City, raised as I was? Or is it important that I've left New York, traveled for years and years and grown into what seems to me to be someone quite different, though I am still white and female? How much change is possible inside the confines of a character-not just one's genetic character, so to speak, but one's national or social or political character?

In your books, the main characters are women who experience unsettling or tragic events. Why do you make yourself relive difficult and emotional experiences for each book?

If you've got an answer, let me know. Writers feel things deeply. The dark, hard parts of life are to me the pieces of experience that are most interesting because they are the unsung, unspoken pieces of what we go through day to day. Although I write fiction, I'm interested in what is realest about people, about the hidden aspects of people's lives. I don't relive, exactly ... Most of what I write is totally made up. I've never lost a parent; I've had a profoundly lucky upbringing; I am very much a person who likes being alive. But I also cannot look away from lives that have been less fortunate or lie about the fact that no one is exempt from pain. In pain people reveal themselves and writers, no matter their genre, are in many ways no more than witnesses to and recorders of stark realities.

What part of that process do you find fulfilling?

All of it. I love drafting. I love research. I love reading other books and thinking, "Oh what a great idea," or, "How inspiring." I love working with my editor, who is an amazingly gifted reader. I love finishing. I am less enthusiastic about publishing because suddenly the book can't be worked on any more and there's never a point at which I feel entirely through with it.

Are you working on another book now?

Yes. A novel about a family that moves to Wyoming from New York after the mother commits suicide. More semi-orphans. I think I wanted to write about a place with fewer people than India, and Wyoming is certainly that. It's mostly sky, horses, elk and mountains, and that was refreshing. India is people, people, people, dust, horns, people, people, people, horns, horns, horns. I also wanted to work on a book that did not use a first-person narrator or weave through too many layers of time. I'm trying to learn to just tell a damn story this time.

You hold or have held a variety of jobs: mother, professor, journalist and Himalayan tour guide, to name a few. How have these experiences contributed to your storytelling?

Each of them has been important in many ways. Mothering is the most essential in that, in my experience, nothing stretches you more than having a child. Everything about who you thought you were flies out the window and you are left with yourself, a soggy, sleep-deprived lump of humanity desperately needed by another sodden lump of slightly less sleep-deprived humanity. What's good about this is you get quite clear about what you need to function. A lot falls away. You turn out not to need trips to movies each week or long walks in the woods alone, perhaps. In my case, motherhood taught me that writing was essential to my survival. Also, it stretched my capacity for love to a place I'd never anticipated and that was also good for my work. Empathy is useful for writing characters who feel real.

Teaching is good because it puts you into contact with the world, with young people, with fellow teachers, and it forces you to get out of bed and at least pretend to be normal. Himalayan guiding: the world is one dangerous, beautiful place. Go see it.

Are there certain authors, musicians or artists you often refer to for either inspiration or relaxation?

Michael Ondaatje. Alice Munro. Don DeLillo. Cormac McCarthy. Elizabeth Bishop. Li-Young Li. Louise Erdrich. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Alistair MacLeod. Jim Harrison. Grace Paley.

As an English Professor at the University of New Hampshire, what advice do you give students who come to you and say, "I want to be a great writer," and how many of them follow through?

I don't think anyone has ever said that to me, and I can't imagine they would. A lot of them say, I want to write, and I tell them, then write. Write and write and write and write and read and read and read. In between, get a couple of bad jobs, have your heart broken once (not more than that-too painful) and do some traveling and moping and turning into a human and then some more reading and writing and perhaps then you'll know if this is what you want and need to do. Just sit down and make it happen, bit by bit. As Roethke says, I learn by going where I have to go.