From the New Yorker

Lethem is headed to California, where he will become the Roy Disney Chair of Creative Writing at Pomona College, a position held by David Foster Wallace until his death, in 2008. I asked Lethem how he felt about leaving a place that has shaped so much of his work. “I take a lot of pleasure in New York,” he said. “But I’m always kind of here in my mind. In a way, I need to be dreaming my way back here. The longing and exile are part of my relationship to writing about this place.”

A change of scenery has worked for Lethem in the past. “The way people respond to this news is ‘Oh no, what will this do to your writing about New York?,’ as though I have to be on the streets. I wrote most of ‘Fortress of Solitude’ when I was living in Toronto and most of ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ at Yaddo.” It may even be, he told me, that getting out of town was necessary to his development as a writer (he lived in Berkeley in his twenties): “There was something about working from the margin and not right under the shadow of the publishing industry. You should find a way to slow that down and dwell in your apprenticeship and take pleasure in being playful and unfinished while you can. Once you professionalize this activity, there’s no turning back.”