The Writing University conducts a series of interviews with writers while they are in Iowa City participating in the various University of Iowa writing programs. We sit down with authors to ask about their work, their process and their descriptions of home.
Today we are speaking with William Pei Shih, an instructor at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. William is currently teaching coming up: A Taste of the MFA in Fiction, Sunday, June 22 - Friday, June 27, 2025!
William Pei Shih’s stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories (2020 and 2025), The Georgia Review, Ursa Short Fiction, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Joyland Magazine, The Southern Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Southern Humanities Review, Crazyhorse, F(r)iction, Catapult, The Asian American Literary Review, The Des Moines Register, The Masters Review, Reed Magazine, Carve Magazine, Hyphen, and elsewhere. Longreads included his story “Happy Family” on its list of Ten Outstanding Stories to Read in 2023. His stories have been recognized by the John Steinbeck Award in Fiction, the Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction, the Raymond Carver Short Story Award, the UK Bridport Prize, The London Magazine Short Story Award, the Granum Foundation Fellowship Prize, among others. His stories have been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. He has been awarded scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and the Ragdale Residency, and he has served on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for several years. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was a recipient of the Dean’s Graduate Fellowship. He is the fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. He currently lives in New York City, and teaches at NYU. For more information, please visit williampeishih.com.
1. Can you tell us a little bit about the course(s) that you are teaching for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival?
I’ve been teaching a course called the Award-Winning Short Story, which is a workshop where we’ve been studying some of the guidelines of what might make a story stand out and perhaps try and make some unified (or less so) claims and/or observations of previously award-winning stories, and try to see if we can incorporate such techniques to enhance our own work. I’ll also be teaching two additional workshop courses on Taking Care of the Audience and The Week-long MFA. Stories that I hope to read in these courses include some award-winning stories of the recent past: Sarah Thankam Matthews, C. Pam Zhang, Jamel Brinkley, Garth Greenwell, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Daphne Palasi Andreades, Deesha Philyaw, Lauren Groff . . . (not an exhaustive list, of course). I’ll also be looking at some classics by Yiyun Li, Lydia Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, Grace Paley, Tobias Wolff, James Salter, John Cheever, (also not an exhaustive list).
2. What is the inspiration for your own work right now?
People with ulterior motives. But definitely not writers. Writers are difficult to write about (although some people do this very well). For one, I know too many of them, and they are either too talented or brilliant or attractive (or all of the above) to make great characters. Used car salesmen make good characters. Terrible bosses, terrible teachers, people who are unaware of their shortcomings make great characters. People who lack a sense of generosity. In short, people who try to make the most of what little power is bestowed upon them—amazing characters. Of course, one can make a case for the opposite too, especially if they have the talent to do it. I don’t.
Since I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I’ve purposefully tried to avoid spaces where writers are prevalent—unless I really enjoy the person, then I make an exception. I cave for a day or two. It is a kind of setback in craft to listen to someone of great ingenuity go on about their work. But for me to become inspired, to really delve into the motivations and essence of character, sometimes you have to write from a place of insecurity and humility and a lack of certainty. Cultivating a lack of certainty is important to me—probably most important to me—which I find more so in people who are outside of these introspective spaces where the justification of answers becomes like a painkiller to the unhappinesses of the world and can be antithetical to my ability to conjure surprise and art-making. I think it is one (and not the only) way to develop convincing characters, or those who embody the characteristics of interesting characters. Again, for me, used car salesmen make pretty good characters.
3. Do you have a daily writing routine?
I try to write every day, and in the mornings, long before I teach and meet with students, I find that I’m most productive. But my true routine is making a practice of trusting my instincts and letting the unconscious work things out, and not rushing what needs to be in process. My routine is always trying to do the opposite of what’s fashionable, and to work on the opposite of relatability, and trying to discover the questions in things. It is not easy to do, and it takes time and much reflection. I also think that my best writing routine is reading every day. Adjacent to my writing routine is visiting an art museum and listening to Beethoven, seeing an opera at the MET. Watching Top Chef. Thinking about how people try to make things convincing.
4. What are you reading right now? Are you reading for research or pleasure?
I read for both, but I try not to let the research overtake the pleasure of reading. Some books that I’ve been reading lately—and recommend:
Ties by Domenico Starnone, The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani, Tell Her Everything by Mirza Waheed, To Have and Have More by Sanibel (one memorable name), The Imagined Life by Andrew Porter, I Know You Know Who I Am by Peter Kispert, What Napoleon Could Not Doby DK Nnuro (an Obama pick), The Story Game by: Shze-Hui Tjoa, and I’m looking forward to reading a new novel by Raaza Jamshed entitled, What Kept You?
I’m also reading and editing stories as the fiction editor for Guernica Magazine, which has been another pleasure. I encourage people to read the wonderful work that is being published there, which each month, is being lovingly cultivated by a passionate team who endeavor to put out the best writing possible. There are so many talented people in the world, so many with great stories to tell. I wish I could publish so much more, but in reality I can only publish about twenty or so stories a year.
5. Tell us about where you are from - what are some favorite details you would like to share about your home?
I’m from New York City. I grew up in Whitestone, Queens, where Walt Whitman had once lived and taught, who once wrote of Whitestone: “Have you never in your travels come across a village where some half dozen principal characters seemed to give a colour and tone to the whole place?—Of such a nature is this Whitestone, which your servant now irradiates with the benign light of his countenance.” Whenever I write about Whitestone, a half dozen or so characters have come to define the place for me. I went to high school in Manhattan at LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts, where I studied music composition. It’s the high school of Timothée Chalamet and Adrien Brody and Nicki Minaj. I studied music composition and chemistry at NYU. So much of writing is music composition to me. So much of it is chemistry too—how do you make the most with the ingredient that you have in the least amount? I have been fortunate to have met a lot of differently interesting people throughout my life. It’s taught me so much of what I’ve been missing in the storytelling of my own life.
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Take the course!:
A Taste of the MFA in Fiction
Sunday, June 22 - Friday, June 27, 2025