Afterword to “Fears”:

 

“Fears” is a story that, as I’ve discovered over the years, seems to lend itself to being read aloud. This may be partly because it isn’t a long story; in an age when attention spans are growing ever shorter, doing a long story at a reading risks putting what audience still remains at the reading’s conclusion to sleep. But I think its modest success at readings is largely because the story is written in first person, which means that the author has only to impersonate the narrator. Writers with great dramatic gifts can get away with reading a story that requires many voices, but for those of us with less skill and less confidence in our abilities, first-person narratives are safer.

Some writers are uncomfortable doing readings, or refuse to do them at all. Others like to read work in progress, which seems to me a dangerous undertaking, but then I’m one of those writers who doesn’t like to show my work to anyone until I have a final draft, or close to it, and even then I pick my target readers carefully. Showing a story or part of a novel to the editor you’re working with, or to another writer whose judgment you trust, makes much more sense to me than seeing how an audience of people you don’t know might react to a piece of writing that is still in the fragile state of being in progress and unfinished. The feedback can throw you off; you have to be able to hear your own voice clearly before you can expect others to hear it.

“Fears” may also go over well in readings because the world it depicts is not an unfamiliar one. Something like it is certainly a possibility, given the increasing control we are acquiring over human reproduction. In fact, I’ve often had the feeling that we’re already living in this world to some degree. Some years ago, after a reading, someone asked me what especially had inspired this particular story. “Super Bowl Sunday,” I told her, “because during that weekend, we might as well be living in an all-male society,” and I think she believed me.