KARL TARO GREENFELD has written six books, including the novel Triburbia. His fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Playboy, Commentary, the Southern Review, One Story, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and a previous edition of The Best American Short Stories. His nonfiction is widely published and anthologized. Follow him @karltaro or visit karltarogreenfeld.com.
• When I was a freshman in college, our dormitory was what had once been a mansion, now subdivided into doubles. My roommate was digging around in the back of our closet one day, and in a narrow alcove behind a stud he found a small devil’s head sculpted from clay. We didn’t know what to make of this and after studying it, we left it where it had been. I don’t recall being frightened by it. We assumed it was something planted by previous students. But I obviously remembered the little totem and found it noteworthy.
I wrote “Horned Men” in the fall of 2009 and submitted it to about fifty journals over the next two years. It was turned down by every single journal you’ve ever heard of—including Zyzzyva—and many that you haven’t. Finally, hearing that Zyzzyva had changed editors, I re-sent it and this time it was accepted.
GISH JEN’s new book, based on a series of lectures she gave about writing and culture, is titled Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. She is also the author of four novels—World and Town, Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, and The Love Wife—as well as a collection of stories, Who’s Irish? Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Paris Review, Granta, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike; she has also written nonfiction for the New Republic, the New York Times op-ed page, and other publications. Grant support has come from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among other sources. She received a Lannan Award for Fiction in 1999 and a Harold and Mildred Strauss Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. In 2009, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• The origins of stories are always murky for me. No doubt my own parents were on my mind when I wrote “The Third Dumpster.” They never viewed assisted living as an option for a million reasons, starting with the food; and it’s true that I felt that the older they got, the more clearly you could see how difficult it was to have come to America—what an opportunity it was, but what a price they had paid in terms of connection and community. How, though, did this feeling—a feeling that I’d had for at least a decade—suddenly become story material? How did it suddenly become funny? Painfully funny, of course, but nonetheless funny. Liberatingly funny.
I don’t know for sure. As it happens, though, I wrote a little about the writing of this story in my recent book, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, speculating that one day at my computer, I simply found myself in a more Asian frame of mind. There is evidence to support this idea. For example, the Chinese author Lin Yutang observed in his 1935 classic, My Country and My People, how the Chinese are given to a farcical view of life, with “Chinese humor . . . consist[ing] in compliance with outward form . . . and the total disregard of the substance in actuality,” and certainly this describes Morehouse’s approach to the problems he and his brother face. It is an approach Goodwin adopts too, from time to time, cloaking his desire for independence so transparently—“And the elevators! Didn’t they just make you want go up?”—that he, and we, find it funny. But probably the story behind the story was that I myself had hit some tipping point in dealing with my own real aging parents, where I needed to “throw off the too heavy burden imposed . . . by life,” as Freud puts it, “and win the high yield of pleasure afforded by humour.” That’s to say that I wrote this story because I myself needed to laugh and had somehow found a way to do that.
BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, the Paris Review, Glimmer Train, and anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Sports Writing, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. He wrote the documentary film Waiting for Lightning, and his novel, Remember Me Like This, is forthcoming in 2014. He teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Harvard University, where he is director of creative writing. His website is www.bretanthonyjohnston.com.
• This story was born from the image of teenagers playing on an abandoned golf course, and although there’s only a passing mention of that here, I think of it as indispensible. The tattoo and animal stuff has been batting around in my head for years, and I’ve tried to get the phrase “a trickle of water tracking through pebbles” into just about everything I’ve ever written. I should also say that I thought the father’s plan would work. I thought he was trying to do right by his boy, and until things went wrong, I thought he’d say his piece, deliver the girl home, and the night would end quietly. I’m grateful it didn’t.
And I’m grateful, immeasurably so, to Heidi Pitlor for the kindness she’s shown my work. That Elizabeth Strout, a writer whom you read again and again to greater reward, would like this story is beyond humbling. I’m also indebted to Tyler Cabot at Esquire for his keen edits and the home he gave the story, and to Amy Hempel for her generous and unsurprisingly spot-on suggestions on how to make the story its best self.
Finally, this story is dedicated to the memory of Mike Anzaldúa. Without him, the story wouldn’t exist. None of mine would.
SHEILA KOHLER is the author of three volumes of short stories and ten novels, including Cracks, Becoming Jane Eyre, and most recently, The Bay of Foxes (2012). Dreaming for Freud will be published in 2014. Her short stories have appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories and the Best American series. Her work has been published in twelve countries. Cracks has been filmed with Jordan Scott as director and Ridley Scott as executive producer and Eva Green playing Miss G.
• There are elements of my life in the story. I do come from South Africa and I did lose a beloved sister in violent domestic circumstances. However, the story also has echoes from literature. I was thinking of the German myth in which a child is led to death by a supernatural being, which Goethe uses in his great poem “Erlkönig.”
DAVID MEANS was born and raised in Michigan. His second collection of short stories, Assorted Fire Events, earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and has recently been reissued by Faber. His third collection, The Secret Goldfish, was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. His most recent book, The Spot, was a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in Nyack, New York.
• “The Chair” came out of my experiences as a father and drew on a particular feeling of isolation that comes from being alone at home with your kids, trying to instruct, to guide, to find a way to persuade and protect. There’s an aspect of crime and punishment in so much parental interaction—along with a strange, dangerous dynamic that involves living vicariously through your kids (sometimes for just a few seconds) even as you’re paradoxically aware that you really can’t. This dynamic is hugely problematic, and I’ve thought about it a lot over the years until, finally, I started writing “The Chair,” which began as a much longer story—a man and a woman in bed discussing their son, analyzing his recent behavior, asking themselves how they might better parent him—and then, in revisions, began to zero in on the incident in the yard. A breakthrough came when the father said to the son, “You’ll get the chair.” Then I understood that the story wanted to be about potential punishment, and it was being fueled by the fact that I’ve always detested the term “time out.” You’re going to get a “time out” sounded, and still sounds, linguistically crazy. If you don’t do what I say you should do, I’m going to remove you from time? As a parenting technique, it was popular a few years ago—maybe it still is.
STEVEN MILLHAUSER’s most recent
book is We Others: New and Selected Stories. Other works include Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer and Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, and Tin House. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Connecticut, and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
• I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Saul. Last year I reread the two books of Samuel, with the vague idea of writing about Saul and David. I quickly abandoned the idea, but my reading awoke a childhood memory of first hearing the story of Samuel, the boy whose name was called in the night. That memory gave rise to my story.
LORRIE MOORE is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English in the creative writing program at Vanderbilt University.
• Nabokov’s famous story “Signs and Symbols” is one of those perfect narrative objects that reveals different things when read at different times, even as it itself remains unchanging. A rereading of this story last year left me in a somewhat new referential condition (though shattered; one is always shattered), and whether it was good inspiration or misbegotten, I was led to try to compose a kind of narrative dance with the story—though I am the hat rack and Nabokov is Fred Astaire. Good idea or bad?—I felt possessed and did not decide nor resist. It was less a “revisioning” and more of a “wandering toward then away then back again.” But it was an honoring exercise, perhaps also an exorcism. “Amateurs imitate, artists steal”: a variation on an old saw I was reminded of recently in a nifty book called Steal Like an Artist, which is full of things said by other people—natch. But “Referential” is not an actual theft nor trying to slink about as if committing one but is intended as—what? A tribute—and like most tributes it contains both debts and detours, shadowings and separatenesses, the collaging of other narratives, and even a joke or two.
ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published many books, including Dance of the Happy Shades; Lives of Girls and Women; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; The View from Castle Rock; Too Much Happiness; and Dear Life.
During her distinguished career, Munro has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W. H. Smith Award in the United Kingdom and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Rea Award for the Short Story in the United States. Away from Her, the film version of Munro’s “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” won seven Genie Awards and was nominated for two Academy Awards.
In Canada, her prize-winning record is extraordinary: three Governor General’s Awards, two Giller Prizes, the Trillium Book Award, the Jubilee Prize, and the Libris Award. Abroad, acclaim continues to pour in. Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best Book Award, Caribbean and Canada region, and were chosen as Books of the Year by the New York Times. In 2005, Munro was included in Time magazine’s list of the world’s one hundred most influential people. In 2009, she was awarded the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for “a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.”
Alice Munro’s stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, as well as in The Atlantic and the Paris Review. She and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.
• “Train” examines a man’s desire to avoid his past mistakes by essentially becoming someone new, someone in whom others can place trust and belief and even memories of loved ones now gone. To atone is so often to assume a new, cleaner identity. To attempt, of course, to begin again. I don’t know whether this is an effective strategy, but the desire to escape and rebuild is something I find interesting.
ANTONYA NELSON is the author, most recently, of Bound (a novel) and Nothing Right (stories). She teaches in the creative writing programs at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College. Her favorite color is green, and she loves babies and corgi dogs and earrings and standup comedy and cocktail hour.
• “Chapter Two” was in my head for years before it was on the page. Based loosely on an actual person, the proximity of high-hilarity hijinks and sudden sobering utter mortal demise was a story I couldn’t seem to tell, although I knew I wanted to somehow capture that exact sensation. How to frame a story? It’s my main question, right after Is it happy hour yet?
KIRSTIN VALDEZ QUADE was a Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where she is now a Jones Lecturer. She holds degrees from Stanford and the University of Oregon and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, The Best of the West 2010, and elsewhere.
• The violent backstory of “Nemecia” is based loosely on true events. As a small child, my godmother watched as her father brutally beat her mother and murdered her grandfather. Her father fled to the mountains but was eventually caught by a posse of neighbors. When he was released from prison, my great-grandmother said, he wasn’t the same man. “He was innocent, like a child.” Her phrasing struck me, and suddenly I saw him vividly: reduced, broken, vacant.
I peopled the incident with invented characters and gave them needs and motivations entirely their own. Nemecia is not my godmother, who was generous and deeply loyal to her family and friends. As I wrote I discovered that I was less interested in the murder itself than in its reverberations and in the way trauma can become a kind of treasure, a currency to be hoarded or envied or spent.
SUZANNE RIVECCA is the author of Death Is Not an Option (2010), a finalist for the Story Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. The recipient of a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in San Francisco and works at an organization that serves the homeless.
• I work as a grant writer for a nonprofit that serves homeless runaways in San Francisco. “Philanthropy” had its genesis in my frustration with the sometimes sanitized and simplified way in which I have to portray our clients’ lives, circumstances, and trajectories for the benefit of potential funders. When you’re scrounging for money from rich faceless entities, a penitential quality infuses the prose by default; it’s like you revert back to some hard-wired feudal mindset, hat in hand. There’s no bigger sin in America than having the temerity to make others bear witness to destitution, and I atone for that sin by grafting an implicitly flattering aspirational arc onto each request: if you give us money, rich people, you’ll be helping these poor boys and girls become more like you. Normal. Relatable. Sympathetic.
There’s an expectation that once “recovery” happens, all past hedonism and experimentation must be renounced and rendered an utter waste. Whenever I interview a former client for a newsletter article or grant proposal, she’ll invariably say something like, “I don’t regret all the drugs I did and all the insane experiences I had, because I wouldn’t be the person I am without them, and that’s what I needed to be doing at the time.” And I think to myself, “Well, shit, I can’t put that in there.” But I should be able to. You shouldn’t have to disown and amputate your past in order to forge a future.
When I wrote a first draft of this story, I showed it to a few people at an artists’ residency. One woman, who may or may not have been the female incarnation of Mitt Romney, approached me to give me a lecture about my unfair portrayal of the downtrodden rich. She said, “Look, my family has a lot of money, and I have a LOT of rich friends. And they’re good people from Brookline, Massachusetts! Just because someone’s rich doesn’t mean they’re bad and foolish. After all, they’re the ones who are putting up the money! They p
ut up all the money but they still have to take all the ridicule. It’s just not fair!”
Well, lady, this is for you. If any residents of Brookline want to redeem their town’s image, I invite them to go to homelessyouthalliance.org and chip in a dollar.
Above all, this story is essentially a love letter to my boss, who does an impossible job every day with tenacity, ingenuity, and humor.
GEORGE SAUNDERS is the author of four story collections, the most recent being Tenth of December. In 2006 he was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. He was awarded the 2013 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of short fiction. He teaches at Syracuse University.
• “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” came directly out of a dream: in the dream, I got out of bed, went to a (nonexistent) window in our house, looked out, and saw four women suspended between two A-shaped frames on a tiny wire that ran in one side of the head and out the other. The women—who, in my dream-logic, I understood to be poor women from Third World countries—wore matching white smocks, had beautiful long black hair, were alive, and were not in any pain—they were talking happily in the moonlight. And—the kicker—my reaction (that is, the reaction of the guy I was in the dream) was not “Holy shit, what’s going on here?” but “Oh wow, we are so lucky to finally be able to get these for our kids.” That is: pure gratitude. The story then took twelve years to finish.
JIM SHEPARD is the author of six novels, including, most recently, Project X, and four story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Story Prize, and You Think That’s Bad, released in 2011. He teaches at Williams College.