MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN was raised in North Carolina and now lives in Vermont. She studied anthropology at Wake Forest University and completed graduate degrees at Duke University and Bennington College. She is the author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and a forthcoming novel. In 2015, she was awarded the Southern Fellowship of Writers’ Garrett Award for Fiction and a fellowship at the American Library in Paris.
• I’ve always been interested in unusual women with power, and when I first read about Joe Carstairs, I couldn’t stop thinking about her: her early days as an ambulance driver and companion of Dolly Wilde, and then her later days as commander in chief of a small island in the Bahamas. I admire islands as settings—they have their own peculiar, highly specific pressures and can function as a character in the narrative. While writing the story, I became obsessed with researching Whale Cay, through Kate Summerscale’s excellent biography of Joe (The Queen of Whale Cay), and through maps and real estate sites. I wanted its mostly unspoiled and wild character to envelop the reader and provide a lush backdrop for the antics of the passionate women who lived there.
When thinking about Joe Carstairs, an independently wealthy woman who loved to race boats and control others, I wanted to imagine the life of someone in her orbit. I’m fascinated by the way we treat others, and how power dynamics reveal so much about characters and values. I came up with the character of Georgie, a girl from the small-town South who ended up as one of Joe’s many girlfriends on Whale Cay. There are islanders in the story who are also at Joe’s mercy; it was important to me not to romanticize her actions. She was interesting, but she was also flawed.
After I wrote the first draft of the story, I knew it had many successful elements, but it took three years of revising, and a final rigorous pass with the editors of The Kenyon Review, to come to the best draft.
JUSTIN BIGOS was born in New Haven and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Ninth Letter, and Memorious, and his novella, 1982, appears in Seattle Review. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Twenty Thousand Pigeons (2014). He cofounded and coedits the literary journal Waxwing and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University.
• “Fingerprints” began as a memoir. I was finishing my first semester as a fiction student at the MFA program at Warren Wilson College (I dropped out the next semester, then eventually went back and finished in poetry). My adviser, Elizabeth Strout, was willing to look at this “memoir,” and I remember her e-mailing me at night to tell me that it was the best thing I’d written all semester, and that whatever it was, fiction, memoir, essay, I needed to keep writing it, no matter what. So, of course, terrified, I put it away, for about ten years. During my two years of doctoral study (I’m really good at dropping out of various levels of higher ed.), I had to take a workshop outside my main focus, which was poetry. I enrolled in a fiction workshop. And I struggled, since I hadn’t written short stories for so long. I dug out “Fingerprints,” and I looked at it. With nothing much to lose at this point, I shattered it, then put it back together, adding new sections and, ultimately, deleting most of the original. I wanted to write a story about stories, I suppose. Though this story is still, to a large extent, a series of memories of my father, as well as my stepfather and mother and the city I grew up in, I wanted the story to be about storytelling—how we tell the stories of ourselves and, especially, of the people who torture us with their tainted love.
At some point I thought I might as well send the story to some magazines, even if I was really a poet. When McSweeney’s took the story, over a year after I’d sent it, I’d kind of forgotten it was still out there, as it had been rejected from the dozen or so other places I’d sent it. I was pretty shocked. Then I was thrilled, especially since editor Daniel Gumbiner wanted to chat on the phone about revisions and edits, and we went back and forth over e-mail about ways I could make the story even better. Dan’s insights and suggestions were essential to the final version of “Fingerprints.” I’m grateful to him and McSweeney’s for taking a chance on a nobody. “Fingerprints” was my first published story. I doubt I would now still be writing fiction if not for the editors of McSweeney’s, who gave me a new confidence in my writing. A year later, I now have a collection-in-progress of stories, essays, and a novella, over a hundred pages and growing, titled (yup) Fingerprints.
Elizabeth Strout: this story is dedicated to you.
KEVIN CANTY’s seventh book, a novel called Everything, was published in 2010. He is also the author of three previous collections of short stories (Where the Money Went, Honeymoon, and A Stranger in This World) and three novels (Nine Below Zero, Into the Great Wide Open, and Winslow in Love). His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Esquire, Tin House, GQ, Glimmer Train, Story, New England Review, and elsewhere; essays and articles in Vogue, Details, Playboy, the New York Times, and Oxford American, among many others. His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Polish, Italian, and English. He lives and writes in Missoula, Montana.
• This story arose out of a time in my life when a lot of things that had been fixed in place started to come loose and rattle around. I found myself single for the first time since the Ford administration, for instance. My father had died. My daughter went to college in Oregon, and my son and his girlfriend struck out for California. I found myself largely alone for the first time in a long time, and without anybody to take care of. This felt difficult in the way I remembered adolescence as difficult: no clear path forward, not even sure what I was supposed to want. This was a moment I recognized as having a lot of potential for movement, for change, the things that stories are made out of.
Into this complex and volatile mixture of emotions was injected a scandalous barroom anecdote, and the story precipitated out pretty quickly from there.
DIANE COOK is the author of the story collection Man v. Nature. Her fiction has been published in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope: All-Story, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on This American Life, where she worked as a radio producer for six years. She won the 2012 Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, and her story collection was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She lives in Oakland, California.
• When I sat down to write the first draft of “Moving On” I was thinking about a lot of things. I was thinking about being left behind. I was thinking about all the risks we take when we love someone and all the ways we might try to protect ourselves. I was thinking about my dad, who was trying to move on after my mom died. I worried it was too quick and I wished he’d take more time to grieve. I was thinking about how I was drowning in my own grief and wishing I could move on.
I was thinking about a kind of e-mail I used to get when I lived in Brooklyn. Mass e-mails from friends saying something like “My elderly neighbor has just died and left behind this sweet toy poodle named Angel. Do you know anyone who might want to adopt Angel so she doesn’t get sent to a shelter or put down?” I was thinking about how confused that poor poodle must feel to have her whole life altered, possibly ended, and probably not understand why. And I was thinking about the people this happens to. Either because they are removed from the only life they know, or because the life they know is forever changed by the absence of the person who is gone. Their loss is doubled in a way.
All of this thinking led to a very short draft. Really just a setup. I had the situation, the narrator, her loss, the shelter, the women on the floor, the manual. But it was just a place populated by shadows of people. Through revision, more elements came to light. The window friend appeared. Women began running. Bingo was played. These things made the shelter and its inhabitants come alive. It became a place where people were either trying to make the best of a bad situation or fleeing from it. Both were attempts to survive, and survival has always been something I connect back to hope. But still, it didn’t feel like a story. Then the narrator began writing the letter that figures in the last third of the piece. And finally I felt like I knew her. She wanted something, even though she knew she couldn’t have it, the hallmark of grief. It amazed me that for months all these words had existed together without being able to accomplish much, and that the addition of just one element could bind all this material into a story.
JULIA ELLIOTT’s fiction has appeared in Tin House, Georgia Review, Conjunctions, and other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award. Her debut story collection, The Wilds, was chosen by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, BuzzFeed, and Book Riot as one of the Best Books of 2014 and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her first novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, will appear in October 2015. She teaches at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She and her husband, John Dennis, are founding members of the music collective Grey Egg.
• When I was in grad school, I became fascinated by medieval female mystics, particularly those who, like Margery Kempe, wrote about their experiences. My first attempt at a mystic story was too comic and outlandish, incorporating not only an obsession with the “holy prepuce,” or foreskin, one of the more eccentric relics that supposedly derived from the body of Jesus Christ, but also the obscure tradition of the “lactating Christ” in late medieval religious iconography. After I abandoned that story, female mystics popped up in the dissertations of at least two of my fictional characters. In one story, which remained unpublished, the mystic’s feverish visions appeared in big italicized chunks. In a more successful story, unnamed mystics from the narrator’s scholarly research hovered in the background of the narrative, occasionally appearing in brief images or lines of dialogue. When I heard about the Conjunctions “Speaking Volumes” theme, I decided to rewrite my mystic story, highlighting the medieval practice of mass-producing volumes in scriptoria. “Bride” also chronicles the private writings and obsessions of a female scribe who records her “visions” on stolen sheets of “uterine vellum,” fine parchment made from the skins of unborn calves.
LOUISE ERDRICH owns a small independent bookstore, Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis. Her latest novel, The Round House, won the National Book Award. Her next short story collection, Python’s Kiss, will include “The Big Cat.”
• Although I tried to improve the relationship in this story, things just kept getting worse. At last I let go of any hope of redemption and allowed Elida’s malevolence to emerge in her husband’s dream. People in Minnesota will usually comment on a book or story, but when mentioning this one nobody knew what to say. “I saw your story.” Mouths would open, hands flap, an odd laugh. Perhaps as a consequence this became a favorite story of mine—it seems to make people uncomfortable.
BEN FOWLKES is a sports writer who covers professional fighting for USA Today and its dedicated mixed martial arts site, MMAJunkie.com. He has covered the sport professionally since 2006 for media outlets including Sports Illustrated, AOL Sports, CBS Sports, and others. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana, and his fiction has appeared in Crazyhorse, Glimmer Train, Crab Creek Review, and Pindeldyboz. He lives in Missoula, Montana, with his wife and two daughters.
• For most of the fighters I know, the period following a loss is its own little identity crisis. If you’re the winner, the fight doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know, which is that you’re a great fighter, a fighter of destiny, possibly the best ever. The loser has to choose between finding some way to continue believing those things, or else confronting a reality where those things are not and never will be true. This is a choice that can be put off indefinitely, in one way or another.
There’s an added layer of difficulty for fighters who’ve been knocked out. They often don’t remember how the fight ended. Sometimes the whole fight—even that whole day—is wiped from their memory. It’s a chunk of time that is incredibly important, that exists for everyone else who saw it and who will treat them with the appropriate amount of sympathy or pity or contempt, and yet for them it’s gone, lifted straight out of their brains, retrievable only via video replay. Particularly when it’s one single blow that does it, a part of them feels like it didn’t really happen. There’s this sense of injustice. They know this isn’t the right result. It can’t be.
For this story, I started with that character in mind—a fighter on the downslope of his career, confronting a changing reality, a changing body, a life where a lot of doors have been closed that can’t be reopened. From there I added the familiar mix of self-pity and self-medication, followed by a situation that almost invites violence. The awful thing for fighters is that they’re so adept at and familiar with violence, they recognize how unfair it is for them to use it on regular people. It’s like being a wizard, but being forbidden to use your powers to resolve your personal problems. It’s terrible, really. For someone already at a certain point, it might feel like there’s nothing worse.
ARNA BONTEMPS HEMENWAY is the author of Elegy on Kinderklavier, winner of the 2015 PEN/Hemingway Award and finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Award. His short fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Ecotone, Five Chapters, and Missouri Review, among other venues. He’s been the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Truman Capote Literary Trust. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently assistant professor of English in creative writing at Baylor University.
• I am a little embarrassed to admit that I don’t remember actually writing this story. During the mild and rainy October of 2011, my daughter, Bluma, was born. For the first month of her life she had extreme difficulty eating, and I had to wake up every hour and forty-five minutes to feed her with a syringe. The ensuing sleep deprivation was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I remember being incapable of contiguous thought. I remember feeling like, once the border between sleep and waking had dissolved, time was collapsing into itself, until I was somehow inhabiting the past and the present at once. Somewhere in there, I knew I had a story due to my graduate workshop, or I risked failing.
At the time, I was doing intensive primary-source research into the Iraq War (and specifically, the experiences of those soldiers allegedly involved in atrocities). In the dissociated hallucinations of my sleepless state, my research, my memories, dreams, and present reality became somewhat indistinguishable from one another. It was just then that I learned about the U.S. military’s strategy of re-creating whole Iraqi villages in the Mojave and elsewhere, and hiring real Iraqi expatriates to play out complex psycho-behavioral profiles faked by various intelligence training units. I started going on long walks, even as I watched a soldier explain that his memory of the After Action Report had somehow replaced his memory of the actual events, even as I was trying to get my daughter to take the syringe. Somewhere in there, I must’ve been writing too, because on the day it was due, I showed up to class with this story, more or less in its current form, in hand.
But the deeper truth is that this story exists purely via the superhuman grace of my wife, the love of my life, Marissa. The real wonder here is of course her, who managed to juggle a newborn and a husband who was slowly losing his mind, with enough strength left over to somehow, somehow, in the midst of all this, point to my office and say, I’ll stay up, I know you can do it, I believe in you: now get to work.
DENIS JOHNSON is the author of several novels and plays, as well as a volume of stories and one of nonfiction articles and two books of verse. He lives in North Idaho.
• I ran across the phrase “the largesse of the sea maiden” in an English translation of a Persian folktale some years back. The words seemed mysteriously linked to a moment from my youth, when a woman sang a song to me—just me—in a bar in Seattle. In 2007 I asked a class I was teaching to write a story in two pages or less, and the first section of this tale was my own attempt at the assignment. Over the next several years I tinkered with other such vignettes, and one day they came together in a sort of arrangement.
SARAH KOKERNOT was born and raised in Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in Crazyhorse, Front Porch, West Branch, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, decomP magazinE, and PANK. She lives in Chicago with her husband, the writer Juan Martinez, and their son. Sarah is the program coordinator at 826CHI, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center. She is currently at work on a novel.
• I was living in rural Pennsylvania, reading a lot of late Chekhov, and I wanted to try my hand at something tender and subtle. I was concerned with the unpredictable and even darkly comical situations that can arise from past trauma. But the story didn’t begin there. It began with the ending—a man picking up a woman’s dress shoes as he followed her into the woods at the edge of a field. I wrote my way backward from those woods. Also, ever since meeting Izzy the camel in Waitsburg, Washington, I was determined to include a camel in a story.
VICTOR LODATO is the author of the novel Mathilda Savitch (2010), which won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award. His stories and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Southern Review. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His new novel, Edgar and Lucy, is forthcoming.
• “Jack, July” started with body language as much as with voice. I could absolutely picture Jack’s way of moving down the street—and I realized pretty quickly that I was dealing with a person reeling from some kind of intoxicant. In Tucson, where I lived for many years, you’ll often see someone marching down the road or standing at a bus stop with this very odd, twitchy behavior. Of course, meth is everywhere in Arizona. The neighborhood in which I lived slid quickly from working class to something a little more provisional. Coming from a working-class family, I find myself drawn to these sorts of characters: characters who appear to have less armor and artifice. Somehow their exhaustion seems to unmask them.
I never know where I’m going when I begin a piece, and in this story, since I’d stumbled upon a character who also had no idea where he was going, both physically and mentally, his state perfectly mirrored my own. Because of Jack’s heightened state of mind, I felt free to go a little crazy, to edit myself less as I wrote—and in doing so, I ended up in some unlikely places.
The beginning of this piece rides on an absurd, almost comic wave. Then the past enters the picture, and the story opens to its true intentions. Jack’s intoxication and eventual crash mirror the story’s journey from a kind of aching zaniness to a deeper heartbreak. I always knew that something unhappy was near, but like Jack, I circled it, hovered above it for as long as I could, until the weight of it had to intrude.
COLUM McCANN is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. He was awarded the 2009 National Book Award for his novel Let the Great World Spin. “Sh’khol” is featured in his new collection, Thirteen Ways of Looking.
• We sometimes forget that the construction of a house, or a cottage, or a hut, or even a cathedral, begins with the smashing up of rocks. There’s so much between the original sledge blow and the placement of the very last brick. It’s the same with stories, of course. Now that “Sh’khol” is in place, I find it hard to remember when I first started swinging the hammer.
One can find beginnings in numerous places, of course, but I recall being at a reading in 2010 and a woman in the audience asking me why I was so obsessed with parents losing their children. I had no good answer for her. I have never lost a child and, at that stage, never even lost a parent. But it struck me that the language of my attempted reply was hampered by the fact that there was no single word for a parent who had lost a child. Odd, given that the English language has (depending on how you classify a word) anywhere from a quarter-million to a million words, and the fact of losing a child is such a deeply traumatic event. Do we not have a specific word precisely because it is so harrowing? This lack of a proper word seemed like an almost hymn-singing absence.
I began to ask people if they knew of an exact word that might work. Most languages failed. There was a phrase in Sanskrit and I learned later that there were words in Arabic as well, but I thought the Hebrew word sh’khol was the closest. It was so deeply onomatopoeic as well, with the sh implying silence and the khol having a distressing sharpness. I hungered to build a story around it.
There were other things I wanted to explore as well. I have long wanted to write about Ireland’s dwindling Jewish community, especially in the context of the collapse of the economy there. Also, I had begun to hear a lot of stories about autistic children and the difficulties parents were having with adopted children. What fascinated me was the unknown history: how whole lives get absorbed into new landscapes and indeed new mythologies. I also wanted to sneak in a few references to other countries, so while the story was to unfold in the West of Ireland, it also takes place in Russia and the Middle East, all stories funneling themselves into one story.
So, all of these things became a collision of obsessions.
Still, the trouble with fiction is that it often makes too much sense, and we allow our obsessions to narrow themselves. Characters with their conscious actions, plotlines unrolling themselves in inexorably stable ways, everything neat, ordered, controlled. You always want to keep the critical heckler alive in yourself. I found myself wanting to write a story that would be grounded in action, but still elusive, tenebrous, and certainly unfilmable. Nothing is ever, eventually, found out.
Funnily enough I think it’s one of the first times I’ve put a mobile phone in a story. I wanted to see how I could get rid of the furniture of the modern world.
ELIZABETH McCRACKEN is the author of five books, the most recent of which, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, won the 2014 Story Prize. She teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.
• Years ago, I was noodling around on a novel about a woman who disappeared from a suburban street, and I wondered where she might have gone to. This was the kind of idle wondering that is really procrastination: maybe I’ll come up with something more interesting than the book I’m working on now. One of the possibilities: a cult in Canada, centered around a girl who’d sustained a traumatic brain injury, whose mother declared her a saint.
That idea stayed in my head, faint but persistent, a song I couldn’t quite remember. More than ten years later, I was on leave from my teaching job, trying to finish a collection of stories. I was writing at a great rate, story after story. Not since I’d been in graduate school had I had the thought Need to work on the next thing, but what, what? Toward the end of the semester, I remembered the brain-injured girl, but now—having become a parent myself in the years that had passed—I was interested in the parents. Generally I know the shape of a story when I begin it, but this one I didn’t, which is possibly why it’s so long. It was the last story I wrote in the collection.
Also, I once had a French personal trainer named Didier who did take an inexplicable dislike to me, and I am delighted to have my revenge in these pages.
THOMAS McGUANE is a member of the American Academy of Arts and letters, a National Book Award finalist, and the recipient of numerous writing awards. His stories and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and The Best American Sports Writing. The author of fifteen books, he lives with his family on a ranch in Montana.
• I started out with some vague ideas about the energy industry, about a more pastoral version of the West, and about the skills learned through agriculture, and how they would finally clash. This was in danger of remaining pretty abstract, pretty ideological, not to mention uninteresting until occupied by human beings, characters I had on hand; and my feeling for the country I was talking about. The energy industry and its taxation on the earth is concentrated in specific places. The extraction of oil from shale through fracking has befallen parts of North Dakota and Montana. Its profits are astronomical. Few dare to stand up in the face of this tidal wave of money. The arrival of hookers, drug gangs, and gunmen in guileless prairie towns and their credulous boosters has been unspeakable. You need to see such broad things through the eyes of individuals in order to make plausible fiction. As usual, this often calls upon a writer’s capacity for finding voices for the voiceless. Nothing new about that, but it can be a challenge when, as in the case of “Motherlode,” there is such extraordinary distance between these lives and the forces that rule them.
MAILE MELOY is the author of two novels, two story collections, and a young adult trilogy. Her story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It was one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the year. She has received the PEN/Malamud Award, the E. B. White Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Paris Review. She grew up in Helena, Montana, and lives in Los Angeles.
• There are sometimes elements floating in the back of my mind that I want to use, long before I ever figure out how to do it. The story from the past in “Madame Lazarus” was one of those: I wanted to write about the strangeness of life in postwar France, where those who survived, whether they had resisted the German occupiers or collaborated, stayed out of the way or hunted the resisters down, were all living alongside one another. But I hadn’t found a way in; it was too big and uncontrollable a subject. Then I started writing the story of a man trying to resuscitate a small dog, and I realized that there was space inside it for the other story, and they each made the other possible.
I also learn things about stories after they’re finished. As soon as “Madame Lazarus” was published, I started getting letters and e-mails from friends and strangers about the deaths of beloved dogs. They were beautiful, heartbreaking stories, and I hadn’t expected them. I thought the story was about human illness and aging, the breakdown and betrayal of the body (and, in the past, of a country). I thought those were the things people would respond to, but I was wrong. In the outpouring of grief, I realized that people’s love for their dogs is very pure, when there’s little in love that is pure. The responsibility for a dog is total, and the sense of failure when they die is enormous. Other loves are guarded—the character’s love for his children, his ex-wife, his partner, the boy in the past, the housekeeper—but the love for the dog isn’t, and his inability to save that one pure thing is at the heart of the story. Readers knew it when I didn’t.
SHOBHA RAO is the author of the forthcoming collection of short stories An Unrestored Woman. Her work has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Water~Stone Review, PoemMemoirStory, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a residency at Hedgebrook and is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, as well as a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She lives in San Francisco.
• This story is part of a collection that focuses on the Partition of India and Pakistan. I had been working on the collection for some time when I was awarded a residency at Hedgebrook, on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. While there—housed in a lovely cabin overlooking Useless Bay—I knew I wanted to explore a moment of terrifying conflict, and the choices we are forced to make during such moments. I also knew I wanted to write it in the guise of a relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young boy. I wanted the relationship between them to be platonic, yet intense. While walking along the shores of Useless Bay, the sentence “I was widowed long ago” occurred to me. I’m not sure why, or how, perhaps the wind, the shimmering water, the clouded glimpses of a faraway island. Still, it stayed with me, and I thought of all the marriages I have known, and of how, in so many of them, widowhood comes long before a death. It didn’t seem sad to me, certainly not tragic: we mourn the people we have been, we mourn the people we are with, we mourn what the years have made us. It is life; it is the basic machinery of life. Once that aspect was decided, to put the woman and the boy on a train, to have that train attacked, to have the woman choose the boy over the husband, and then to have the train burned to the ground, all came relatively quickly. Violence, after all, is not difficult. Humanizing that violence is what is difficult.
JOAN SILBER is the author of seven books of fiction, including Fools, longlisted for the National Book Award and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Size of the World, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction; and Ideas of Heaven, finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. She’s also the author of The Art of Time in Fiction. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program.
• When Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, I heard a radio report about older residents of housing projects who impressed volunteers with how well they managed without electricity or water. (My neighborhood, the Lower East Side, was in the dark zone, so I knew what they dealt with.) I began to think about self-reliance and the situations that call it forth, and the character of Kiki started to form. I had wanted for a while to get Turkey—a place I’ve happily visited a few times—into a story. And I wanted Kiki viewed by a younger female character, with her own ideas about risk and frontiers. Once I’d given Reyna a boyfriend at Rikers Island, I saw the story heightening. I wanted the two women to understand each other just fine but view each other across a great divide, where neither envies the other. I assumed “About My Aunt” was done when I finished it, but it has become the first chapter of a novel.
ARIA BETH SLOSS is the author of Autobiography of Us, a novel. Her short fiction has been published in Glimmer Train, Five Chapters, Harvard Review, and One Story, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Iowa Arts Foundation, the Yaddo Corporation, and the Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in New York City.
• I am not a natural storyteller. By which I mean narrative—the spine around which a story is built—does not come easily to me. Construction is slow, laborious, feasible only after I’ve scored some image or scrap of dialogue with a thousand tiny lines, trying to see if it will bleed.
In this case, I got lucky. A few weeks after my daughter was born, I picked up Alec Wilkinson’s The Ice Balloon, an account of the nineteenth-century inventor S. A. Andrée’s ill-fated attempt to reach the North Pole via hot air balloon. I was bone-tired, half-drunk on hormones and joy. In other words, primed. For days, that image dogged me: a balloon fueled by ambition, sailing over Arctic tundra.
Not long after, my husband went back to work. My days retained their strange new softness, the baggy shape of time delineated by feeding, washing, and soothing. Men leave, I told a friend, incredulous. Women can’t. Patently false, but I had my blood. Not long after, I sat down and began to write.
LAURA LEE SMITH is the author of the novel Heart of Palm. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, as well as New England Review, the Florida Review, Natural Bridge, Bayou, and other journals. She lives in Florida and works as an advertising copywriter.
• I really like cars. I don’t know much about them, but I grew up in a family where most of the men loved and worked on cars, and I married a man who shares that passion. I wanted to write a story about a car, and I remembered that when I was much younger—twenty-one? twenty-two?—I almost bought a used Corvair. I had money down on it and everything, but my father talked me out of it, citing the instability of the car’s rear-engine design. We argued about it. It was a beautiful old car, white with a red-leather interior, and I wanted it even though I knew it might be unsafe. In the end I lost the argument, and the kind lady who had taken my deposit gave me back my $200. I ended up buying a Dodge Challenger (what a name!—another car story one day, perhaps), but I never forgot that Corvair. So when I started playing with ideas for a car story I decided to give that latent desire for a Corvair to a character and see what would happen. Once I had Theo on the road, moving southward through the Florida heat on a quest for this car that he unreasonably, irrationally wants, the story started to tell itself. In reading up on some of the car’s details, I stumbled across the infamous Ralph Nader judgment that the Corvair was “unsafe at any speed.” I thought it would make a great title.
JESS WALTER is the author of eight books, most recently the novels Beautiful Ruins (2012) and The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009) and the story collection We Live in Water (2013). He was a National Book Award finalist for The Zero (2006) and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Citizen Vince (2005). His fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2012, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Esquire, and many others. He lives with his family in Spokane, Washington.
• “Mr. Voice” grew out of that first line: Mother was a stunner. Sometimes a line just pops into your head, like a song lyric. You know it’s right, so for once in your life, you don’t tinker with it. You stare at it, try different second lines, walk around wondering, Who said that? Then the characters start to come into focus: a girl, her beautiful mom, Claude. I’d wanted to write a story for a while set in the early to mid ’70s: home intercoms, Wild Kingdom, waterbed stores, and the 1974 Spokane World’s Fair. It was one of those stories that kept surprising me as I discovered a bit more of it every day—Oh, so she turns out to be . . . Ah, then he is . . . Right, so they are . . . I have two daughters and when I got to the end of the first draft and wrote Tanya’s line (“Nobody gets to tell you what you look like, or who you are”) I realized that’s what I wanted to tell my own daughters and, sentimental goof that I am, I started crying.