It's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Linda Holmes. It's always tricky to ask a writer whether something they wrote is autobiographical. It's too easy to assume that every story comes from the writer's own life when the truth is often more complicated. For example, Hotata Onee Moing, the author of the new short story collection call and response,

is from Botswana, like the women and girls in her stories. But the way she talks about the book

with NPR's Scott Simon, you can tell the stories are not just about Botswana. They're about

knowing that the place where you're from has its own rhythms, its own expectations, its own pace,

and you might not even remember them clearly until you go back, whether you go back in person

or you go back in a story.

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Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our our new show, Sources and Methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,

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Call-in response is a collection of short stories that reveals the world as lived by girls and women in a village and in the capital city of Botswana.

Girls and women who seek lives that might reach beyond or around traditional ways and current circumstances.

Here's how the author begins her story, A Good Girl.

One Sunday's October morning, in the year I was nine and given to daydreaming. I watched my

mother step the soil in the potted plants on the veranda. She was stooped over her African violets

and wax begonias, quiet except for the halves of angry breath spreading from the tight line of her lips.

It had been only two days since my older sister, which herpots returned home from God knows where, and she and Mama were still staying out of each other's way.

Colin Response is the first book from Hotata OneNe Moeg, whose work has appeared in the

Oxford American and a public space, and who's a recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship.

She joins us now from Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Thanks so much for being with us.

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