Some stories feel closer than others. I wrote “Mermaid River” during my first year in Iowa, where I’d moved for graduate school. I was thinking about a few things: I was twenty-four, and had the terrible sense that my family, or my idea of them as individuals and as a unit, was fracturing. My brother was experiencing the United States as a black man. I was the farthest I had ever been from my mother and two siblings, which was a kind of relief. I was thinking about loving through and in spite of distance. I was also remembering Canarsie, the Caribbean neighborhood I had left behind in Brooklyn. In that place, I’d known Caribbean mothers, like Samson’s mother, who left children behind in the care of loved ones, with the hopes of settling in the United States and eventually sending for them. In writing “Mermaid River,” I was also thinking about tourism and how much of a place and the history of a place is done away with and reimagined for outsiders.
Alexia Arthurs was born in Jamaica in 1988 and moved with her family to Brooklyn in 2000. She has published short stories in Granta, Small Axe, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, Shondaland, BuzzFeed, and The Paris Review, which awarded her the Plimpton Prize in 2017.
I wrote the opening of this story several years ago and then put it away for a long stretch of time as other parts of life happened. But it’s always a relief to have something to return to, even if it’s only a few paragraphs, and especially if you haven’t written for a while and are feeling uncertain about how and where to begin again. When I returned to it, I was thinking about how much I enjoy reading stories that consider the overall shape of a thing—a career, a romantic history, the course of a friendship—and how often I reread the work of Alice Munro and Joan Silber to experience this pleasure. I wanted to try to write a story like that, and out of my attempt came this story, which I think may be just as much about the failure to discern an overall shape as it is about the shape itself—in this case, the shape of a marriage. Or the shape of two marriages. Two marriages that seem to share a single shape until it’s revealed that they don’t. With this story I was interested in voice, too; I wondered if a conversational, digressive, lightly offered voice could still convey the deep sense of loss that has compelled its narrator to speak.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Tin House, Glimmer Train, The New Yorker, and The Best American Short Stories. She was born in Houston, grew up in Boston, and now lives in Los Angeles.
Every Colombian has been touched by the violence of a civil war that lasted over half a century. Though I was raised in the United States, I have known many people who were kidnapped or who’ve had family members kidnapped. In some cases, captives were killed, but in others, victims were eventually released and expected to just go on with their lives, often keeping silent about their imprisonment. The father of one of my best friends was held for five months; I remember the terror the family endured, how they navigated the estrangement once he came home when everything about him, from his appearance to the way he spoke, had changed. I wanted to write about intimate violence and an unlikely friendship, strangers who find comfort in each other for a time, and how, despite our fragility and impermanence, not only our traumas but the people who touch our lives in good ways can remain with us forever.
Patricia Engel was born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey. She is the author of The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris; and Vida, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Young Lions Fiction Award, and winner of Colombia’s national book award. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her books have been widely translated, and her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and elsewhere. Engel currently teaches creative writing at the University of Miami.
Some stories begin with a very decisive seed or insight, but although “Funny Little Snake” has a very particular flavor now, it actually began rather indefinitely. All the extravagant period detail came later on: first of all, I just liked the idea of that conjunction of three females—mother, daughter, and stepmother. It felt almost like a shape I could put down anywhere, and make something interesting. Then next I had that opening, with the buttons, the helpless gesture of the child holding up her arm for fastening. I had round brown buttons like those on a dress myself, when I was a little girl in the 1960s—although nothing in my actual life apart from the buttons and that dress bore any resemblance to the material in the story. My childhood was much safer and more ordinary, thank goodness. From the buttons the whole of the rest of it unfolded. In the original three-women shape I had expected the mother and stepmother to begin in antagonism and end with a warmer mutual insight. But as the character of Marise began to elbow itself so fiercely onto the page, I realized that would be sentimental. Not that the story doesn’t have its sympathy with Marise—some sympathetic insight, into her origins and history. But I knew there was no reconciliation possible between her and Valerie. And that was when I understood that the story must end in high drama—a real rescue from danger, like the one in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, when the Jewish antique dealer smuggles the children out from the house of the wicked bishop. That filmic sequence was my inspiration, in writing the closing pages of the story.
Tessa Hadley was born in 1956 in Bristol, England, and grew up there. She has written seven novels—Accidents in the Home; Everything Will Be All Right; The Master Bedroom; The London Train; Clever Girl; The Past, which won the Hawthornden Prize; and Late in the Day—and published three collections of short stories, Sunstroke, Married Love, and Bad Dreams. She publishes short stories regularly in The New Yorker, reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books, and is a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. In 2016, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. She lives in London.
“Goodnight Nobody” was written after several life-changing events over the last few years—most especially the birth of my daughter and the death of my mother. I also became a single parent during that period. It was a time of emotional extremes and physical difficulty, but also processing the existential nature of these events was incredibly challenging. Fiction doesn’t provide answers to those big questions of life and death, but it can be companionable—for readers and for the writer—in the asking of them. I was reading Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown to my daughter a lot, and every time I got to the blank page that says “Goodnight nobody” I would feel a kind of existential vertigo. Oddly it wasn’t a wholly unpleasant sensation, more like some kind of exposure of truth. One more event triggered the writing of this particular story. There was a report in the British news about a newborn baby that had been killed by a dog in a northern town close to where I was brought up. How to explain such things? I suppose Jem, the mature questioning child in the story, is trying to simply comprehend mortality. She is, in the end, walking up to a mortuary door by herself. Don’t we all, at some point?
Sarah Hall was born in 1974 and raised in the Lake District in Cumbria. She received an MLitt in creative writing from St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of five prizewinning novels—Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, Daughters of the North, How to Paint a Dead Man, and The Wolf Border—and two short story collections, The Beautiful Indifference and Madame Zero. Her third collection, Sudden Traveller, will be published in 2019. Hall is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award. She lives in Norwich, Norfolk, England.
While writing “Mr. Can’aan” I remember describing the experience to a friend as “sticky”—the story was coming out with excruciating slowness, at a rate of something like a sentence a day. But while the process was difficult, by the time I reached the finish line and looked back over what I had written, I did not see much I wanted to revise. This was a pleasant surprise at the end of a dark, sticky tunnel.
I did not have a logical conception of the story as I began, only a feeling. I also had a few ideas and influences floating around in my head: the work of the Lebanese artist Walid Raad, certain short stories by Alice Munro, the lives of several Palestinian historians I knew, the films of Olivier Assayas. These four things all had something to say about the life of stories: what stories can “do” in the world, the way they are passed along, how they act upon others. For me that seemed particularly relevant to Palestine. Sometimes it can feel as though Palestine has more substance in the stories people tell about it (to themselves, to others) than it has in reality.
Something else those four influences explored, or at least conjured in me, was a sense of time that wasn’t straightforward or predictable. And from the beginning, “Mr. Can’aan” felt like a story that was going to leap through time.
Isabella Hammad was born in London. Her work has been published in Conjunctions and elsewhere, and she was the 2018 winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for fiction. Her first novel was The Parisian. She lives in New York.
The triggering incident or moment for “Prime” took place when I was a schoolgirl of thirteen or fourteen. Call it twenty years ago. I was a writer by then and I viscerally recall that day: the dizzy, momentous feeling that comes when inspiration (or the catalyst needed to make something decent) drops in. But I only wrote poetry at the time, and I knew that a poem was not the form for what I wanted to render. When I got around to fiction writing in my twenties, I started with the novel and wrote several of those before ever attempting a short story. “Prime” is the second short story I’ve written. It is the only form “Prime” could have taken. After all those years writing poetry and novels, I felt ready to try to realize it on the page. I didn’t know how the story would play out or how it would be told—the span of time, point of view, setting, characters, all of that—I just had the box and the abstract role of a teacher. Everything else arrived by writing slow slowly slow and erasing every false note. Do they really think her coat is made of carpet? I would go back and forth on such things for hours, until I realized that the problem was in thinking of them. I had to enter the circle of we, come what may. The writing process was frightening because the story asks a lot of a reader and I believed (as I wrote it) that it wanted a reader—that we wanted the reader there as a friend—to fill the eighth chair. But readers are not always benevolent, and I was afraid for the children (and for myself) to introduce another unreliable, unpredictable presence into their/our world.
Little did I know how they would turn the tables on their teacher and on the reader both—not to be playful or coy or manipulative or to placate, but to unburden our heavy adult heads, and to demonstrate youth’s wild courage and resilience.
Caoilinn Hughes was born in Ireland in 1985. Her first novel, Orchid and the Wasp, was shortlisted for the Butler Literary Award. Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence, won the Irish Times’s Shine/Strong Award. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2018, Hughes won the Moth Short Story Prize.
I don’t think the buffalo were in on the start of the story. I think it started being about tractor repair, which is probably a pretty dull subject for many readers, but the buffalo came into it fairly early on. First, it occurred to me that I’d seen a neighbor canning buffalo tongues, a delicacy. It went from there. There were two young buffalo bulls that were kept in a marginal pen on a farm. As they grew older they became fearsome, and there was the place the story was set, eastern Washington, which in that summer was the site of fires. Hundreds of thousands of acres burned and so the desecration that the buffalo as a species had already endured extended incrementally. Then there was the small herd of buffalo from the Kalispel Reservation that passed into the fires. As the writing developed, there came to be people in it, who are always necessary to stories. There was a family who made connections with the two buffalo and for whom the buffalo became expressive of significant things in their natures—foolish pride, misplaced ownership, sadness, and finally despair. An unnamed narrator observes all of it.
John Keeble was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and raised in Saskatchewan and then in California, and so has dual citizenship. He is the author of six novels, including his most recent, The Appointment: The Tale of Adaline Carson. He is the author of Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound, which won a Washington State Governor’s Writers Day Award. His collection of short stories is Nocturnal America. He was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Keeble’s novel Broken Ground was selected as one of the best books in the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission’s exhibit Literary Oregon, One Hundred Books, 1800–2000. He lives in eastern Washington.
The story drew its inspiration from my father, whose younger sister Beverly was handicapped by illness when she was very young. Beyond a black-and-white photo taken of her just prior to her illness, I don’t know much about her because my father has said very little. And I don’t think it’s because the memory of her is lost to him, though more than fifty years have passed, but rather the opposite—his experience of Beverly before, his witnessing of his mother’s grief after, all of it remains alive and vivid still. I suppose I feel drawn to those places where pain is exquisite and words are few. I’m interested in a sort of silence, not as a marker of failed communication, but as a possible measure of impossible loss.
Rachel Kondo was born and raised on Maui, Hawaii. Her most recent writing has appeared in Electric Literature and Indiana Review. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, she now lives in Los Angeles.
In my head, “Lagomorph” is a story about time and about change and about the decisions we make when we are apportioning the little bit of care we send out into the world. I was interested in the way people love animals differently than they love people and I gave Gunther just a touch of supernatural longevity so that he and the narrator would be locked into a relationship that moved well beyond normal limitations. The unnervingly silent way that rabbits pay attention to everything around them was also important to me. I wanted Gunther to just be there with my couple for a long, long time, a quiet witness, taking it all in. Then, in the end, I wanted to imagine these two people coming together again inside his head. I wanted to see their lives as his memory so that, in some weird reversal, when the two of them couldn’t exist together in any other way, they would eventually end up belonging to him.
Alexander MacLeod was born in 1972 in Inverness, Nova Scotia, and grew up in Windsor, Ontario. His first book, Light Lifting, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Book Prize, and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The collection was also recognized as a book of the year by the American Library Association, The Globe and Mail, and Amazon.ca. MacLeod lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and teaches at Saint Mary’s University.
The acquisition of language, which exists at the center of this story, is endlessly fascinating to me. The experience that I’m always hungry for, both in fiction and in my life, is the sensation of passing from a state of disorientation to orientation—that short window in which things just begin to organize themselves around you. When, in a new city, for instance, you enter an alleyway already with the vague sense of where it will deposit you. I grew up surrounded by my grandfather’s paintings of his home, the Spanish Basque Country, and my father’s stories of growing up in Troubles-era Northern Ireland, both of which have heavily influenced my work.
I spent the summer before writing this story living myself in Spanish, learning the way in which language can simulate that alleyway—that anticipation of arrival—over and over again. Of course, in the Basque Country, during this period, the relationship between Spanish and Basque varied from town to town, even from family to family. In “No Spanish,” Basque is the new, unfamiliar language, though always at the back of my mind, and, I hope, lurking in the back of the story, is the notion that for many, many people, that painful transition happened the other way around.
Moira McCavana was born in 1993 in Boston and raised there. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, she received the Le Baron Russell Briggs Prize Honors Thesis award and the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for her short fiction, which has appeared in The London Magazine and elsewhere. McCavana lives in Madrid, Spain.
I think this story is actually about İzzet’s father. He is the only one who seems to realize that his son is chasing a phantom aspiration. In fact, I too believed İzzet was right in his desire to get an electrical engineering degree to become a turbine mechanic because this was his escape from the mine, from all the terrible things the mine means to İzzet, but I was wrong.
This story is smarter than I am; it is my shortest piece, and I wrote it in a week, so there was very little opportunity for me to get in the way of it. I had to reread it before I could comment on it, and in the rereading since its publication, the ending has taken on a cold suspension, a terrible impossibility for change. İzzet has surrendered himself to the false notion that to be in the air is to be something different, but his father, thinking between bites of watermelon, is acutely aware that it is the same to go up a turbine as it is to go down a mine. Though he might not admit it to İzzet, he believes in his swimming. He is the only one who wants his son to dream bigger, to try to get far, far out of town, to escape from the village, and he tries to articulate this, but he has problems with words; he can’t say it just right. And because of this, I didn’t realize until I reread it that İzzet’s end is a failure. He stakes his relationships in the village, his education prospects, and his future career on a race across the Hellespont only to convince himself that this short lapse from the gravity of the mine is a complete break with it when in reality he is eager to return to the village. He seems to me only alive while balancing on the surface of the water, a rare moment of transcendence that should be not a means to an end but an end in itself. İzzet should become a swimmer; his failure is in never realizing it.
İzzet’s father is unable to cause a change in his son. He can’t speak the spell that would magically alter his son’s destiny. Neither can I; it took me this long just to see that İzzet’s father, the little character at the corner of the story so full of aborted hope, is actually the center around which the fiction orbits. What can we possibly do when our heart tells us there is a right thing to do but this right thing to do is not emotionally accessible to us?
Kenan Orhan was born in 1993 in Overland Park, Kansas, where he grew up. His stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Common, and elsewhere. He recently finished a collection of stories set in Turkey and is at work on a novel. He lives in Kansas City.
At the heart of “Bad Girl” is an exploration of the tangled mess around friendship, sex, vulnerability, and grief. I wrote it partly in response to Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, a novel that I’ve loved for almost twenty years; the complexities of teenage girls’ friendships are an endlessly fascinating topic. I was interested, too, in exploring the aftermath of trauma: in this story, Cheryl’s mother has recently died, and Cheryl is struggling to find a way to understand herself in the wake of that catastrophic loss. At the time I was working on a series of interlinked stories set in a fictional suburb of Manchester, and so the setting—a rather insalubrious pub called the Glory Hole—was already familiar to me, and in fact I went on to write further pieces about many of the more peripheral characters in this story, including one exploring the backstory of Cheryl’s friend Tania. I’m still a little hung up on both characters—perhaps one day they’ll make it into a novel.
Valerie O’Riordan was born in 1980 and grew up in Dublin, Ireland. She has an MA and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Manchester, and she also studied at Trinity College Dublin. O’Riordan teaches fiction writing at the University of Bolton. Her short stories have been published in Tin House, Unthology, The Lonely Crowd, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, and Fugue. She won the Bristol Short Story Prize, and she is a senior editor at The Forge Literary Magazine and coeditor of the review site Bookmunch. O’Riordan lives in Manchester, England.
I have a good friend who has hated her house for as long as I’ve known her, which is going on twenty years. I happen to like her house, not because I don’t see its flaws, but because it has sheltered me during some dark times. She has, too.
At some point, perhaps after my friend described yet another way the house was a bitter disappointment, I decided to memorialize it. Like her, I’m a bit of a contrarian. Of course, I couldn’t make a whole story about its popcorn ceilings and poured-concrete floors. The horror! Something needed to happen, but what? I let my first pages sit for a little while—six months? a year?—until one day when I was bored or disillusioned with some other half-finished project, I reread the beginning and realized it would be really funny if Liza, the protagonist, found herself haunted by a ghost who was making the house that she loathed, and was intent on neglecting, a bit nicer. In fiction, answers always lead to more questions, but that joke kept me writing, even as I gradually learned that the story wasn’t as funny as I initially thought.
Stephanie Reents was born in 1970 and grew up in Boise, Idaho. She’s the author of a story collection, The Kissing List, and I Meant to Kill Ye, an account of her attempt to come to terms with the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Her awards include a Rhodes Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and the Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship for writing from the Rhode Island Foundation. Her short fiction has appeared in Epoch and Bennington Review, among other journals. She teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Whenever I encountered an old woman in a story she was always unattractive or sick or dying or a burden to those around her. It made me angry to see that. I was also annoyed with romantic stories with a young woman at the center who always gets her man. I wanted to write a love story where not getting your man can feel deep, profound, freeing. I wanted to say love isn’t everything and it isn’t enough. It can fail you even when it’s there.
Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in 1978 in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Light. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, Noon, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her first story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, is forthcoming. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.
This story has as its source two anecdotes. When my maternal grandmother was dying, we were able to obtain for my aunt, the only one left from either side of my family to have stayed back in Laos, permission to visit on an emergency visa. Obtaining the visa involved a doctor’s written note that said, This patient is dying, and she would like to see her oldest daughter one last time. If at all possible, it is imperative that this daughter’s visit be expedited. While my aunt was here in the States, my mother asked her how she was surviving. My aunt, who is terrified of water, replied that for a living she woke in the dark before dawn and plied the waters of Laos in her narrow fishing boat. To do all of this without a husband, from my vantage point, was a pretty heroic deed.
The second anecdote contains a pot of flowers. When I moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, for graduate school, my mother gave me, of all the things she could think of, a pot of her coveted, special flowers. The superstition behind these flowers, as told by my mother, is that only men could coax life from their bulbs, or, to put it another way, the flowers only grew for men. My mother’s belief in this superstition was underscored by the fact that, when she was first given some bulbs, they refused to grow when planted. The following year, she dug up the bulbs and gave them to my uncle. Under his care, they grew so prolifically that he returned the flowers in a bushel-sized pot to my mother. Due to its unwieldiness—I think now that pot must have been close to seventy pounds of dirt and flowers—my mother kept the flowers outside, and the pot was quickly stolen in broad daylight for the flowers’ medicinal value. These flowers, my mother’s gift when I moved away, were an expression of trust, I see now, that perhaps I, being a son and someone whose curiosity is such that I would even care to ask about a superstition behind a plant, would look after them. When winter arrived and the flowers dropped their petals, I stopped watering them, and the following spring, when I knew there was something I was supposed to do to help bring them back to life, I did nothing at all, and they remained dormant—some too rotted to salvage when I finally dug them up—the rest of my time in Greensboro. It was my aunt’s courage, my mother’s odd choice in a gift, the value of the flowers, and the superstition behind them that I kept returning to, so I wrote this story.
Doua Thao was born in the Phanat Nikhom refugee camp in Thailand. He first immigrated to Madison, Wisconsin, and then settled in Milwaukee. His writing has appeared in Crab Orchard Review and Reservoir. He lives in Milwaukee.
Two years ago, my now-husband and I moved to New York. Every person I met said the city takes some getting used to and I would get used to it in about two years. Now everyone says five years. Once I hit five, they will say ten. I wrote the story when I was at the height of my frustration with the city subway system. The event of getting hit in the face with a shoe happened to me on the L and while rubbing my left cheek, I consoled myself by saying that I would be able to write this someday.
In “Omakase,” a couple goes out for sushi. What makes this specific sushi night different? My husband and I go out to sushi a lot. We usually have a good time. But I thought, let me change this couple and change the good time. Let me change the sushi chef. (The omakase chef we go to is so nice I sometimes have to remind him that I suffer from acute sarcasm.) When I sat down to write the story, I wrote it in four days. My best writing comes when I don’t overwork it. But I did keep reminding myself that I was writing to this idea: in what ways can these three characters interact with one another so that by the end, everyone leaves a bit unsatisfied? After the story came out, I had many responses. Someone asked me if I thought women on the whole overthought. (On the whole? You mean, all four billion of us?) Someone else asked me if I thought men on the whole overexplain. (Similar response.) I didn’t get it, another said, was the story about race? Naturally, questions of gender and race are never simple. And what reads “off” to one may not have any effect on another. While nuance is crucial to fiction, it is often overlooked in real life. Yet if we, as different people, are to find common ground, we need to think about the in-betweens. The question I get asked the most is if the couple stays together. My usual response is, Does that matter? But if the person is adamant, I then ask, Well, what do you think? After the person tells me, I nod, ask another question.
Weike Wang was born in Nanjing and grew up in China, Australia, Canada, and the United States. She is the author of Chemistry, and her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Kenyon Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as awards from the Whiting Foundation and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35. She lives in New York City.
A heavy wet snow fell one of those last nights my husband and I lived together in rural Montana. The following day was warm, glittery with sunshine, a balmy wind coming over the Swan Range. I went for a walk. I thought maybe I’d just keep walking into the mountains and never come back. I didn’t want to return to the East Coast, where my husband had gotten a grant to farm oysters, but there seemed to be no choice. I made it as far as the top of the hill, where I found a bird with a missing wing flapping around in a futile circle. I wasn’t the kind to look away and keep on walking. Nor was I going to gather it in a box and drive eighty miles to a wildlife sanctuary. At least I wasn’t that kind anymore. I knew what I had to do. I picked up a stone and crushed it.
Soon after leaving the valley, I gave birth to a daughter. I wrote nothing for many years. She went to preschool on the other side of town. The land was wilder over there, tangled with brush and skunk cabbages and a barbwire fence that kept the cows from wandering out of the dilapidated dairy farm. My daughter’s teacher had once lived on the farm but didn’t anymore, because she was too fond of the cows. We met sometimes during the weekends, sitting in tiny chairs at the round tables in my daughter’s classroom. The wood was a screen hiding the farm, which she spoke of with a quiet smile that glinted at the corners with a touch of animosity. Did I know riding a horse was a means of domination, and a weed was only a weed if you didn’t like where it was growing? She fed the robins every season, and kept the mice as pets instead of trapping them. It was from her that I learned about the bitterness of dandelion in a cow’s milk, that you should never toss to a child the empty phrase Good job! It was important for the child to think for herself.
I keep seeing the bird flapping in the snow as I think about the germination of this story. I think about what happens to a girl without confidence, and the preschool teacher who opened my imagination again. She told me a lilac dug up and left exposed for a whole season can still take root and bloom again. Somewhere between the tenacity of the root ball and the bird I killed came Gretel and her story.
Liza Ward was born in 1975 and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of the novel Outside Valentine. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Best New American Voices 2004, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005, Vogue, AGNI, Tin House, and other publications. She lives in Duxbury, Massachusetts.
This one happened pretty quickly. I’d been living between Houston and New Orleans at the time, working on a bunch of linked stories. Their protagonist was giving me trouble, I couldn’t really figure him out, so I found myself going further and further into his past and the people who shaped him: chief among them being his mother. And the way she moved through the world. And how that conflicted with everything around her, and how that conflict reverberated in her home. I don’t know if they’d actually say it, but the narrator and his mother are the two people who understand each other best in their lives—so, once I understood that, the piece unspooled in a day or two. A gift.
Bryan Washington has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, One Story, Catapult, and elsewhere. His first collection of stories, Lot, was published in 2019. He lives in Houston, Texas.
Writing for me is one means of making my way around a world that always changes, a world different each time I look—my story is titled “Maps and Ledgers” because maps and ledgers are reconstructions that perform work similar to work that all stories I write perform for me—keeping track, locating, accounting, managing the chaos of time—maps and ledgers are imagined recordings of the form a world, if it stood still, might assume—to consult a map or ledger is to pretend it could represent a reliable approximation of something that is, itself, reliable—as if the evidence of the senses, the mind, is actually capable of arriving at that certainty expressed when a person exclaims, “Been there, done that”—maps and ledgers are games we play as if the rules and instructions invented for those games might stand outside time, somehow evade or at least circumvent change—though a changing world never ceases to be different each time I look (or don’t look).
John Edgar Wideman was born in 1941 in Washington, D.C., and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His books include Writing to Save a Life, Philadelphia Fire, Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong, Hoop Roots, and Sent for You Yesterday. He is a MacArthur Fellow, and has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He divides his time between New York and France.