FICTION

LISTEN TO THEIR VOICES: Twenty Interviews With Women Who Write, by Mickey Pearlman (Norton: $20.95; 224 pp.) Writers generally feel that they’ve said everything important in their writing. Readers don’t agree. They want the story behind the stories--not just in tell-all biographies, but in writers’ own explanations of who they are and of how and why they work.

Fortunately, as in this collection of interviews, most novelists and poets are articulate people with sharp, independent minds who can fulfill this assignment quite nicely. Interviewer Mickey Pearlman gives us either too little background information or too much--her elaborately cozy scene-setting only distracts us from the tape-recorded material--but she has chosen her 20 subjects well. The writers, without exception, deliver.

Since all are women, we hear about women’s particular problems in the literary world. Jane Smiley notes that women can’t trade “adventures,” as macho male writers do, for male publishers’ money. Janette Turner Hospital says she writes to overcome the “silencing of women” in Australia since convict days. Terry Tempest Williams describes how a Mormon upbringing can both oppress and empower women. Sue Miller shrugs off male-dominated Hollywood’s facile treatment of her novel “The Good Mother.”

We also hear about the problems of being female and ethnic. Gish Jen, Jessica Hagedorn and Cynthia Kadohata tell how they chafe against the label of “hyphenated writer” even as they take advantage of mixed cultural backgrounds. Finally, we hear about the universal concerns of writers, regardless of race or gender. Here’s Anne Rice on editors (“What really interests me is not collaborative art”) and on newspaper reviewers (“The shallowness and the lack of integrity, the flippancy, the disregard . . . is too great for anyone to take seriously”).