When asked to describe the difference between a novel and a story, I often use the metaphor of a train; the novel is a crosscountry trip; one boards leisurely in Washington, D.C., prepared for the landscape to unfold as the train pa.s.ses through Maryland, Ohio, Illinois, bound for Los Angeles"s Union Station. The short story is like hopping onto that same train already in motion in Chicago and riding it into Albuquerque with no time to waste. What makes a successful story is very different from what makes a successful novel-characters that are not sustainable for the duration of a novel, styles of telling, tones, narrative constructions that are perfect for a story but crumble or bore the reader if carried on for too long.
With this in mind, I noticed something about this year"s selection of stories-many expressed an outsider"s point of view, a discomfort, a sense of being between places, on the verge of being lost, and were rendered from the point of view of not belonging. I was struck by this sense of "otherness."
The urge to be seen, identified, known to others as one is known to oneself seems to be a fundamental human urge-as though it takes another to confirm our experience of ourselves-i.e., we don"t exist in a vacuum.
And so it was that one of these wonderful stories had a strange effect on me; it seemed to escape the zippered suitcase and come calling, tapping me on the shoulder in the dead of night, demanding attention, as if to say, I"m not quite sure you understand-read it again. For this, among many other excellent qualities including being extremely challenging and persistently haunting, I chose "Sunshine."
Initially one is deceived (or seduced) by the surface simplicity of "Sunshine," the way in which it "un-says" things. There is something unusual and exceptionally artful in the way the author manages the balance between what is said and what is left unsaid. Enormously complex information and emotion is invisibly conveyed; this works because what is being said carries the fullness and weight of collective archetypical imagery, cla.s.sical themes of mythological root, literary references, albeit barely spoken, and psychological theories-all adding up to the very essence of one"s moral life and responsibility. And in some ways I wish I were kidding, I wish I could go lighter here-after all, the story is called "Sunshine." And while I am loathe to describe the story, which you"ll read for yourself, suffice to say, starts quite innocently: "They told Grace they"d found her curled into a nest of leaves." Hardly threatening, but that quickly and subtly changes; at first the hunter trackers don"t speak English and when they first spot the girl they"re not even sure what "it" is. The only named characters are Grace and Beauty whom one can a.s.sume were long ago "it" and Julian de Jong, the master, whom even the trackers don"t look in the eye. "It" is a wild child, her animal nature described by her sitting on her haunches and "baring her teeth in a dreadful high-pitched screech." If the Master, Julian de Jong, simply tamed her it would be a rather pleasant echo of George Bernard Shaw"s Pygmalion in which Professor Henry Higgins trains Eliza Doolittle, the c.o.c.kney flower girl to speak "properly," or Francois Truf-faut"s brilliant 1970 film, The Wild Child. But in this case, the Master seeks to more than tame his prize; after he pays the trackers for her, Grace and Beauty work to civilize her enough so that he can then rape her. It is the rape which throws the story into the stuff of mythology, psychological theory, and honestly creepy fiction. And here is the moral challenge in that everyone from the trackers, the doctor, the dentists, the missionary, and the townspeople are complicit-this isn"t the first time Julian de Jong has done this. The narrator notes, that in the past when the Master finally sent "them" home, "they seemed not to know where they"d rather be. And who was the worse for it then?"
The author"s deft summoning of the complexity of slave/master relationships, the struggle of women for legitimacy beyond man"s object or possession, and questions of economic power and domination-de Jong has more money than anyone else in the story-are part of what give this story its resonance. That and the added cruelty that the Master preys not just upon the very young, but the undefended abandoned "it" who lives outside of society. In the end it is that "it" not bound by social convention, who is free to act independently and who powerfully and heroically stands up to Julian de Jong.
I read this story multiple times and was disturbed by it and quite honestly I went back to reread several of the other stories again because I wanted to select something more conventional, something less threatening, and yet each time I tried to walk away, "Sunshine" demanded that I return. And so it is for these qualities and the author"s careful balance of presence and absence, location and timelessness, what is said and left unsaid, which leaves the reader"s imagination to create a world familiar enough to enter and yet distant enough that the reader feels "other" that I chose "Sunshine."
In "Sunshine," a broken-winged girl, taken for a beast, triumphs and I am at once reminded of the necessity of moral and artistic challenge-of Dostoevsky and his murderous Raskolnikov, of Nabokov and the finely wrought Humbert Humbert and here I could go on, but suffice to say that it is with all that in mind-that I celebrate the dark art here, applaud the gruesome, the trans-gressive, the thing that does not let us escape from the side of ourselves that we would rather not see.
A. M. Homes was born in 1961 in Washington, D.C. She is a novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, journalist, and screenwriter. Her books include This Book Will Save Your Life (2006), and the story collections The Safety of Objects (1990) and Things You Should Know (2002). Homes has received fellowships from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. She lives in New York City.
Manuel Munoz on "Something You Can"t Live Without" by Matthew Neill Null.
For over ten years now, one of my favorite reading experiences has been to go through the two premier award anthologies that appear every year-The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories-and attempt to rank the stories for myself. It"s an effort to make myself read slowly, to measure why my enjoyment deepens with particular work. Often the exercise makes me aware of my own reading patterns, of the ways in which I"ve become more receptive to particular styles of storytelling, or even of my willingness to give a favorite writer a free pa.s.s on something that is clearly not his or her best. No matter what, it"s nearly always the most deeply fun reading I do all year, a surprising story never failing to emerge.
I kept this little habit to myself until around the time of the 2004 National Book Award nominations for fiction. That was the year when the five-book slate named only women writers-Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Christine Schutt, Joan Silber, Lily Tuck, and Kate Walbert-and the uproar around this unusual circ.u.mstance lead to all sorts of shoot-from-the-hip speculation. None was more cutting (at least to me) than from The New York Times, which sniffed that the list shared "a short-story aesthetic" and that none of the books boasted a scope that was "big and sprawling."
What the h.e.l.l, I wondered, is wrong with such an aesthetic? Is there even such a thing? And since when are stories not "big"?
I went right out and got those books.
I still seethe over that article six years later, and can always turn to The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories for any number of examples of stories that are more than just big and sprawling-they overwhelm the page. This year, I"m happy to wave "Something You Can"t Live Without" as one such story that offers almost too much to fathom. Even its t.i.tle seems to call out its essential nature.
It"s rare that a story makes use of nearly every part of speech, reminding us as readers that every part of our language-from verbs to adjectives-can gather awesome weight when coupled together. Pay attention, the pages seem to say. All over this story spring words chosen with accuracy and care, from words deeply wedded to the Appalachian geography ("ironweed" and "seven sisters" and "chert") to the labor of the farm ("carded" and "planing" and "hand-forged"). Even the story"s time frame feels slickly yet un.o.btrusively referenced, with a word like "cipher," with its faint hint of history, employed as a verb of literacy, or "conscription," with a register that the more modern "draft" could never achieve.
But these are just words. Cartwright"s attempt to pa.s.s on a cheap piece of goods to the poor farmer McBride is as straightforward a plot as anyone could ask, and the surprise comes in the story"s largely silent battle of pride and comeuppance, two men thinking of the single way to emerge the better in the bargain. The real pleasure-and certainly not the only one-is in the sentences, as complex, deliberately a.s.sured, and lethal as Flannery O"Connor"s. What an authentic, confident story this is, soaked through with deceit and menace and the distinctly abrupt strain of American violence. Add in a startling ending-an unforgiving embrace of the nature of time and history, if not the devouring jaws of myth-and you"ve got a work ready to prove that short stories and short-story writers are the most sprawling and unruly of all myth-makers.
Manuel Munoz was born in Dinuba, California, in 1972. He is the author of two short-story collections, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was a finalist for the Frank O"Connor International Short Story Award. His first novel, What You See in the Dark, was published in early 2011. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and a 2008 Whiting Writers" Award, and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Christine Schutt on "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You" by Jim Shepard.
A great story announces itself entirely to start; its terms are then rolled over and over again, and the story is made larger for what new a.s.sociations adhere until, by the end, the terms are profound. Every reading reveals some new, impossibly smart gesture, surely intended and c.u.mulatively significant. I lose my way, snow-blind. A great story is as heavy as wet snow, the kind that rolls up like carpet and grows bigger for the binding of its parts.
Halfway through "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You," the narrator of this story, Eckel-his first name is never given-explains in scientific language, then in easier, metaphoric terms, what might in fact account for avalanches: a degraded crystal, a stratum of which if slightly jarred can set tons of more recently fallen snow in motion. His mother calls such degraded crystal "sugar snow" because it will not bond. Even when compressed, the snow does not cohere, a phenomenon at odds with great story-making, in which the parts must cohere. And the parts. Sifted into this story are wondrous accounts of nature"s brute force, anecdotes, histories, avalanche lore recalled by Eckel or his companions in the course of their freezing work.
They call themselves "the Frozen Idiots." They are four volunteers researching the complexities of snow; they conduct experiments on a viciously windy slope miles above Davos in efforts, all potentially deadly, to better understand and defend against avalanche. The year is 1939; they live in a hut; they have no heat and only kerosene for light. They are frozen idiots; they go about their work with reckless enthusiasm. They have started an avalanche and destroyed a church. Few of their fellows find their subject significant; nevertheless, they are close to finishing an important book on snow, and Eckel"s tone at the start of this authentic story is confident and self-deprecatory. His voice is more matter-of-fact when he recounts the catastrophes that have contributed to the researchers" industry. An airborne avalanche, the most destructive category of all, killed the group leader"s father, and another avalanche, less severe perhaps but lethal, killed Eckel"s twin brother, Willi. The boys were sixteen.
Images of these a.s.saults, the unnatural uprootings, flattened houses-a roof mistaken "for a terrazzo floor"-powerfully ama.s.s and add to the story"s gravity. An unbroken teacup bewitches while a broken girl unsettles as does a boy "entombed in his bed." Napoleon"s little drummer is lost in a gorge and drums for days before he falls silent. Avalanches, the seductive enormity of them! How helpless we are, slight as flies before it, but must we die alone? "Seventeen people were dug out of a meetinghouse the following spring, huddled together in a circle facing inward." A consolation, I think, companionship at the end.
Contrastively, Willi"s death is horrible. He dies twice: First, under an immensity of snow, alone in the dark for hours, he loses consciousness. The second time, an avalanche of fear triggered by Eckel when he puts out the light kills Willi. He is dead by the time his mother reaches him. As for the survivors, buffeted by gusts of rage, self-rebuke, and loneliness, they endure by contraction.
Even before the catastrophe of Willi"s death, the family terrain emerges as stark and severe as the slopes, dangerously unstable. An elder sister is dutiful but retreats to her room and her romance subscriptions. The father, an Alpine guide, claims to be "content only at alt.i.tudes over eleven thousand feet" although his sons know otherwise. They consider their father"s "homemade medicines" his sole pleasure, yet Eckel attends to his father"s every mood, negotiating the shifting terrain "even as disinterest emanated from him like a vapor."
To be loved, it seems, is as fateful as any experience. "Why does anyone choose one brother and not another? I wanted to ask." Significantly, Eckel does not ask this question aloud-not of his mother or of Ruth, the young woman to whom he is hopelessly devoted. He grudgingly accepts his mother"s preferential treatment of his twin and Ruth"s deception of him with Willi. Against the wintery heart there is no defense beyond contraction, a withdrawal from the world with a cruel, self-absorbed intention to endure. Contraction, silence. At the onset of an avalanche a survivor trick is to keep your mouth shut; this has been Eckel"s strategy throughout his life.
I underestimated how difficult it would be to act as a juror for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Beyond the challenge of making a selection from the forgathered, there has been the trauma of writing about the choice; my choice makes me sick. All great stories make me sick with their muchness. The parallel actions and anecdotes, repeats and reversals, all made with pickax accuracy, add breadth and bulk. Everything connects. The alpine landscape, G.o.d-like, brooding and indifferent, gives contour to the characters" lives. The story of the old guide"s devotion to the empress mirrors Eckel"s devotion to Ruth; just so, the avalanche"s "fractures ... stress lines ... fusillades of pops and cracks" apply to the human drama. And how better to represent our essential helplessness in the universe than with the image of a researcher inadequately dressed, awake in his hammock, hanging in the cold dark? The harrumph a boy makes with his skis to signal to his brother "We"re so close" fatally severs and forever binds them. In Jim Shepard"s story, the snow coheres; it coheres for now. The hammock creaks. Someday, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next, Eckel and his fellows will-we all will-be overtaken by that white ambush.
Christine Schutt is the author of two short-story collections and two novels. Her first, Florida, was a 2004 National Book Award finalist; her second, All Souls, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Among other honors, Schutt"s work has twice been included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Yaddo, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Schutt is a senior editor of the literary annual NOON. She lives and teaches in New York.
Writing The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011.
The Writers on Their Work.
Chris Adrian, "The Black Square"
This story was written for an issue of McSweeney"s that endeavored to imagine what the world will be like in fifteen years. Each story was to be set in a different location all around the world. This meant that the magazine would have sent me more or less wherever I would have liked to go to research the setting for the story-Paris, Berlin, Ho Chi Minh City, Bali-by means of funding provided by mysterious South American filmmakers. For a reason that had a lot to do with stalking my ex-boyfriend, I chose to go to Nantucket and took his dog with me (with the ex"s permission). I spent two days poking around the beaches and moors with the dog, but didn"t start writing until many months after I returned. I threw out five or six drafts about Nantucket sinking into the ocean or being overwhelmed by intelligent shoes before I finally discovered what the story was about-me, the ex, and the dog. Which is often how it works for me: I put in a bunch of work on a decoy story while waiting for the real story to sneak up and announce itself.
Chris Adrian was born in Washington, D.C., in 1970. He is the author of three novels, Gob"s Grief, The Children"s Hospital, and The Great Night, and a collection of stories, A Better Angel. He lives in San Francisco.
Kenneth Calhoun, "Nightblooming"
"Nightblooming" was one of my many attempts to write about music. Throughout my high school and college years, music was my life. I worked in a music store and played drums for a variety of projects-punk and funk bands, theatrical productions, even a wedding band. As a drummer, I was especially interested in patterns and beats. At some point, I got it in my head that everything that was seemingly random could in fact be the articulation of a grand, overarching rhythm, but that the count hadn"t yet been revealed because we hadn"t reached the end of a measure. I realized while writing "Nightblooming" that this could be a comforting, religious sort of idea, not just a whimsical speculation.
Kenneth Calhoun was born in Upland, California, in 1966. He has published stories in journals such as The Paris Review, Fence Magazine, Fiction International, St. Petersburg Review, Quick Fiction, and others. He is a recipient of the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction and a winner of the Summer Literary Seminars/Fence Magazine Fiction Contest. He lives in Boston.
Jennine Capo Crucet, "How to Leave Hialeah"
Somewhere in the beginning of my thinking of this story, I made a list of all the people I hated. Then I strung together versions of a few of these people-along with versions of people I loved and who loved me-and unleashed this narrator on them. A lot of my stories come from a place of anger, which is probably not the healthiest place, but it"s where I tend to start. Thankfully, because things so quickly become straight-up fiction once I"m actually writing, that"s never, ever where I finish. In writing "How to Leave Hialeah," it wasn"t until the cousin showed up in my imagination and on the page that I knew this was a story I needed to hear.
Jennine Capo Crucet was born to Cuban parents in 1981 and raised in Miami, Florida. Her debut story collection, How to Leave Hialeah, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the John Gardner Memorial Prize, and the Devil"s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and was named a Best Book of the Year by The Miami Herald and the Miami New Times. Her stories have been published in Ploughshares, Epoch, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, The Los Angeles Review, and other magazines. A graduate of Cornell University and a former sketch comedian, she currently divides her time between Miami and Los Angeles.
Jane Delury, "Nothing of Consequence"
This story emerged from a description of s.e.xual dynamics that I heard years ago from a French teacher who had volunteered in Senegal. But I recognize other elements from my lived experience as well: a snake that gave me a fright, an unfortunate episode with a bathing suit and a Pacific wave, and my recognition that for many, like Rado, writing is a long process of learning and refinement rather than a blazing ascension. Though each of the women making up the group of teachers has her own complexity, I was interested in the way that groups of people-especially those who find themselves outside of their familiar environment-can create a larger personality.
Jane Delury was born in 1972 in Sacramento, California. Her stories have appeared in journals including The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, and Prairie Schooner. She has received an award from the Maryland State Arts Council and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She teaches in the University of Baltimore"s MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts program, and lives in Baltimore.
Tamas Dobozy, "The Restoration of the Villa Where Tibor Kalman Once Lived"
The impulse to write is usually exactly that: an impulse. It starts for me in that need, experienced daily, a kind of negative drive, fueled by absence, that moves after something in the positive sense-a t.i.tle, an image, an idea. For many, many years I"ve been mining material on the siege of Budapest, a particularly dark period in what is the general darkness of Hungarian history, in the hope of putting together a collection. This story comes out of that endless seam.
I have some relatives who own an old villa in a suburb east of Budapest, called Matyasfold, that I have always loved. It seems to me a place that still somehow retains its Austro-Hungarian character despite the ravages of two world wars, revolution, Soviet takeover, land reapportioning, and the sudden and in many ways catastrophic shift into wild capitalism.
When I started writing this story the image of the villa came up for me, almost as it does for Laszlo, as a kind of golden lure, a place of security, a final goal. Of course, for me it was a way to tell the story, while for Laszlo it was salvation, though maybe in some way this is the same thing-the desire to engage with something that will save what we do from futility, that promises everything will come out all right in the end, that the sacrifices will be worth it, only to realize that it was only really important for what we did-good and bad-along the way.
I do wonder sometimes about this use-misuse some might say-of history in fiction, the way there"s something both moral and amoral in it at the same time: a desire to write in a way that responsibly engages the world, and a desire to write about something simply because it makes for a marvelous story. Maybe this tension is productive and shouldn"t be reconciled. It is, at any rate, a question that haunts the writing of this story, and leaks out in Laszlo"s own uncertainties about what he"s doing.
Tamas Dobozy was born in Nanaimo, British Columbia, in 1969. He has published two books of stories, When X Equals Marylou and Last Notes and Other Stories, whose French translation won the 2007 Governor General"s Award. He is an a.s.sociate professor of American literature in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He lives in Kitchener, Canada.
Judy Doenges, "Melinda"
Soon after I moved to Colorado, my neighbor, who sells bail bonds, told me the story of methamphetamine use in the West. She knew all too well, she said, how the drug had damaged the infrastructure of towns and destroyed thousands of lives. Living with my neighbor at the time was the charismatic Mark, a recently paroled former meth chef and dealer. Mark introduced me, via interviews, to the practice of hijacking foreclosed farms for meth labs, the ident.i.ty theft business that often accompanies a methamphetamine enterprise, and the particulars of meth production. A clerk in a local drugstore explained how the state polices sales of medicine containing ephedrine, which is a necessary ingredient in meth cooking. Now the name and address of anyone buying Sudafed, for example, enters a database of other cold sufferers-or meth users.
As is the case in many stories about drug or alcohol abuse, the addiction itself is a character, unavoidably yoked to the protagonist. In that way, Melinda not only humanized a social ill but also animated it. It was impossible for me to write about Melinda without meth and impossible to write about meth without Melinda.
"Melinda" is set several years in the past. Methamphetamine cooking is like any other kind of manufacturing: technological advances improve production. Now people can make meth in the back of a van or on a stove. It"s a true American cottage industry.
Judy Doenges was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 1959. She is the author of a novel, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, and a short-fiction collection, What She Left Me. Her stories and essays have appeared in many journals, among them The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, and Western Humanities Review. She has received fellowships and awards from many sources, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and Artist Trust. She teaches at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Brian Evenson, "Windeye"
I owe a debt to Dan Machlin, since his poetry introduced me to the Old Norse word vindauga (vindauge in contemporary Norwegian), which translated literally means "wind-eye." That word worked on me, haunted me, and slowly took on for me a life of its own. Over a month or two it somehow subconsciously cross-pollinated with games my younger siblings and I used to play when we were little, with my own fascination with the difference between childrens" and adults" perceptions, with problems I was having with shingles warping and cracking on my house, and with my own basic distrust about the nature of reality. All of that secretly gestated for a long time, but when I finally sat down to write it, it came out all in a rush, something that rarely happens for me.
Brian Evenson was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1966. He is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the limited-edition novella Baby Leg, and his work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, j.a.panese, and Slovenian. His novel Last Days won the American Library a.s.sociation"s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. Other books include the story collection Fugue State and a new collection of stories, Windeye, that will be published in 2011. His work has been included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories three times, and he has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Evenson lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University"s Literary Arts Program.
Adam Foulds, "The Rules Are the Rules"
The story began with a single image: a priest who longs to be a father holds an infant for baptism. It was this predicament, this public moment crowded with private feeling and detailed physical experience, that compelled my attention, and I wrote a few pages to try and get hold of it. This then was set aside, and it wasn"t until Granta commissioned me to produce something for their "s.e.x" issue that I returned to it and the story became more than this fraught tableau. I thought about s.e.x as an urgent, risky, and difficult kind of intimacy, as procreation, and as something that structures an individual"s personality, determining what they notice and react to in the world. Peter"s character and wider situation unfolded with these thoughts.
Adam Foulds was born in London in 1974. He is the author of two novels, The Truth About These Strange Times and The Quickening Maze, as well as a narrative poem set during the Mau Mau uprising in colonial Kenya in the 1950s, The Broken Word. In 2008 he was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and he has won the Costa Poetry Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and was a finalist for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. In 2010 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London.
Lynn Freed, "Sunshine"
Perhaps it is the wildness itself of feral children that has always intrigued me. Or perhaps it is the very idea of life in a state of nature, beyond or before civilization. I don"t know. What I do know is that the girl in this story, which was originally a failed attempt to begin a novel-several stories I have written have begun this way-has been with me always.
Lynn Freed was born in 1945 in Durban, South Africa. She came to New York as a graduate student, receiving her MA and PhD in English literature from Columbia University. She has published six novels (Friends of the Family, Home Ground, The Bungalow, The Mirror, House of Women, The Servants" Quarters); a collection of essays, Reading, Writing & Leaving Home: Life on the Page; and a collection of stories, The Curse of the Appropriate Man. Her short fiction, memoirs, and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper"s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and Southwest Review, among others. In 2002 she received the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Northern California.
David Means, "The Junction"
In order to write "The Junction" I had to write another story first. That story-still in a rough draft-was about a kindly Pittsburgh doctor, during the Depression, tending to a patient in a flophouse who mysteriously disappeared-against all medical odds-and took to the rails, ending up at State Line Junction, where he saves the day by falling across a switch mechanism. I put the Pittsburgh story aside and began to write a new story, using a little bit of the background material-i.e., when he tells the story at the dinner table-and some of the same energy of the other version. I didn"t see the men in my story as drifters. They"re looking for something, on a quest of sorts, trying to pin down exactly where they need to be to find solace and hope. Part of what inspired me to write this story was the image of a fresh-cut piece of pie on a windowsill waiting for someone. The ideal sense of home is something we"ll never really find, but we keep wandering and changing our own stories in the hope that, at last, we"ll find ourselves in the perfect place. Perhaps it"s hard to write about the search for home right now, in this culture, because the Internet has provided all of us a hyperlink into what might or might not feel like safety: the safety of drifting from site to site, following one link to the next as if we"re free. Setting the story back in the day before cell phones, before high-speed hookups, before Facebook and satellite hookups, back when all you had to do was take a few steps away from the campfire and find a complete solitude, allowed, I like to think, an access to a certain kind of situation, purified down, that allowed a certain pattern to be exposed. (The gibberish above is exactly why writers should, in most cases, avoid talking about their work. The truth is I just wanted to tell a good story and respect my characters and get the words right.) In any case, one other thing that informed this story was the fact that, when I was growing up in Michigan, my grandfather-a lovely man, a true self-made gentleman, who in many ways saved my life-often told me stories about surviving the Great Depression. He had a big cupboard in which he still stored canned goods in case the world crashed again and the food supply became short. Some of the cans actually dated back to the Depression, with labels that were so simple and beautiful and clear they seemed to be hand-painted. He vividly described the way men would come to the back door, knock, be invited in for dinner, and sit at the table with the entire family. There was an old coal yard up the road from his house, and it still had black mounds of coal left over from the days of steam. I paid careful attention to those old piles of coal-half-buried in the weeds, just glints of shiny dark coming through the green. Coal and steam engines weren"t that far in the past in the late sixties.
David Means was born and raised in Michigan. He is the author of four story collections, including a.s.sorted Fire Events, The Secret Goldfish, and, most recently, The Spot. Means lives in Nyack, New York.
Susan Minot, "Pole, Pole"
I began this story initially as a challenge to myself-to complete something. I"d not published a book-or a story for that matter-in a long time, and in the long years of working on what looked as if it was now turning out to be two novels, I wanted simply to finish something. So one winter I took a break from the book to write this story. I had spent some time in Kenya in the late "90s, and imagining a tryst there was a way of revisiting a place I"d been intrigued by. In the writing of the story I also began to envision a collection of intertwined stories set in east Africa of which "Pole, Pole" would be a part. So that"s another book that now needs to be written, though I have its t.i.tle already: Fatina.
Susan Minot was born in 1956 in Boston. She is the author of Monkeys, l.u.s.t & Other Stories, Folly, Evening, Rapture, and a poetry collection, Poems 4 A.M. Her nonfiction has appeared in McSweeney"s and The Paris Review, among other publications. She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci"s Stealing Beauty. The film Evening was the first adaptation of her fiction. Minot divides her time between New York City and an island in Maine.
Matthew Neill Null, "Something You Can"t Live Without"
The drummer tale is a staple of storytelling. To be kind, you"d call it well-worn; to be cruel, cliche. So many have done it so well: Faulkner, Chekhov, Flannery O"Connor, Malamud. Breathing life into the form seemed an impossible task, so I had to try. Sitting down to the desk, I wanted to see if I could outdo the established demiG.o.ds of fiction. An act of hubris for sure, but what isn"t? I hope the reader judges me kindly.
The story, for me, always begins with an image. In college, my first love was geology. A group of us went down into a cave, and after what seemed like miles of dodging bats and slogging through mud, a professor showed us where the remains of an extinct bear-Arctodus simus, I think-had been discovered. I began with the vision of a skull, and then I had to dream the characters to find it. The story unspooled from there. Other stray images found a home: twin boys working fence posts by the roadside; a high meadow drowning in beaver dams; a pair of dead foxes, one red, one gray. Also, the story gave me an opportunity to write one of my favorite landscapes in West Virginia, where the karst lands meet the mountains.
Most of my work is a variation on one theme: the crisis of people who love the land, but are faced with the prospect of selling or destroying some aspect of it to translate the landscape into dollars. This is West Virginia"s story. From timbering to coal mining to Marcellus shale fracturing, the ground has been sold again and again. Despite our common myths and party rhetoric, extractive industry has failed to improve the lot of West Virginians. For me, "Something You Can"t Live Without" is a middle chapter in a long, fraught history.
Matthew Neill Null was born in Summersville, West Virginia, in 1984. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers" Workshop, and his stories have appeared in Oxford American and Gray"s Sporting Journal. He was the 20102011 Provost"s Postgraduate Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa. Null lives in Iowa City.
Lori Ostlund, "Bed Death"
In 1996 my partner and I moved to Malaysia, where we taught business communications at a college very much like the one in the story. There was a bed, for example, behind gla.s.s in the lobby, and we looked at an apartment in Nine-Story Building, which, at least then, was the tallest building in our town and was thus, sadly, attractive to jumpers. We found an apartment elsewhere, but during our stay, several people committed suicide by jumping from the building"s roof, and so we became familiar with the building through newspaper accounts and public lore as well as through a friend who lived there. What intrigued me was the way that people sometimes spoke of the jumpers, with a detachment that allowed them to view the suicides as an irritation, an occurrence whose salient feature was its ability to make less pleasant the lives of those who lived in the complex. Yet, on another level, I understood how and why the tenants came to feel this way, and this understanding-of the way that others" pain or suffering can become a minor and curious backdrop for the drama of our own lives-became the framework of my story.
Like the couple in the story, we stayed at a seedy hotel where the smoke alarms beeped every few minutes. After trying to explain that the batteries needed to be changed, to no avail, we spent an afternoon trying to buy replacement batteries-also to no avail. Finally, we were moved to the only beep-free room-outside of which lay a wounded, moaning man on a chaise longue. We never learned what had happened to him, which is ultimately for the best when it comes to writing fiction.
This story evolved slowly, over the course of ten years, beginning with images and scenes that I wrote down but did not necessarily regard as parts of the same story. Usually, especially with my first-person narrators, the narrator "arrives" first and starts telling the story, but this time the narrator came along later, a narrator who is nothing like me except for a shared navel phobia. As I recall, that narrator appeared one morning as I was reading through all these bits and pieces, wondering whether they would ever amount to anything; she began commenting on them, weaving these disparate parts together, and through her seemingly insightful and often cynical a.n.a.lysis, I began to see how ill-equipped she was for the world, how fragile her relationship was, and how incapable she was of extending compa.s.sion to another lost soul.
Lori Ostlund was born in 1965 in a town of 411 people in Minnesota. Her first collection of stories, The Bigness of the World, received the Flannery O"Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and named a 2009 Notable Book by The Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Georgia Review, among other publications. She was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers" Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers" Conference. She lives in San Francisco.
Leslie Parry, "The Vanishing American"
When I was a nerdy, Zoobooks-reading kid, my parents, tired of seeing me use their fancy ice tongs and expensive olive pitter to dissect my stuffed animals, sent me to a marine biology summer camp on Catalina Island. I learned many things there-how to breathe through a snorkel tube, the life cycle of a garibaldi-but what I remember most is shivering in my pup tent at night, listening to stories about the wild bison who"d been roaming the island since 1924. They"d been shipped out as "scenery" for a western movie, our counselor said, and afterward, when filming was done, they were-"Wait, what?" I sat up in my sleeping bag and blinked against the orange light of the mosquito lamp. "Just left there? Like ... abandoned?" I wasn"t sure what was more astonishing-that the movie people could be so extravagant and indifferent, or that the herd had managed, despite its new environment, to adapt, flourish, and survive. As an adult, I had tried a few times to write about a soldier who"d lost his voice in World War I. However, I just couldn"t get any purchase on the character, so I put my notes away, frustrated and disappointed. A few days later I saw that The Vanishing American (hey, that buffalo movie!) was screening at the Silent Movie Theatre here in Los Angeles. I had a free night and so, perhaps nostalgic for the bygone days of peeing in my wet suit, I went. Afterward, as I emerged from the theater and crossed Fairfax Avenue, these two ideas-the bison and the soldier-joined serendipitously in my mind. I went home and began to write.
Leslie Parry was born in Los Angeles in 1979. She is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers" Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. "The Vanishing American" is her first published story. She lives in Los Angeles.
Jim Shepard, "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You"
"Your Fate Hurtles Down at You" began as many of my stories begin lately-with my browsing around endlessly in an utterly nerdy and bizarre subject and then finding my imagination caught by a particular moment that resonates with me emotionally in unexpected ways. In this case I was reading about the history of the science of avalanches-I know, I know; imagine how my wife feels-and I was struck by the notion that a skier or hiker might cross a given area with no effect and then the next skier or hiker might, when doing the same thing, start an avalanche that carried away any number of those in his group. That desire that must follow to penetrate the capriciousness of such an event-as in, I must have done something different, something to cause such a catastrophe-seemed to me to have all sorts of crucially useful a.n.a.logues, in emotional terms. I imagined someone at the very dawn of avalanche science who found himself wondering about his responsibility for the fate of someone he loved. And the story proceeded from there.
Jim Shepard was born in 1956 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including You Think That"s Bad. His third collection, Like You"d Understand, Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Ma.s.sachusetts Book Award for Fiction, as well as the Alex Award from the American Library a.s.sociation. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper"s Magazine, McSweeney"s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. Four of his stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories and one has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. He"s won an Artist Fellowship from the Ma.s.sachusetts Cultural Council and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Ma.s.sachusetts.
Helen Simpson, "Diary of an Interesting Year"
It"s always fun when you"re writing to zoom in on what"s uncomfortable-on what causes a silence to fall-and one such touchy subject now is whether we ought to cut back on our rate of consumption for the sake of the future. This suggestion never fails to annoy. Anyway, I wanted to see if I could make interesting fiction from climate change. It"s an undeniably important subject-it"s the elephant on the horizon-but it"s also undeniably difficult, boring (for the nonscientists among us), and horrifying to contemplate. Yes, I thought, that would be really difficult to do, make climate change interesting. Still, I like a challenge, and I went at it from different angles for my fifth story collection, In-Flight Entertainment, treating it as a love story, a dramatic monologue, a satirical comedy, a sales pitch and-the story included here-a dystopian diary. Having said this, I ought to add that I"m not interested in writing polemic. As a reader, I resent fiction that has designs on me. I think the only duty of a writer is to resist writing about what they think they ought to write about-and to write about what stimulates their imagination. Oddly, the subject of climate change did this for me. I sensed dark rich comic pickings, and I wasn"t wrong.
Helen Simpson was born in Bristol, England, in 1956 and grew up near Croydon. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from Oxford with two degrees. She is the author of five collections of stories and a recipient of the Hawthornden Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award. Her collection In-Flight Entertainment will be published in the United States in 2012. She lives in London.
Mark Slouka, "Crossing"