The moral self within.(PW talks with Joyce Carol Oates)(Interview)

PW: What prompted you to start writing specifically for young adults? Joyce Carol Oates: I was invited by Tara Weikum, who's an editor now at HarperCollins Children's Books, to assemble [a collection of] short stories about adolescents, because she had noticed I'd written quite a few. The collection is Small Avalanches (March, 2003).

I've always written about adolescent girls. I think I just have a gravitational pull in that direction, and yet I've never written specifically for that audience, So, it just was a matter of rethinking how a story might be presented in a somewhat less complex way.

Then I wrote a young adult novel, which was just the next step. I …