Jensen Beach, an assistant professor of writing and literature at Johnson State College, is the author of two short story collections. “Far Out of the Heart Proceed” was published by Dzanc books in 2012. His new collection, “Swallowed by the Cold,” will be published by Graywolf in May 2016. He is the fiction editor for Green Mountains Review and also teaches in the MFA program of Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Beach lives in Jericho with his wife and three children.

What was your childhood like?

It was good, kind of calm and quiet. I grew up in Napa, played a lot of sports in northern California, where I played soccer and tennis, rode my bike a bunch and did mountain bike racing. I also skied and snowboarded when I was a little bit older. Throughout high school I played ice hockey.

What got you into literature?

My mom was a high school English teacher before I was born. Both of my parents are big readers, so it kind of came naturally to me. Then it was always my favorite subject in school. When I went to college, I took some time off and then went back at around age 25. I started studying and wanted to be a writer and an English professor. My love for it was always there but then I professionalized it, I guess in school.

Do you have a favorite thing about literature and writing?

That’s a really good question. I think what I like about literature is that it can render the sort of moral ambiguity of life, maybe, in a way that I find very interesting. Literature and art are very interesting moral pursuits. Reading and writing just feel good — they are pleasurable pursuits for me. The moral qualities of writing and reading literature are that you get to see other people’s lives and develop empathy.

Do you have a favorite literary work?

I think it changes. There are a lot of writers that are really important to me in my development as a reader and as a writer. Flannery O’Connor, for one, but I think that naming a favorite sometimes is tricky. It’s really what I’m reading at the moment. Lately I’ve been very interested in European writers and writers in translation. I’ve been reading a Swiss writer named Peter Stamm, who’s probably my favorite living writer. I like his work a lot.

What brought you to Johnson?

I wanted a tenure track creative writing teaching job, but the thing that ultimately settled me was location and the fact that it was a BFA program. Being able to combine my interests in teaching creative writing [and] literature, and doing editorial work is very important to me. And I was drawn to the student body. I like working with the students we have here at Johnson, as opposed to teaching students at a larger university like Illinois, where I was before I came here.

What is your favorite class to teach?

I like all of my classes; I think that the class that I probably feel most comfortable teaching, and am therefore doing the most for my students in, is the fiction workshop. I love teaching lit surveys, but at times I feel a bit overwhelmed by them because my background isn’t in teaching like that. I mean it is, but I have to work a bit harder at that in a different way than I have to work hard at teaching something like the fiction workshop. I also work really hard at teaching the introductory creative writing course, because it’s fun for me to introduce students to poems and stories that are exciting and can turn them on to a world that they didn’t know was there.

Did you have a favorite class when you were in school?

That’s a tough one. Some of my favorite classes were linguistics classes that I took as an undergrad. I think that my favorite class as an undergraduate was actually a sociolinguistics class that I took with a professor at Stockholm University. For classes that are closer to my own field, I took a form and theory class in my graduate studies, and I still use some of that stuff I learned in that class when I teach. The activities in that class were very important to me.

What are some of your favorite hobbies?

I love skiing, which is a sport that I do enthusiastically but not very well. I like spending time with my family and we’re pretty active. We like to hike and go skiing in the winter and that sort of thing. I love traveling, and I honestly spend a lot of my free time reading and writing.

What’s your favorite mountain to ski on?

It probably is Smuggs. When I was a kid, I skied at a couple of resorts up in Tahoe up in the Sierras and I liked skiing there a bunch. But we always just went to the one that was closest you know, so it was never all that great. Smuggs is where, when I moved here, I rediscovered my love of skiing. When I lived in Illinois, there wasn’t any skiing there. Smuggs is full of surprises and the terrain is fun.

What’s your biggest influence?

It’s hard to say. I think I have had a couple of mentors who have been important to me as writers and teachers and remain so to this day. Their influence isn’t as direct as when I was in a workshop or in a class with them, but I still think about things they taught me. Someone asked me the other day who my audience was when I was writing. I think this maybe dovetails with your question a little bit. I don’t think about an audience so much [as I do] about other writers and teachers that I have had. Not that I want to impress them, but we participate in a larger conversation in the things that I write. In terms of teaching I think that I have borrowed from various teachers I had in the past, and people that I have worked with have been enormously influential to me.

I was wondering how you went about getting your recent article into the New Yorker.

So getting the New Yorker, I think the only way to do that is to have your agent send stories to them, and my literary agent has been sending stories to the New Yorker, stories from this book that is going to come out in May. I guess I’ve been working with her for five years now and for probably three of those years she’s been sending them to the New Yorker, and then as the book got closer to publication the stories have been edited and refined and she sent several stories from that final batch and finally they accepted the one they put in. So it took several tries. I don’t know if I’ll ever get another story in the New Yorker but it was fun. It was an exciting experience. It was also weird; it’s strange to see how people respond. People who don’t know much about creative writing or the writing world will be like, “Whoa, I know the New Yorker.”

What’s your favorite music?

Oh. Usually when people ask me this question I jokingly answer, “NPR,” but I don’t listen to a ton of music. I think I like a lot of old punk rock and rock from like the 70s to 90s and even now. I like indie rock and some hip hop. Probably my wife is my greatest influence and I listen to a lot of what she listens to, which is a lot of contemporary current indie bands. My kids love terrible pop music so I listen to a lot of that. They’re always yelling at me to put on Star 92.9 and listen to Katy Perry, and you know it’s really bad.

What is most important to you?

Obviously my family is most important to me. After that, friends, and then I would say my career and that would be sort of an umbrella term meaning not just my writing, which is obviously very important to me, but also the students that I’m teaching are really important to me too.

If you weren’t a teacher what would you want to be doing?

I have no idea. I have been teaching pretty much nonstop since I was 20, through the college and various forms of teaching. I’m not sure I know how to do anything else. I don’t have the personality that would do very well in a nine to five job. I had one job like that and it was a disaster. If writing was not just on the table my guess is I would probably do some type of creative thing, something like advertising or the tech industry in some ways. I have a lot of friends growing up in Napa who went into the wine industry, and that has always sort of interested me. Not really the science of making wine, but more like making labels or writing interesting ads or something. A lot of my friends own wineries or they help out or they handle the financial stuff and that’s probably where I would have ended up had I not taken this route.