My story “Dismemberment” is about Andy Catlett’s recovery after losing his right hand to a corn picker in 1974. That story was told in a different way, with a different interest, in my small novel, Remembering. The question here is whether or not this story is worth telling twice. My own belief, supported by much local conversation, is that a story worth telling is worth telling any number of times.
Wendell Berry was born in Newcastle, Kentucky, in 1934. He is an essayist, poet, farmer, environmental activist, and fiction writer, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, and also the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award, and the John Hay Award of the Orion Society. He is a 2013 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received many prizes and awards in recognition of his long and fruitful career. Berry lives with his family on a farm in his native Henry County, Kentucky.
When my father passed away a few years ago, I found myself in the same position my character Jo does—on my hands and knees, cleaning out a freezer. I had joined the sad club of people who’ve lost parents, and this distinction, though dubious, made me privy to new information. Ideas about life I had suspected I now knew, and ideas I knew I double knew. I realized my relationship with my father was not, as I’d have guessed, over, but that it continued in a way that felt more intimate. Like someone whispering in your ear.
What I double knew was that there are only so many chances to spontaneously buy a ticket to Paris. So a few weeks after the funeral, I did just that. Thinking back on it, in a place I keep hidden even to myself, I hoped I’d find him there.
I spent ten days walking the Seine but he never showed.
On my last afternoon in Paris, I visited the Musée de Cluny. For the sake of those who haven’t read “Exit Zero,” I won’t name the famous mythological animal I found on the tapestries there. I sat in the room with her for over an hour, casting out my imagination. By the time I returned home, I knew I wanted to write a story that featured her, but I’d have to upend the expectation her presence would bring. Muddy her up a bit. That particular creature enjoys a reputation for being pure and docile, which wouldn’t do for what I wanted to say.
What did I want to say?
Fathers can be hard to believe in. Family can be anywhere. Grief, like New Jersey, is a strange place, but that doesn’t mean it’s without magic. Death, pain, and violence—trauma, essentially—can sometimes act as a portal we do not see as we are passing through.
I suppose I too passed through a portal after my father died, one that delivered me to Paris, and to ______. She gave me a lot of laughter and comfort during a complicated time, not to mention the first scatologically focused scene I’d ever written.
I said my father never showed in Paris. Thinking back on it now, maybe he did.
Marie-Helene Bertino was born and raised in Philadelphia. She is the author of the collection Safe as Houses, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award and named Outstanding Collection by the Story Prize; and the novel 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick. A Pushcart Prize recipient, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Center for Fiction in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
I was on a fishing trip one recent fall with my son. We were on our way to a mountain cabin to meet up with my other son and my brother. We were the only vehicle on Wyoming Route 414, driving past Lonetree, a road which every time I’m on it fills my heart with the ages. I was first there with my father sixty years ago. In October the sun had fallen away but was still trying, and the lonely world lay empty. We had the radio on and the announcer in a football game said that the team had good field position. Seriously, that was it. I thought we had good field position. To the north we could see a river wandering between the cottonwoods and haystacks in the fields. I had a feeling under my ribs and I realized I was happy. The affection for the moment took and I began writing the story when I got home the next week, wanting to stay close enough to each small event that I could feel each again in my ribs. The ending of the story was a surprise to me.
Ron Carlson was born in Logan, Utah. His most recent novel is Return to Oakpine. His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Pushcart Prize, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and others; they have been performed on National Public Radio’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine.
A few years ago I reread Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin and became interested in the way Nabokov disguises his first-person narrator as a third-person voice for most of the novel, telegraphing the true point of view only in small breaths. I also (more simply) loved the character Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, who is so vulnerable and doughty—indeed, noble—despite the tyranny of the voice telling his story and trying to make him look like a fool. One of my interests, then, in writing “Temples,” was to play with the idea of hiding a lovely person behind a less lovely speaker, and in that way playing with audience expectations of whom to be closest to, whom to trust.
Of course, as is the way with most fiction, the story didn’t exactly stick to the plan. (Most stories, after all, are bigger on the inside.) For instance, I couldn’t have guessed, at the outset, how important the church would be to these characters, or how the narrator’s voice would bleed into the first person whenever she began relinquishing control. But mostly, I was surprised by how much I ended up loving my judgmental narrator—quite as much as her aunt Marjorie, perhaps because the narrator ended up being the really fragile one in this case.
Adrienne Celt was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. She’s the author of the novel The Daughters, and her short fiction and comics have appeared in numerous publications, including Esquire, Kenyon Review, Epoch, Prairie Schooner, Bat City Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Rumpus. The recipient of residencies and awards from the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, the Willapa Bay AiR, and the Esquire and Aspen Writers’ Foundation Short Short Fiction Contest, Celt lives in Tucson, Arizona.
The idea for the story originated with the simple desire to look at the last two neighbors after an end of the world flood. Neighborliness and the forced interaction of neighbors is a thing I’ve always been intrigued by.
I wanted the neighbors to hold differing opinions as to how to live out the end of days. I love Robert Frost and especially “Mending Wall.” The neighbor in the poem likes doing what has always been done and the speaker has a bit of disdain for that. A flood that wipes away all of our man-made boundaries can be a stand-in for the loss of the fence that makes good neighbors in the poem. It puts a familiar pressure onto two people living out an unfamiliar nightmare.
But this was all in the beginning. An idea, a scenario, a voice to get started. Early ideas just give you a framework. They aren’t a story. Once I began writing, I discovered more of what I really wanted to write about and I got to a place with the writing where I was surprising myself with things. For instance, with Gary.
I love Gary. He was not a planned character, but he must have shown up when I lost steam just playing around with the scenario and the voice. Gary brings out the humanity in the narrator. And he brings out the real conflict, which isn’t between the neighbors but within the narrator. Companionship or survival, our narrator ponders. Which is more important? That quandary has no stakes without Gary. To me, Gary is the star of the show. He presses on the narrator to change, but it’s Gary who changes.
Last note of possible interest: the narrator is a man. A number of readers have gotten this wrong, but I think it’s fairly obvious. You be the judge.
Diane Cook is the author of the story collection Man V. Nature, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, received Honorable Mention for the Pen/Hemingway Award, and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. She was awarded the 2012 Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, and in Tin House, Granta, and elsewhere. She was a producer for the radio show This American Life. She lives in Oakland, California.
Began with the desire to set the Grimm brothers story, “The Juniper Tree,” on the American prairie. It’s a story about cannibalism, murder rewarded, brutality of the “good” people, punishment by millstone, and a blasé acceptance of the extraordinary, which seemed about right for such a setting. The narrator is an old Midwestern girlfriend of mine.
Robert Coover was born in 1932, in Charles City, Iowa. He attended Southern Illinois University, Indiana University, and the University of Chicago. His many awards include the William Faulkner Foundation Award for The Origin of the Brunists, REA Award for the Short Story, Lannan Foundation Fellowship, Clifton Fadiman Medal for Pricksongs & Descants, and Independent Press Storyteller of the Year, 2006. His most recent book is The Brunist Day of Wrath. He divides his time between Providence, Rhode Island, and Barcelona.
The only way I ever finish anything is if I can feel the guillotine of a deadline hanging over my neck. As for “Bonus Baby,” I promised my wife I’d finish it before the birth of our daughter, Olivia, as a gift for her. True to form, I read a just-finished draft to my wife just after her epidural kicked in following twelve hours of back labor.
“Bonus Baby” is obviously a loaded title. A somewhat anachronistic baseball reference, the phrase also denotes to me a late and grateful passage into parenthood. For Olivia, I suppose I wanted to commemorate how her parents bonded over watching the Dodgers and listening to Vin Scully. Part of our connection was a mutual affinity for a pitcher who had old-school style, obvious intelligence, and a deep talent he couldn’t quite master. The story was inspired by imagining what it might be like to be alone on that mound attempting to come to terms with oneself and the game of baseball at the same time. As I got into it, the story showed it could contain a lot more than the game itself…much like the game itself.
Joe Donnelly was born in Syracuse, New York. He is a journalist and fiction writer. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
My MFA fiction cohort happened to be all female. Right away, the six of us felt a kinship with one another. It was incredibly good fortune to be grouped with these women, all of them smart, talented, honest, and kind. We had potlucks together, and after one where we talked about our dreams, I wrote most of “They Were Awake.”
Like us, the six women in the story met up for a potluck, and like us, they shared stories in turn. (Of course, the story’s tone is darker than our lovely potluck was.) As they sit around the table, eating and describing their recent dreams, the conversation creates little cycles of dread and relief—dread that something bad is about to happen, and relief that it never manifests. What keeps the tension cycling is the women themselves. They talk eagerly, they listen earnestly, and they spur one another on. But they also make one another uncomfortable and pull back from the unsettling dreams they’re sharing, returning to affirmations and the food and wine at hand.
The best stories render something truthful about the human experience, good or bad. This instinct to resist, to gloss over terrible things, felt true to me, and it also felt honest to expose the kinds of disturbing events—nightmares—that threaten women disproportionately. The women in the story are safe for the duration of the dinner party, but as they peel off and reenter the world alone, they are susceptible to anything the world can dream up.
Rebecca Evanhoe was born in Wichita, Kansas. Her stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, Bat City Review, New World Writing, Gigantic, NOON, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from the University of Florida, and lives in Gainesville, Florida.
I’m a big believer in the “write what you’re afraid of” advice, and, for me, that’s usually an organic process. As the story evolves, my fears surface, and my job is not to shy away from them. With “Safety” that relationship was reversed: it began as a fear. I started the story just after the one-year anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when that tragedy was very much in the public eye. I’d just had a baby, and all of a sudden, my fears involved this new person and the safety of her current self, over which I had some control, and her future self, over which I have way less control. I didn’t have any connection to the victims at Sandy Hook, but I couldn’t stop thinking about them, and this story was the best way I could find to express those fears.
I also used the snippets I remember from elementary school as a way into the story, and especially into the children’s interiority. The first line came from this memory: The gym in my school had skylights and high ceilings, and all this dust floating up there in the light, and I remember being little, lying on my back during the wind-down, staring up into space, and feeling completely relaxed and safe. I wrote the first couple lines hoping to tap into that emotion and transfer it to the reader before it’s broken by the sound of the gunshot.
Lydia Fitzpatrick was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2012 to 2014, and a fiction fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Her fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, and Opium. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a Hopwood Award winner. She’s also received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
Two years before I wrote “Irises,” my mother took me to the old Fine Arts Building in downtown Chicago, where she had taken dancing lessons before beginning her career as a ballerina. A year later, I was wandering the city alone, remembering certain chapters of my own life and questioning where to go next. I came back to Tennessee and dug up an ancient draft of a story about a woman deciding whether to abort her child. Chicago was still vivid in my mind, as was this unborn child and her young mother, but someone was missing. He turned out to be Joaquin. I fell as much in love with his character as Rosalie did, and the story took on newfound complexity. I was so deeply lost in the story that the ending surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. Regret intertwined with revelation is a place many of my characters find themselves on the final page.
Elizabeth Genovise grew up in Villa Park, Illinois, and studied in the MFA program at McNeese State University. She is the author of two short-story collections—A Different Harbor and Where There Are Two or More. She lives near Knoxville, Tennessee.
The summer I turned twelve, my family moved into a big old brick house not unlike the Detweilers’, and the putting up and taking down of storm windows became a ritual even more perilous than the one described by Lionel. These windows were massive, and every spring and fall, my daredevil father would haul them up or down an impossibly high ladder, like Jack climbing the beanstalk, while I stood at the bottom, looking on in terror, “spotting” him. In time, this memory (or its mythification) rubbed up against a remnant of an earlier Lionel story—a version of what became the front end of the second act of this one (the pumpkin carving, the phone call, the flight to Chicago, the hospital burlesque)—and spawned a pattern of near misses, real and imagined, which I called “Father’s Death in Three Acts and an Epilogue.” Though that title didn’t survive the first draft, it suggested a structure that did.
Charles Haverty was born in Flushing, Queens, and grew up on Long Island and in the far west suburbs of Chicago. He is the author of the collection Excommunicados, which won the 2015 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. His stories have appeared in Agni, The Gettysburg Review, Ecotone, Colorado Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
There is a fascinating article in The New York Times about glacier mice—little moss balls that roll across Arctic ice flats, within which live tiny animals like springtails, water bears, and nematodes. The discovery captivated me. I must have shared the article with friends and family, but what I really wanted to do was seize someone off the street and place a little glacier mouse in their hands and say—“Look, look closer, isn’t this wonderful?” I wanted to keep a glacier mouse under a bell jar and tend to it like a houseplant. I wanted to put the entire polar cap under a protective bubble just so these delicate micro-ecosystems could live on.
Instead, I wrote the first letter of “The Mongerji Letters.” Almost immediately, I realized that by using an epistolary structure, I could re-create what I found most compelling about the glacier mice article in the first place—the tactile desire to hold a whole world in my hand. Letters became literal vessels of experience, the words within coming to life.
And the thing is, this is always true. When you read fiction, to make sense of words you must enact them inside your head. Even if it’s just for the briefest of moments, you have to believe what you read to understand it. The great joy of writing “The Mongerji Letters” came from pushing and playing with that idea. As it grew, it also became a way to explore the tension between protection and possession—something that impacts social relationships as much as it does the natural world.
Geetha Iyer was born in India and grew up in the United Arab Emirates. She received an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in journals including Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, The Missouri Review Online, and Mid-American Review. She’s been the recipient of the James Wright Poetry Award, the Calvino Prize, and the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, and has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Panama City, Panama.
This story, like so many of mine, came about as a collision, as it were, between different events and topics in my life. A close friend was badly injured when her bike hit a groundhog in the middle of a road. Her helmet cracked neatly down the center, as it was designed to do. Unlike the character in the story, however, she suffered no lasting damage. I’ve also been aware of, and fascinated by, the profound changes in personality, in character, in sense of self, which have been brought about by car crashes and illnesses. I have known some people affected in this manner. The lasting, haunting lesson for me has been the fragility of our selves. We are used to thinking of ourselves as vulnerable physically. But we also tend to assume that “who we are” is solid as bone. The notion that a relatively minor switch in our internal chemistry or neuron circuits can radically alter our identities is deeply and fascinatingly unsettling, at least to me.
David H. Lynn has been the editor of The Kenyon Review since 1994. He is the author of the novel Wrestling with Gabriel, the story collections Fortune Telling and Year of Fire, and The Hero’s Tale: Narrators in the Early Modern Novel, a critical study. His stories and essays have appeared in magazines and journals in America, England, India, and Australia. A professor of English at Kenyon College, he lives in Gambier, Ohio.
The rural landscape in “Slumming” was inspired by central Maine. In 1999, my mother took over an abandoned Girl Scout camp on a lake near Bangor. I try to spend time there every summer. It’s a safe space in which to look at the delusions and brainwashing I’ve experienced during the year living in the “civilized” world. The urban neurotic, such as the narrator in “Slumming,” is a great character for me to use in describing the damage done to the human psyche when it’s disconnected from nature.
Being at the camp in Maine challenges me to face myself more honestly. The place isn’t home to my archive of past selves, and that is liberating. I feel that I know myself better after a few days up there. I do get scared at night sometimes when I’m alone—the wind in the trees, the loons on the lake, the stars, the darkness. I begin to feel inconsequential, just a little human life in the midst of so much nature. I suppose that’s behind my impulse to be creative.
Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of McGlue and Eileen. Her forthcoming story collection, Homesick for Another World, will be published in early 2017. She lives in the Northeast and in California.
This story began the way all my stories begin, with a sentence or two and an image. In this case the image is of a woman standing in an open doorway looking down at a man who is sitting tipped back in a chair. They are smoking. From that image the basic elements of the story flowed easily, and it was finished almost as fast as I could type it. This is the way it usually goes for me, and is probably the reason my stories are so short. Writing a novel is just the opposite—a laborious, slow, and sometimes excruciating accretion of word upon word.
I was thirteen when I started smoking. I can vividly recall the manifold pleasures of cigarettes, moments of intense calm and satisfaction, the sense of release, leaning back and exhaling slowly, and I can also recall sucking smoke into burning lungs, scrounging ashtrays for butts that could be relit and smoked, and even, on one occasion, picking a butt up from a sidewalk in Paris, my reluctance eased by a smear of lipstick on the filter tip. Even today, with ruined lungs, I sometimes, sitting over coffee in the morning, feel a tug of the old craving, though the cigarette I crave is not the final scorching Gauloise I smoked when I was thirty-six but the Chesterfield I held in a hand I had posed with studied nonchalance on the steering wheel of a 1954 Pontiac Chieftain when I was fifteen. I suspect that my own fraught relation with cigarettes contributed to whatever power this story possesses.
Sam Savage is the author of five novels. His first, Firmin, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Originally from South Carolina, he lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
To talk about “Train to Harbin,” I have to talk about its companion, a story called “The Visitor,” which I was lucky enough to have included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. Both stories belong in a collection of interconnected stories and are literal companions in the sense that the man in “Train to Harbin” is married to the woman in “The Visitor.” Like husband and wife, who are relegated by war to the margins of each other’s lives, the two stories are written to complement each other, each furnishing a part of the world the other shares but has no access to; together, they are set up to speak to the symbiotic way in which war affects seemingly discrete groups of people living in varying proximity to it. The stories were conceived this way, as a pair, and I wrote them in succession, though revision took its own time and separated their births by a couple of years.
“The Visitor” is a compact, linear story, confined to one domestic arena and spanning just a few hours; “Train to Harbin” is a more expansive, elliptical story, inherently undomestic, and spanning several decades. “The Visitor” is basically all current action and one long scene; “Train to Harbin” is its inverse, almost all backstory and exposition, with one scene that can properly be called a scene. “The Visitor” is a kind of ghost story that takes place at home; “Train to Harbin” is the ghost, the murky context that haunts the private everyday. The two stories are worlds apart—two autonomous pieces written to be read independently—but juxtaposed, they are meant to line up like a photograph and its negative. “Train to Harbin” is the negative, rarely exposed to the light of day.
Asako Serizawa was born in Japan and spent her precollege life in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. Her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, The Antioch Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and the 2016 Pushcart Prize anthology. A recent Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a recipient of a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, she has received grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center.
Mainz, Germany! For many years, I had been trying to write this story, but got stuck every time at the moment of departure. Whenever Arundathi and her husband arrived in America, I could find no way forward. It was just too familiar for me to depict it with the strangeness Arundathi felt. Mainz was a random Internet find (I think I just Googled “physics university Europe”), but as soon as I saw pictures from that carnival, the story ran ahead, and I followed it home. “A Simple Composition” is perhaps the ugliest story I have ever written, and many scenes unnerved me as I was writing them. (“Oh no,” I said aloud, genuinely dismayed, when I realized what would happen between Arundathi and the professor.) But each turn of the story presented itself in an undeniable way, and I felt I had to be faithful to it. The oddest thing about this story was that though I felt a mild horror—sometimes physically—at some of the situations I was depicting, I also took a true pleasure in the writing of it, every part. Over and over again, I had the feeling of stepping forward into darkness, and finding that though I couldn’t see the way forward, my feet kept falling on solid ground.
Shruti Swamy’s fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Agni, Black Warrior Review, and New American Writing, and she has received residencies and fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Vassar College, and Kundiman. She received her BA from Vassar College, and her MFA from San Francisco State University. Born in California, she lives and writes in San Francisco.
Years ago a box of love letters came from FedEx, very kindly returned by their recipient, who had written to say they were coming, and I had a bad feeling about those letters and how nakedly needy the girl who wrote them was going to seem. I got as far as nicking the brown packing tape with a knife before putting the box away in a corner of the closet it ended up never leaving. Whenever I thought of it that box gave off a quiet radiation of unresolved trouble and sexual shamefulness. Sometimes I tell students that shame is a compass needle pointing to a potential story, but, in a clear case of Do as I say, not as I do, I so hated the actual feeling of shame aroused by the box that I had trouble tolerating it long enough to see whatever story it promised or obscured. Only when I gave up and tried a slantwise approach, a draft whose narrator falls in love with a writer purely on the basis of having found his work beautiful, did I get a narrator who seemed the right mix of bold and scared, of insight and self-deception. The risk was that her fool-for-love naïveté seemed to solicit a plot that would be a series of deserved disillusionments, and I wanted a more volatile progression, a kind of narration that was going to keep sabotaging itself as it went along. Then, too, I really love stories that carry the marks of having scraped into being past resistance, that sound like they cost something to tell, and I tried to get that in.
Elizabeth Tallent was born in Washington, DC. Mendocino Fire is her fourth and most recent collection of stories. She teaches in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and lives in California.
In 1962, I found myself adrift. I had just returned to New York from having dropped out of a PhD program in literature at a frosty upstate graduate school. I found a job clerking in a bookstore that paid by the hour, and I needed to work long hours and six to seven days a week to pay my rent and to live. My hopes of finding time to write or ever becoming a writer were vanishing. A year passed this way before I received official word that the social worker job I had applied for in the New York City Welfare Department was mine.
I lived in the Lower East Side—as does the character in my story, “Winter, 1965”—in a six-floor walk-up—one room, a kitchen with its own bathtub, a toilet and stand-up shower. I was happy because I worked only five days a week and was now free to write and to dream.
But many of my dreams were haunted by the stories, the hard lives and worries—which often became mine—of the sixty or more people on my welfare caseload. Every day there was some new emergency: evictions, utilities shutdowns, suicides. Sometimes in my sleep I would confuse and blend the stories of my clients with my own history of childhood impoverishment in the Bronx. In that Welfare Department period, which lasted a charged year, I never wrote about those people or my life with them: I wanted to escape from them; I wrote anything that was far away from what I was then living.
Fifty-three years later I woke up one morning, having had a dream about a former client, a blind Jamaican woman in her nineties who wanted me to read poetry to her—Longfellow, her favorite. And I began writing this story.
Frederic Tuten, Bronx born, has written about art, literature, and film in several periodicals, including Artforum, The New York Times, and Vogue; was an actor in the Alain Resnais movie L’An 01; taught with Paul Bowles in Morocco; and cowrote the cult-classic film Possession. He earned a PhD in literature, three Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Tuten is the author of five novels: The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; Tintin in the New World; Tallien: A Brief Romance; Van Gogh’s Bad Café; The Green Hour; and a book of interrelated short stories, Self Portraits: Fictions. He lives in New York City.
This story and I had chemistry from the start. I like to approach a story not with a plot in mind, but by throwing together a few elements to see what happens as a result. A drought, a sick horse, a boy. Like the character, I did not quite know the end until it happened. The epistolary-like address presented itself within the first paragraph, long before I realized it was a story about telling and not telling. It is by far the most intuitive story I have written. There are lines that I did not write, I just knew.
Notes (and his haircut) is based on a pony named Snowflake, who lived and died at a farm where I worked. I grew up with horses and sometimes I find it easier to populate my writing with believable equine characters than human ones. I have heard many comments about the connection between the name “Notes” and the theme of letters, but I must admit that I did not notice that myself until the story was already finished. I just thought it was a memorable name. His friend really was a horse named Otter; that one was too perfect to change.
Zebbie Watson is from Elverson, Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College. Her stories have appeared in Breakwater Review and elsewhere, and she received a 2016 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Athens, Georgia.