The habit of speaking for pictures, bringing them to life, is as old as writing, maybe older. Ekphrasis, the Greeks called it. Ekphrastic poems, beginning with Homer's account of the shield of Achilles--which tells the story of creation, and everything under the sun--(re)create artworks in writing, including some that may not exist elsewhere. More recent poets have written from paintings and photographs, using them as jumping-off points to create their own worlds in words. The novelist Peter Rock has long practiced the art of ekphrasis, though he would not call it by that name. A word he uses to describe his habit of turning to pictures for inspiration is provocation. His most recent project, Spells (2015), was provoked by the work of five photographers he invited to be his collaborators: Sophia Borazanian, Sara Lafleur-Vetter, Shaena Mallett, Peter Earl McCollough, and Colleen Plumb. Each supplied him with photographs, and he wrote stories in return. Rock calls it a novel-within-photographs, suggesting that the stories, some of them linked, were waiting to be found--that his job was as much archaeology as invention. A Guggenheim Fellowship, awarded in 2014, helped to finance the project, and an exhibition last fall at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon (at the nonprofit Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts), included all forty-three photos, as well as video sequences of images with many of the thirty-one stories in voiceover narration. Blue Sky's website and The Peter Rock Project website continue to host Spells online. Several of the stories and accompanying photographs have appeared in literary journals (Illuminations in ZYZZYVA, Go-Between in Ploughshares, and To Begin to Start in Oregon Humanities), and Rock hopes to publish the project in book form. Can attach myself to a story, project myself into a picture? asks the speaker in Hello, one of the first stories in Spells. Is there a difference if believe it? It is easy to imagine Rock asking himself these questions. This is not the only time his stories have been sparked by rubbing up against real worlds outside his own. Rock's last two novels were inspired by actual events. The Shelter Cycle (2013) is set against the background of the millennialist faith of the Church Universal and Triumphant, which Rock encountered while working on a ranch in Montana in the early 1990s. Adherents prepared for the end of the world by digging vast underground shelters; years later, Rock met a young woman who grew up in the church at Reed College in Portland, where he teaches creative writing and she had been a student. My Abandonment (2009) was his response to a news story announcing the discovery by a backcountry jogger, in Portland's wild Forest Park, of a father and daughter living in a remote camp where they had gone undetected for years, complete with a garden, library, and septic system. They were moved to a farm outside the city, where the father, a veteran, was given work and the girl sent to school, but they soon disappeared, and haven't surfaced since outside the novel. I've always found that a little bit of information is a good thing, Rock says in an online video interview about My Abandonment, which follows him as he looks for the site of the camp. I just started to wonder what became of them. He could be describing the way he turned for inspiration to photographs made by people he barely knew--or to the way photographs suggest whole worlds to him. In the five novels and two collections of stories Rock has published since 1997, outsiders and unsuspected lives and forces are often his subjects. Phis spring, his first young adult novel, Klickitat, will be published by Abrams Books. This exchange occurred by email in December 2015. The participants once lived down the hall from each other, on a ranch in a remote corner of the California desert, but they hadn't spoken for years. Stephen Longmire: You've said you first wrote from pictures when you worked as a guard at an art museum years ago, keeping yourself amused by making up stories about the pieces on display, remembering what you could until you could write them down on breaks. …