Instead, her novels and stories are about identity, Harper says. "They're really about a character's search for her own identity, how that search is impinged on by various social and political factors."

The search is personal for Kincaid, who proudly claims to have no identity: "I'm no one and I'm quite happy about it."

Kincaid says she writes to discover who she is. If she knew the answer, she would stop writing immediately.

"I only know who I am, or who I think I am, when I'm at my desk," Kincaid says.

Yet Kincaid is clearly somebody--somebody enough to draw the adulation of students and to attract widespread interest in her two courses.

This is Kincaid, the acclaimed writer, whose byline has appeared in Rolling Stone as well as The New York times op-ed pages, and whose passion for the craft is unmistakable.

"I write on a typewriter, I write by hand," Kincaid says. "I often write with people sleeping on my lap. I write in bed, I write at the dining table, I write at the kitchen table. I write whenever I can."

If Kincaid is impassioned, she is also particular, admitting openly that "a certain kind of student interested in a certain kind of writing would be hard for me to teach."

She isn't interested, she explains, in "how things get form here to there." She doesn't want to know about how one gets from inside to outside. She just wants to know what happens when one is there.

To select students for her fiction writing workshops, Kincaid surprised applicants by asking them to write about a tree.

"It's really more of a statement about myself," Kincaid says. "It's the sort of thing that I supposed I would have responded to."

"For me, these things are points of departure," she says. "What does it bring up in you...I can imagine hundreds of pages on why it would mean nothing, and even that would be about the tree."

At the English Car meeting, she is softspoken as she reads aloud a nonfiction passage about trees and shrubs. She waves her hands gracefully, occasionally lifting her index finder for emphasis.

Writing is lying, she tells the potential students. "If you don't know the text of something, you can't make an untruth about it."

This is the way Kincaid talks, a stream of easily flowing words that often ends in something unexpected, some striking statement.