As a child, Allan Gurganus didn't want to be a writer.

He didn't know it was possible. Growing up, he had no writing role models.

"I don't think I ever saw a writer until I went to study writing myself," he said by phone the other day. "I thought a writer would have pens sticking out of the top of her head. I didn't know if they left ink tracks everywhere they moved. I didn't know what one was."

That's one reason why, when he visits Richmond this week as part of Go Read, the city's community-reading program, he looks forward to the time he'll spend with school-age children.

"I think it's important for them to see artists as working people. And I don't think anybody works harder for less money than artists do. And so I think it's very powerful to give children permission to think about themselves in that way."

Though he currently teaches a college class, he once got a fellowship to teach writing and drawing to fourth-graders.

"What you realize - it's an obvious point - is that everybody's an artist in the fourth grade, because they don't know not to be."

A couple of grades later, "it starts being about what people can't do."

But his fourth-graders happily did what he asked: They wrote their stories, then, when he told them to turn the paper over, they drew what they'd written.

"It was very exciting to see their power and also wonder what eventually happens to that power and who we give it to. It's like suddenly you're more concerned about having the right kind of tennis shoes."

But if encouraging young artists were the only reason for Gurganus' upcoming visit, this would be a very short story, even shorter than the 3-page story, "It Had Wings," in "White People," Go Read's 2004 book choice.

There's more, of course.

He'll meet with adults, too, for a reading from "White People" and a question-and-answer session. A book signing is on his agenda, too. "I'll see as many facets of the community as I can," he said.

He likes the one-city, one-book concept. "This gives people a single title that they know they can discuss. That, I think, is one of the things that literature can provide: to give us a common conversation."

To him, his visit is a chance to practice good citizenship. "This is the first of my books that has been honored in this way, and I feel as a good citizen, as a Southerner and as a member of the literary community, I want to do everything I can to encourage the program.

"I think the idea of an artist being a citizen is very important. I think it's one of the reasons the book was chosen. I think it's also one of the reasons I'm looking forward to being with people who've read the book."

Does he see other reasons for Go Read's choice? "I think they were looking for a book that would speak to lots of different kinds of people, all races and all genders and all persuasions. Also, of course, it's a book that's set in the South. Some of the stories are actually set in and around Richmond and in North Carolina."

Gurganus grew up in Rocky Mount, N.C. He left the South for a spell but eventually returned to his home state and now lives just outside Chapel Hill.

"I think there's a certain Southern, ethical stance that I write about and embody that a lot of readers in the South can respond to. I grew up in the church, and though I'm something of a pagan right now, I think those lessons are all over my work."

He sees his stories as part entertainment and part moral tale. "They're partly asking the questions: 'How should I behave?' and 'What's ethical?' and 'What's decent?' and 'Whom am I responsible for saving?' Those are ancient questions, but I'm trying to ask them again and again."

The title of his book caused some controversy when Go Read announced its choice. Here's how Gurganus explains its origin. "I started out to be a painter, and I studied color theory. I was told that black and white are really not colors, per se. Black is the presence of all colors, and white is the absence of all colors.

"It struck me as strange because, since Caucasians could have chosen any name for ourselves of any color in the world, why we would have called ourselves white, when, in fact, I'm looking at my hand, and I'm yellow and pink and brown, or rose-colored. I mean, why didn't we call ourselves the Rose People?

"If you're given a choice of being named for the presence of all colors or the absence of all colors, I think I would prefer to have everyone present and accounted for.

"What I tried to do is relate this business of being named for a vacuum to our own crippling perfectionism, to our own fear of sensuality and to our setting for ourselves difficult and impossible standards that we really never can meet. If you call yourself the perfect people, you've already set yourself an incredible difficulty, because we're all of us flawed.

"So, for me, the very phrase 'white people' is very poignant and very comical. It also implies that there are many other colors of people and that we are one of many kinds. So the title is somewhat ironic for me."

The stories in "White People" are, as Gurganus puts it, "related by blood. I think the stories are gathered sort of like a family reunion. They have a lot of consistencies. They tend to be about one family repeatedly. Together, they make up a kind of chronicle of the family."

Blood isn't the only thing that ties them together. Ask Gurganus about themes, and he says, "It's somehow our all being related. Our every gesture, our every deed has implications not just for ourselves but for everybody around us."

That's the kind of insight he believes you may get only by growing up in a small town. "You throw a rock in the city, you never see whom it hits, you don't know what the consequences really are of hurling a rock.

"You throw a rock in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1950 and the phone is ringing and it's the police department, it's your preacher, it's the preacher of the person whose windows you broke, it's the child whose arm was cut, it's a family feud that will last another hundred years.

"There is a kind of family pride, a sense of territoriality in a small town that can be very instructive. It's a good training ground, because then you can move to New York and understand the implications of your actions."

In a small town, everybody knows everything. "There are no real secrets, and so you're rewarded accordingly. There's a kind of justice in that small sort of ethical sphere, and I think the stories participate in that."

Somehow, Gurganus manages to tackle serious issues and to write funny books at the same time. "There is a kind of test in humor. If you can laugh at something, it lightens it."

Not having a sense of humor is limiting. "If you do find experience funny without its being cruel, you have a tremendous advantage in the world. My family was very funny. There was a lot of laughing at the dinner table, which I'm grateful for."

There was also a lot of storytelling. "If you're lucky, you grow up hearing the family stories. My family has always been talkative, and I remember hiding under my grandmother's dining room table listening to the adult secrets being told. There was a long tablecloth, and I was small enough to fit between the sets of shoes lined on either side. You'd hear about who was bankrupt, who was a nymphomaniac, who'd gotten into trouble in what way."

By listening, he developed an ear for different voices. "You notice early on that everybody has a different way with a story. I think growing up in a completely integrated town was also a factor in that. There were black people in and out of the house all the time, so there were lots of different versions of the same story and different ways to tell the same story.

"I think that honoring that voice is extremely important. Everybody should be allowed the dignity of telling their own story in their own language."

That Gurganus became a storyteller instead of a painter is a good story in itself. He had been studying art but decided to take a year off. It was during the Vietnam War and, without his student deferral, the draft board came calling.

"I wound up trying to get out of fighting in the war, because I didn't think it was right or justified. My Republican parents didn't do much to help me, and I ended up having to choose between going to federal prison for six-and-a-half years or going into the military. So I wound up in the Navy.

"I was off the coast of Vietnam on the U.S.S. Yorktown. There was no painting studio on the ship, you'll be amazed to hear. I did find a library, and they probably had 12,000 titles. Just to save me from going insane, I started reading."

This was new for Gurganus, who described himself as one of those smart-alecky kids who preferred to make up book reports rather than read the book.

"Having been trained as a painter, I brought that to bear in learning how to write. We learned how to paint by imitating other painters, and I did the same thing with writing. I would read a Dickens novel, then write a chapter in the style of Dickens or Jane Austen or Henry James or whomever else I was reading. I tried to teach myself how to write a sentence, and it was very, very good training.

"So when I got out of the Navy, I knew what I wanted to do, and I went to Sarah Lawrence College and studied with writers whose work I respected."

Today, his prose suggests that he finds writing effortless. "That's an illusion," he said. "That's the highest kind of praise, but it's the hardest praise to qualify for. I can honestly say that every story in the book was rewritten at least 30 to 60 times.

"I think reading it should be like handling a piece of carved ivory in the dark. You should be able to turn it over and over in your hand and never hit a snag and never find anything that's extruded.

"Everything should be inherent. Everything should be contained. And then that means you can reread it and go deeper and deeper without bumping into anything that was left over."

But that's books. The kids, of course, will want to know about movies, possibly, the one made from the novella, "Blessed Assurance," that they read in "White People."

Perhaps, like the fourth-graders he once taught, they'll ask him if he arrived in a limousine. "I think it's the celebrity culture," he said of the limo question. He answered it by describing his arrival in a 1995 station wagon. "Jim Carrey or Jude Law, those are the artists that they know. They associate Hollywood with artistry."

To him, the real artistry lies in books. "If I thought a movie could do everything a book could do, I would write a movie. I think books are much subtler, much broader, much more complicated, and they invite readers to be participants.

"The thing about going to a movie is that you feel you've gotten your money's worth if you forget who you are for two hours. With books, you never forget who you are. You're always in the driver's seat. You're always the person who can pick it up or put it down. You're the person who can inhabit or weep or imagine, and it makes you a much more powerful consumer than we are at films.

"We sit in the light when we read. We sit in the dark when we're at films.

"I think one of the things I want to talk to the kids about is how you have to have millions of dollars to make a movie.

"With writing, happily, all you need are a notebook, a pen, a lot of wild and wonderful imagination and 26 letters."

Contact Jann at (804) 649-6820 or jmalone@timesdispatch.com.