Evaline began to make a Gibson. "What's your name?" she said. "Maybe I've heard of you."

Bud said, "Bud."

"Oh," Evaline said, looking a bit flustered. "Oh, yeah."

Robison's distinctive style of spare, non-florid prose has been labeled "Minimalism" by reviewers. "They're borrowing terms from painting that aren't applicable," Robison complains. "I don't know why they can't think up their own terms."

"I am always grouped with two or three others--Anne Beattie, Raymond Carver. I happen to be friends with them," she says. "I don't know anyone in the minimalist school who enrolled."

When it comes down to labels Robison prefers to be called a subtractionist, "because at least it sounds as if there's some effort involved. And besides, I made it up and I'm writing an essay for the Times on being a subtractionist. I'm going to wrestle with the critics there a bit."

Even if the critics don't always appreciate her work, Robison "is a writer's writer," says Bobbie Bristol, Robison's editor at Knopf in New York.

"I think the most interesting thing about Mary's reputation is that while she's not widely known, she has been very influential on young writers like David Leavitt," adds Andrew Wiley, her agent. Author and fellow Car instructor Chris Leland attributes the effectiveness of her writing to "her wonderful economy of language."

Not surprisingly, Robison is best known for her short stories in Days and An Amateur's Guide to the Night, most of which have been edited and published at The New Yorker by Roger Angell.

"I have a great respect for the form, but I actually prefer novel writing," Robison says. "But there's the obvious thing that I can get paid a great deal more money with short stories than with novels. I get paid twice--usually I publish the story somewhere then get paid for the collection." Robison has finally reached the position, rare amongst the literary set, "of being able to make more from my writing than from teaching." She plans to return to teaching only if offered "obscene amounts of money."

She has also published a novel, Oh!, which "has been optioned [for the movies] a lot. I think there's a better chance than there ever was of it being made into a movie."

"As a matter of fact, I don't particularly want to see this version made--I better not say why. Some of the people involved I'm crazy about, others I don't approve of," she says. (The Hollywood Rumour Mill states that actress Allie Sheedy is one of the persons being talked to.) "I don't have any say--my opinion is solicited," Robison adds.

Robison's husband is also a writer, who recently published a collection of short stories. Robison also has two teenage daughter from a former marriage. "I never hesitate to use them for material," she says. "I did one thing right. I convinced them early on that I was inept and pitiful, so they wait on me and do a lot for me-most children don't. They're used to an unconventional life."

Vintage Robison

"WE WERE IN MY Plymouth, on the expressway, passing a red weedfield that was going to be subdivided into a housing tract, when Junior asked to be let out. I pulled onto the berm and stopped. A bad wind was throwing paper and Dixie cups around.

Junior said he was going to walk back and sit on a pine bench he had seen. He said after that he might run around in the weedfield until he got lost, and maybe he did, too, because I only saw him one other time before I saw him dead at his funeral--he was hit by a post office truck in a Florida crosswalk on his way to Disney World--and that one other time I saw him was when Aunt Barbara got married to a man who owned a soda-bottling company."

excerpted from "Relations" in Mary Robison's Days.