By JOAN SMITH short stories, like poems, demand a lot from their readers. Novels may be longer, but they don't require the same compressed attention. They allow moments of relaxation; their narratives promise to hold you, however casual the concentration you invest. But Tobias Wolff, who is one of our great contemporary masters of the short story, says that the difficulty of the short story is its own reward. "The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story," he once said. And the writer's thrill is "working a miracle, making life where there was none" in the space of a few precisely and elegantly distilled pages. "There's a joy in writing short stories,'' he says, "a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off." Wolff is best known for his two dazzling memoirs — "This Boy's Life," the story of his precarious childhood in a small town north of Seattle which was made into a movie starring Ellen Barkin and Robert De Niro; and "In Pharoah's Army," about his reluctant stint as an officer in the Special Forces in Vietnam where "pharaoh's chariots (were) engulfed; his horsemen confused; and all his magnificence dismayed. A shithole." It is one of the best literary renderings of that murky conflagration to date. Wolff, who lives with his wife and three children in upstate New York where he is writer-in-residence at Syracuse University, said during a recent interview with Salon that while he started out writing novels (none of them ever published), he grew up telling stories and hearing them told. His father (as both he and his older brother, the writer Geoffrey Wolff, have fondly written) was a wonderfully compulsive liar, and Wolff as a boy had a similar habit of making things up. The tales in Wolff's most recent book, "The Night in Question," are seamless, their characters relentlessly ordinary. Yet there is nothing so extraordinary as a character brought to exacting and believable life: a boy who realizes during a crazy drive through fresh snow that what is most unreliable in his father's character is at the same time what will always be most reliably lovely. A young woman who can't escape her memories of the evolution of her brother's most self-defeating tendencies, or her awareness of his heart. Do you think that writing can be taught? No. So what do you teach in your writing seminar at Syracuse? I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into. You want them to ask more of themselves, to ask more of every sentence. These are really values, I suppose, frames of thinking rather than discrete bits of information. You don't teach information in a writing workshop. Who are your students? I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion. We don't ordinarily take people straight from school, but, rather, people who have been out in the world and have kept writing while they're working. That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program. We take six students every year in fiction, so I work with them pretty closely, and I sometimes teach courses in literature. One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.