In school, we read stories written by Hawthorne, poems by Dickinson and essays by Thoreau. As adults, we turn more often to John Irving, Annie Proulx or Stephen King.

All are New England authors. Why do their works have such a hold on the American imagination?

"StoryLines America," a creation of National Public Radio and the American Library Association, is turning its attention to that question this fall. Now in its fourth season, the program will investigate New England classics, old and new, in "StoryLines New England." The call-in program runs for 13 weeks on New Hampshire Public Radio, Sundays at 6 p.m.

The man with the difficult task of choosing those stories is David Watters, professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and director of the Center for New England Culture. He recently talked with The Wire about the conversations he hopes the program will spark.

How did the first program go?

I thought it went pretty well. I was a little nervous. ...As soon as the phone lines were open, people were calling, wanting to talk about their family's immigrant experience and their family farm experience. Jane Brox was there, and she had some wonderful things to say about her family, about her book.

You know, this series is a little different. It's not supposed to just to be just talking heads talking about books. It's supposed to create a community on the air, where people feel that, whether they've read the book or not, that they are invited into the conversation about the region, based on what the book has raised. So it's a little different that way. It's not just: here's the author, let's do a book talk. It's really "storylines." It's supposed to get people's stories together and create a conversation on the air about people's lives in the region.

So the book is the starting point for conversation?

Yeah. With New England literature, one might have expected that we lined up all the dead classic authors: Hawthorne, Dickinson and so on. We've got a few of them. But again, the idea is that maybe we can think about what might be new classics, or undiscovered classics, that will involve more of New England's people today.

Where is that difference?

So much of the image of New England past is Ye Olde Puritan or Yankee New England. But New England was the first global society. Africans, Europeans and Native Americans came together here. And for the last two centuries, it's been the most Catholic region in the country, while it also has extraordinary regional and ethnic diversity. We wanted books that would present that older New England, because it's real, it's palpable and it still has a lot to do with experience in the region. But then we also wanted to have books by contemporary authors: African American authors, Irish American authors, Lebanese American authors, people who really speak to what it's like to be in New England today.

How does "StoryLines New England" differ from the programs featuring other regions?

Being a New Englander, I think we've got the best literature, OK? (laughs). It's going to be the best, that's why it's different (laughs). In the West, the much stronger presence of native peoples meant that there's nationally known contemporary Native American writers. Also, the presence of the frontier is still strong in some of the regions. What gets studied in New England is the incredible four centuries of layering of communities and histories. And I also think the presence of the past. We have a literature that goes back, in terms of printed texts, almost four centuries now. There's just going to be more historic consciousness, perhaps some more early books, than some of the other series had.

How does a region's culture get represented in literature these days, when information travels so quickly?

Great question. That's not only a question of contemporary media, when things can instantly be everywhere and nowhere, but it's also a quality of American life. In the global society, and in the nation state, which is interested in homogenizing its people for political purposes, how does a region persist? I think that's what's interesting in these books. I think persistently there's a human need to live in the local, that we still respond to the landscape, and we respond to people we can know face to face. And in New England particularly, the pull of community is very strong, and the attachment to place is very, very strong. While that's changing, and it might be different for some people, I think it still really characterizes New England.

Can you define the New England identity?

One thing that's interesting in America is that a lot of the regions define themselves against the other regions. So the West likes to define itself as being newer, as being closer to Asia and Latin America. And maybe freer, less tradition-bound than New England, say. Less class-conscious maybe, than New England. Then you think about how the South and New England define themselves against each other. They went to war over it. And that lingers. And you can find a lot of attitudes in New England.

I think the regions are kind of a national conversation. I think it strengthens our democracy, and I think it also tells us something about the need of people, despite the media, to feel that they have a homeplace. I think, too, that New England, in a funny way, functions for the whole nation. People who never have been in New England still consider it an American homeplace, associated with Thanksgiving, maybe, with the Pilgrims, with certain kinds of resonant images of American democracy, like the town meeting. Whether those things are really still true about the region or not, there's a need for those to be there in the region. And that's why people want to walk the Freedom Trail, visit Boston, go see foliage.

What does this series uncover that might be unexpected?

I think people also really associate New England with certain ethnic groups, with the Irish, for example. There's more Irish certainly in New York, in Chicago, than there are in New England, and yet Boston Irish means something. There's Michael Patrick McDonald's book about the busing crisis, about growing up in the projects of South Boston, about the poorest neighborhood in the United States being white, not black, when he was growing up. And we've got the Kennedys, right?

What I hope to do in this book series is play the old off the new. And also I want to surprise people. I want people to think about what it means to live in New England in terms of African American experience. What do you get that's different? Most people associate African American experience predominantly with the South, with urban areas like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and so on. But we've got black Boston, that tradition, in the book "The Living Is Easy," which means you have to think differently not only about New England, but also about black America, maybe.

I think it's also surprising to have a children's book, "Charlotte's Web." We're the first region (in the series) to present a kids' book as classic literature. Children's literature was kind of invented in New England, and many of the best children's writers live right here in New England. And we've got Stephen King (laughs).

How did you choose your books?

It was kind of fun kibbitzing. I was the lead scholar among a group of three scholars. In a way, we couldn't go wrong. There were so many great writers to do. Some of the guiding principles I set in place were to have a diversity of traditions, to have relatively matched male and female. I also thought New England is unique in that the states still mean something, so I wanted to make sure we had one or two from each state.

And what's in print? I don't know how familiar you are with this problem, but so much isn't in print. Books that were written two years ago aren't kept in print. So that was a real problem for some authors. I had wanted to do John Preston, a gay author from Maine, and that book was not available. I thought about Spalding Gray. And Tobias Wolff has a great novel, "Providence." That would have been my first choice for Rhode Island, but it's out of print. Mark Doty. I was kind of thinking about doing his memoir about the death of his lover. That one, they might have had 300 copies in stock. We need to think of 700-1,000 in stock.

I think with any list like this, anyone who knows New England literature is going to say what, you left out (this person or that person), and I just figure, well, sorry. It was a process, and I feel like we came up with a fun list, with some surprises. Most people hadn't heard of Brox. A lot of people really don't associate Annie Proulx with New England. I asked her about that once, asked her why she moves around so much. I think she remembered a conversation she had with (New Hampshire author) Ernie Hebert, saying "don't get yourself identified as a regional writer. Keep moving." And she has. John Casey did win a National Book Award for "Spartina," but it's not really well known. It's a great book for bringing back not only New England and the sea, but also manhood, and how masculinity gets defined in New England. I think that will interest people in ways they may not have thought about.

What are the current threads of New England culture you tried to represent?

I wanted people to see a multi-ethnic, multi-racial society. The two Boston books give you a conversation between African Americans and Irish Americans. And the Wasps in both cases. That was nice. People really get that. Also, because of my own personal interests, I wanted people to really understand that Native Americans are identified with this region, small in numbers but important in presence. ... There's a literature there, and there's some contemporary writers, but there isn't a New England Louise Erdrich.

How much do you read, and how do you choose what you read?

I've focused myself on New England in my teaching and my writing in the last several years, and I do try to read New England literature, but I also read a lot of newspapers, too, two or three newspapers a day. I'm interested in politics, that's part of it. I don't know. It's hard. I think that one of the things, ironically, is being a professor these days means you have less and less time to read. I think that's a problem. I think it's getting harder to say that you know what's happening in American literature. We're forced to make choices. There are a few authors I try to read everything of that comes out. I read a lot of poets, you know, Don Hall or Charles Simic or Mekeel McBride, people who are real local to here. And I'm pretty interested in books about landscape. I read a lot of history, too. Coming from American studies, I probably read more history than I read literature, and I'll read anything that's about early New England gravestones or New England architecture. I read a lot about artists. And I have kind of a particular interest in New England African American literature. Any New Hampshire writer, I try to read. Wherever my curiosity leads me.