KlM EDWARDS: I did my graduate work in Iowa City. When l finished, my husband and I left for teaching jobs on the rural east coast of Malaysia, worlds away. Against the dazzling backdrop of the South China Sea, life seemed very quiet-no talk of writing, no other writers, no visible ways in which books mattered. Still, I kept writing stories and sending them out hopefully over oceans, one last, tenuous connection with my old life, with what I still believed was my writing life. The mails were slow, erratic. One day I came home to find not one, but two, rejection letters waiting. They were simple form letters, neither kind nor unkind. Still, in that silence I allowed them enormous weight. For days I was depressed, glum. At last my husband got fed up. “If you love to write then do it,” he finally said, exasperated. “Do it for that reason and that alone. But if you only want to get published, give it up.”