SOURCE: Busch, Frederick, and Miriam Berkley. “PW Interviews: Frederick Busch.” Publishers Weekly 225, no. 13 (30 March 1984): 58-9.

In the following interview, Busch discusses his works, analyzes his attachment to his characters, and shares insights on his life and his approach to writing.

Frederick Busch writes fiction in a barn built for sheep in the small upstate New York town of Sherburne. Visible in the distance is Cooperstown, with the Baseball Hall of Fame he loves. A few hundred yards from his study is the renovated farmhouse he shares with his wife, Judy, and their two sons; the kitchen is toasty from a wood-burning stove. It's clear, crisp and cold outside on the late January day on which we speak with Busch, a man of moderate height and immodest heft, about his new novel, Invisible Mending, out this month from Godine (PW Fiction Forecasts, Feb. 3).

At the age of 42, Fred Busch...