NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH is from Spring Valley, New York. He graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. He was the 2016–17 Olive B. O’Connor fellow in fiction at Colgate University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Guernica, Esquire, The Paris Review, Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, Printer’s Row, Gravel, and others. Friday Black is his first book.
▪ In writing “The Era” I found a new way to arrive at a story. I discovered that sometimes just a voice could be the spark. I had what would become Ben’s voice rattling in my brain for a while. It was a postapocalyptic-sad-boy chorus that was strange and funny and alive to me. An idea of a world emerged from this voice, a world that was brutal in the name of “honesty,” a world that had learned to forsake kindness as a virtue. And once these general ideas were in place, I let the voice take me where it would.
Born in Northern California in 1988, KATHLEEN ALCOTT is the author of the novels America Was Hard to Find, Infinite Home, and The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times Magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, Tin House, and ZYZZYVA; her short story “Reputation Management” was short-listed for the 2017 Sunday Times Short Story Award. A fellow of the MacDowell Colony, she has taught fiction and literature at Columbia University and Bennington College.
▪ Having lost my parents by my early twenties, I often considered how I might maintain a relationship with each—which stories of theirs might take on different meaning as my life changed, which objects left behind might alter in emotional valence. But at the center of these thoughts was a certain dynamic: myself as protean, my parents’ lives as fixed where they left them—never, as the story begins, providing any new information.
As my parents’ lives grew further away, I found that they were not the statuary I expected, and that certain truths I had took to be calcified were not; I learned, for instance, that a turquoise ring of my mother’s, something she’d worn my entire life and whose sentimental value I believed to be significant, was actually a gift from a college boyfriend she nurtured no fond feeling for—she just couldn’t, reported a mutual acquaintance of theirs to me, ever get it off. My experience of my father, after his death in my adolescence, was not dissimilar; once I was twenty, a well-meaning friend of his typed up some old correspondence of theirs, revising a narrative I’d built of his adventurous, politically driven early years as an itinerant journalist into something else: a portrait of a very troubled, potentially bipolar young man who seemed motivated mostly by the blankness of any new place.
I must have felt afraid of some other fact that lurked for me, regarding either of them, particularly in the wake of a very painful separation that left me, at the end of my twenties, without much of a plan for my future; it is always when I fear what’s ahead that I begin to doubt and revisit what, or who, is behind. I spent the year after the relationship ended in a string of houses that did not belong to me, renting sublets in increasingly remote parts of the country, and wrote “Natural Light” during my stay in the last, in a ramshackle farmhouse in Maine, writing all morning and swimming all afternoon.
WENDELL BERRY is native to the community of Port Royal, Kentucky, to which both sides of his family have belonged for more than two hundred years. Since 1965, he and Tanya Amy Berry have lived on and from a marginal farm in the Kentucky River valley. He has written fiction, poetry, and essays. For most of his life he has maintained an interest in issues of land use, and he has tried to promote the good care and good health of the land and the people.
▪ I have always known more stories, and have told more, than I could write. Now and again, because of increasing age and experience or the accumulation of work, I have more or less suddenly become capable of writing so as to be read by strangers a story that, until then, had been only spoken and heard in my own neighborhood. Behind this now-written story is a lived one that, for a while, could be passed about among people who knew the setting and, so to speak, the original cast. Writing such a story calls for the characters and the situation to be newly imagined, in order to give it the plausibility previously supplied by local tellers and hearers. This can be accomplished by moving the lived story into a fictional community already prepared, as has been done here.
JAMEL BRINKLEY is from the Bronx and Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, A Public Space, Gulf Coast, LitMag, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, and Tin House, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.
▪ If my files are accurate, the opening line of the very first draft of this story was this: “The first time I heard ‘Brooklyn Zoo’ by Ol’ Dirty Bastard, I was at a house party in Flatbush with my friend, a guy who called himself Claudius Van Clyde.” For a while, “Brooklyn Zoo” was my working title, and I wanted to draw upon the energy, aggression, and arrogance that characterize that song in order to counter the passivity, inwardness, and timidity of the narrators I often find myself using in first-person stories. But then, in order to counter all that male intensity and assuredness, the story demanded that Ben and his friend be out of their depth, in terms of their age and maturity, and in terms of their understanding of their environment, of the women they pursue, and of their problematic, exoticizing desires.
It is a cliché in fiction to have a scene in which a dog barks mysteriously in the distance, but what happens when a barking dog actually shows up? When it occurs here and the young women respond, Claudius, who has acted as the catalyst for much of the story, decides he’s had enough, but then Ben, driven by his lust and his preoccupation with his father, takes the baton. I was excited to see what would occur after that, and while I was surprised by the specifics of what ensued, it made total sense to me to discover that neither of the two guys were ever really in control of what was happening.
DEBORAH EISENBERG’s most recent collection of stories is Your Duck Is My Duck. She lives in New York City, teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and has received many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship.
▪ I’d say that none of the stories I’ve written are what you’d call characteristic of my stories, but this one is possibly the least characteristic, as well as the most recently written. It began—uncharacteristically—with the title, which popped into my head one day. I thought, Somebody should write something called “The Third Tower,” and after a time during which nobody seemed to do that, I thought, Oh, well, I guess I will.
I really didn’t know what snagged me on that title, but it was always in my mind as I worked, and eventually, after many trials, I finished the story. So then there I was, with a story set in a sort of near future or a parallel present, about a girl—a young laborer—whose imagination, curiosity, vitality, and quality of experience are being purposefully reduced.
Maybe it’s asking a lot of the reader to explore the dynamic space between those two elements, but that’s how it worked for me; the character and her plight arose from the title. The title obviously implies a relationship between an image of two towers—almost inevitably in this era the image of the two annihilated World Trade Center Towers—and a third tower. That third tower might suggest, for example, the Freedom Tower, a triumphalist tourist magnet erected ostensibly as a monument to those murdered on September 11, 2001, or the first of horrifyingly proliferating skyscrapers (this tower, that tower) signifying, above all, money, or just an abstract tower representing surveillance or domination.
So it turned out that what had interested me about that phrase, the third tower, were matters concerning the systemic opportunism of power and money: catastrophe as a rationale for increasing economic inequities, as a rationale for invasions and resource appropriations and wars and oppression that benefit only the powerful; catastrophe utilized as an instrument to make a population compliant or inadvertently complicit—incapable of significant dissent or incapable even of comprehending what is happening to it. Naturally, plenty of writers have investigated these processes in different ways, but unfortunately, there’s always room for more investigation.
JULIA ELLIOTT’s writing has appeared in Tin House, The Georgia Review, Conjunctions, the New York Times, and other publications. She has won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses and a previous edition of Best American Short Stories. Her debut story collection, The Wilds, chosen by Kirkus, BuzzFeed, Book Riot, and Electric Literature as one of the Best Books of 2014, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her first novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, arrived in 2015.
▪ In a bloated early draft of my novel, The New and Improved Romie Futch, I got sidetracked by a digression about Romie’s first erotic experience, a blissful romp with a rural third cousin during which the two prepubescent kids smear molten tar all over each other, a transcendent moment followed by a brutal reckoning. In the original flashback, Romie’s grandmother catches them and cleans them up with gasoline and a hard-bristled brush, nearly flaying them, leaving them humiliated in sodden transparent clothes. Recalling badass girl cousins from my own youth, so-called tomboys who could hold their own among hellion boys, the kind of girls who could drive go-carts one-handed while taking cool puffs from stolen cigarette butts, I realized that Butter’s perspective on this incident would be far more interesting than Romie’s. When I took the cutting from my novel and switched the point of view, my story “Hellion” bloomed from the corpse of that killed darling.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES is the author of three novels: The Virgin Suicides, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which appeared in 2018; Middlesex, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize; and The Marriage Plot, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named as the best novel of 2011 by independent booksellers in the United States. Fresh Complaint, a collection of short stories, appeared in 2017. Eugenides is the Lewis and Loretta Glucksman Professor in American Letters at New York University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
▪ According to a file on my computer, the first impulse of the story that became “Bronze” was written on July 23, 2013. That was nine months after my novel The Marriage Plot had come out, at a time when I was working on a book of short stories. Clearly, I had intended for “Bronze” to be part of that collection.
It didn’t work out that way. The working title of that fragment was called “Boy on Train.” I knew that it involved an encounter between a college freshman and a professional actor who are forced to sit together on a crowded Amtrak train, during a trip from New York to Providence, in 1978. I knew that the point of view should shift back and forth between these two characters and that their meeting should be dramatized moment by moment. The idea was to give the story a feeling of immediacy, as if its events were happening in real time.
I made decent progress at first. The language of the story, highly inflected by the characters’ personalities, felt freeing, allowing me to reproduce the way the world, or at least my world, had sounded back in ’78. I worked on the story off and on. Sometimes I put it away for a few months to write another story, or to play around with an idea for a novel. There was a moment, early in 2017, when I felt optimistic enough about finishing the story that I told my publisher that it would be included in my forthcoming collection. In fact, a German journalist recently reminded me that an early notice for what later became Fresh Complaint had claimed that the collection’s title would be “Bronze” and that it would contain a story about a college freshman on a train. He asked me what had happened.
I couldn’t finish “Bronze,” was what. I kept getting hung up by the opening. So much information had to be established that it was difficult to get it all in while keeping the story moving. Whenever I tried to simplify things by removing some aspect of the story, the story lost some of its verve and eventual payoff. So, I would put that stuff back in and quickly get tangled up again. The first page of “Bronze” still seems to me its weakest part; after that, the story gets rolling. But it’s possible that I can’t read the opening without remembering how much trouble it caused me.
It was only after Fresh Complaint had gone off to the printers that I marshaled the courage to face down “Bronze” yet again, released from any expectation that it would be included in the collection. During that final showdown, I managed to get the opening to work, and to polish the rest.
All this chaos turned out for the best, however. The New Yorker published “Bronze” in early 2018. In the months afterward, I began writing other stories featuring Eugene, its young hero. And so, rather than being orphaned from my previous collection, “Bronze” has begun to grow into a book of its own, the difficulty I had with the story’s beginning now the beginning of something bigger.
ELLA MARTINSEN GORHAM lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children. Her writing has appeared in ZYZZYVA and New England Review. She is at work on a collection of stories, and also a novel.
▪ I saw that my children and their friends documented much of their lives on the screens of phones and laptops. I began to think of them as inhabiting two worlds: the touchable, physical world and the digital world. They slipped back and forth between them. This notion gave rise to the story “Protozoa.”
I was interested in a girl of thirteen navigating the two worlds. I wanted to capture the moment she decides to shed her childhood self and become more provocative. The girl, Noa, transforms herself by building a new, darker online profile. She grabs the attention of an older girl, Aurora Waters, and the two fall into an intense friendship though they never meet in person. I had the idea that the physical distance between them could enable a kind of intimacy.
Noa and Aurora develop a ritual of sharing tears. I was inspired by accounts of the Japanese practice rui-katsu, in which groups of people convene to cry together as a therapeutic release. I wanted to know what that would look like among girls in search of an outlet for their emotions. As it turns out, the girls’ motives for sharing tears in the story are mixed. The true feelings, sadness and anger, are shaded with a sense of intrigue in the act of crying for an audience.
Noa also pushes herself to hook up with a boy named Paddy, who then dubs her “Protozoa” in an online roast. While both Aurora and Paddy play a part in Noa’s reinvention, I didn’t know in early drafts whose influence was the more powerful. As I revised the story, it became clear that Noa’s stronger drive was to impress Aurora. This led to the final scene, in which Noa posts a video of herself weeping and waits for a reaction.
NICOLE KRAUSS has been hailed by the New York Times as “one of America’s most important novelists.” She is the author of the international bestsellers Forest Dark, Great House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize, and The History of Love, which won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. In 2007 she was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and in 2010 she was chosen by The New Yorker for their “Twenty Under Forty” list. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages.
▪ Like Romi in the story, I first saw Taste of Cherry in London in 1998, the year it was released. I was living in student housing near Russell Square, and the film was playing nearby at the Renoir, whose marquee advertising foreign films was dwarfed by the giant concrete Brutalist building in whose underground the cinema was housed. I went alone, which was the way I usually saw films at that time. I was already a fan of Abbas Kiarostami’s films, but when Ershadi’s face appeared on the screen “it did something to me,” as the narrator of the story says, and what it did to me, and continued doing to me for the next twenty years, is what I tried to work out in this story. I don’t have a good memory for most films: what I remember is usually atmospheric rather than details of plots or dialogue. But Ershadi’s face, and scenes from Taste of Cherry, continued to return to me, often without having been evoked by any obvious reminder. The memory of Ershadi’s face as Mr. Badii, and those dusty hills outside Tehran, seemed to have become involuntary, lodged at some mysterious juncture of synapses in my brain that was sometimes tripped, and over time he became a kind of landmark in my thoughts, one that only gained feeling the more I passed through it, or it through me.
Six years later I traveled to Japan for the first time and visited the temples of Kyoto. Did I really think that I saw Ershadi in the Zen garden of Nanzen-ji? I remember believing that I had seen him. But now I can’t say for sure if what I am remembering is a scene I invented for this story, or something that actually happened to me. I really can’t.
I moment after I wrote the last sentence I stood up to stretch my legs, wandered over to my bookshelf, and, scanning the titles of the books I’ve tried in the last months to cull, I pulled down Censoring an Iranian Love Story, by Shahriar Mandanipour. When I flipped through the pages, I found a ticket used as a bookmark: the ticket to the Zen garden of Nanzen-ji! There are the stones like leaping tigers pictured on the front of the ticket, the very place I had just been thinking about, trying to figure out whether the scene I described that took place there was imagined or recalled. I have no idea what to make of this coincidence, beyond that things that can’t be explained rationally often fall to writers to investigate, because most respectable professions don’t want to touch them. But all the same, they seem to promise access to regions of the mind, and being, and the world that are otherwise closed off to us.
Whether I really thought I saw Ershadi in the temple in Kyoto, or whether a scene I wrote later became conflated with actual memory over the thirteen years it took me to finally finish the story, I don’t know. During those years, the story absorbed many new experiences: my time watching the Israeli dance company Batsheva rehearse, and getting to know many of its dancers; my friendship with an extraordinary Israeli actress; the arrival of my children.
More coincidences: A few days after the story was published in The New Yorker, I received an email from the son of Abbas Kiarostami, who lives in San Francisco. “Your story has touched so many of my friends,” Ahmad Kiarostami wrote. “I received the link from at least 20 people from all over the globe, including Iran . . . It was as if I was watching a touching love story film.” He offered to introduce me to Homayoun Ershadi the next time the actor was in America. I wrote back and asked whether he thought Ershadi had read the story. He replied almost immediately:
I actually talked to Homayoun’s sister, Toufan (who also helped my father for many years and was a close friend of him), and asked what Homayoun thought about the article. She said he was very emotional after reading it. She said the timing couldn’t have been better. Apparently he is down these days, and your story very much helped him to feel better. She said that since it came out, he’s been getting cheerful calls and texts every single day.” At the end of the email, Kiarostami had attached a screenshot showing Ershadi’s Facebook page, where he’d shared a link to the story.
URSULA K. LE GUIN (1929–2018) was a celebrated and beloved author of twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve children’s books, six volumes of poetry, and four of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebulas, seven Hugos, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.
MANUEL MUñOZ is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, and two short story collections, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been recognized with a Whiting Award and three O. Henry Awards. His most recent work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train, The Southwest Review, and Freeman’s. He has been on the faculty of the University of Arizona’s creative writing program since 2008.
▪ My stories are taking longer to write these days. I don’t know exactly why, but the long pauses keep steering me back to story basics. I give myself more room to think about what a story’s center might be and I have let go of the need to resolve every conflict that arises. I’m learning to listen to the stories as they want to tell themselves: I know that sounds odd, but it comes from years of listening to my mother’s stories and only now realizing that I haven’t been fully understanding them. Most of my recent fiction has come from delving again into the stories she has told me, particularly of the deportation years, as I call them, when my father was repeatedly sent back to Mexico before the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act changed our lives and many of those in our Central Valley town of Dinuba, California. I used to think that my parents’ reunification was the only story but, as the first line proved to me, sometimes other pressures took over. When that line came to me, it snapped me out of my recurrent doubt that the “domestic” or the “realist” story can do much in a fraught and complicated world. It reminded me that the infinite ways in which we struggle to keep or make family is more than story enough.
“Anyone Can Do It” appeared in an issue titled “Restoration: Of and About the Environment,” and I want to thank Laura Cogan, Oscar Villalon, and everyone at ZYZZYVA for thinking so generously and broadly about not only the natural world, but the lives of the people who work within it on a daily basis.
SIGRID NUNEZ’s most recent novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. She has published six other novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian American literature. Nunez has been the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. She is writer in residence at Boston University.
▪ The first story I ever published was in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and though I did not go on to write fiction in that genre and am not even a big reader of such fiction, I have often found myself wanting to write about a crime. For “The Plan,” I wanted to write about a certain type of criminal—violent, murderous, misogynistic—and I wanted to write from his point of view. The fierce anger and resentment that appear to consume so many men today was likely among the influences on my desire to explore this killer’s vision of society and his place in it. Also, I have vivid memories of what New York City was like during the seventies, how crime-ridden and seedy and dangerous it was—a very noir place, it seemed to me—and I saw this as the ideal setting for my crime story.
MARIA REVA was born in Ukraine and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Granta, The Journey Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories 2017, and elsewhere. Her musical collaborations include an opera libretto for Erato Ensemble, texts for Vancouver International Song Institute’s Art Song Lab, and a script for City Opera Vancouver. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. “Letter of Apology” is part of a linked story collection, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, forthcoming in spring 2020.
▪ A few years ago I read that the KGB had to stop arresting citizens for telling political jokes in the 1960s, due to the Khrushchev Thaw, but also because it was impossible to lock up the entire Soviet Union. Instead, officers were to engage offenders in a (re)educational conversation and have them submit a letter of apology.
Shortly after I learned this, my father told me that the KGB tried to recruit him to the Honor Guard in the 1980s. He was a model student and athlete, but the last thing he wanted was to guard Lenin’s tomb. (In the end he slipped from the KGB’s clutches—but that’s another story.)
These two sources inspired “Letter of Apology.” I’d already written a story from the perspective of a character who suspects she is being trailed by the KGB, but not one from the perspective of a KGB agent doing the trailing. I wanted to explore the loss of power a secret service agent must have felt, having to chase after citizens for a chat and letter. Finally, I wanted to examine the mechanisms of self-delusion: how does a person escape a terrible truth?
KAREN RUSSELL is the author of the novel Swamplandia! and three story collections, including the recently published Orange World and Other Stories. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and son. She currently holds the Endowed Chair of Texas State University’s MFA program, where she teaches as a visiting professor.
▪ My husband and I went to Korčula on our honeymoon, on a tiny ferry that docked at night during a tremendous storm. It seemed as if we were the only living people in the walled medieval city. “Look,” my husband reassured me as we racewalked over the cobblestones, “I see some people right over there.” Lightning illuminated three faceless nuns floating down a gothic staircase. Later we’d laugh about this B-horror-movie tableau, but it wasn’t the nuns who frightened me that night. Something was pursuing us, I felt quietly certain. As we wandered down the silent streets, I had to consciously still my muscles to avoid breaking into a run.
In our hotel, I learned about the vukodlak.
Sometimes translated as “vampire” and other times as “werewolf,” a vukodlak is a body that exhumes itself and wanders the woods after its death. According to Croatian folk belief, the dead could be protected from this fate by severing their hamstrings before burial. As recently as 1770, Dalmatian villagers requested that this “operation” be performed on a loved one’s cadaver. The idea of a posthumous surgeon who operates underground came to me shortly after reading this detail in our guidebook.
I wrote the original draft of “Black Corfu” in a feverish season of hope and fear, while I was pregnant with my son and considering the unlevel landscapes that children inherit from a new vantage point. I remember working on it in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, and I’m sure this story set in a fictional 1620 Korčula was my way of grappling with the rampant injustice in our country. How many people today feel trapped in their orbits, unable to ladder out of poverty, despair? Condemned to work in the shadows while they watch others enjoy health, wealth, safety? The vukodlak seemed like the right vessel for a story about a father’s “zombie” hopes—those undead dreams of freedom that stalk a world where they are as yet unfulfilled. In her incredible work on horror, history, and haunting, Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon describes an agony that I think applies both to this imaginary Korčulan and to so many real people today: “the wear and tear of long years of struggling to survive . . . the deep pain of always having to compete in a contest you did not have any part in designing for what most matters and merits.” It’s the involution of hope that turns the doctor into a monster. You could say “Black Corfu” is a horror story about mobility, in a sense—Blessed are the living, as this subterranean doctor says, who can move.
SAïD SAYRAFIEZADEH is the author of the story collection Brief Encounters with the Enemy, a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the critically acclaimed memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free, selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Dwight Garner of the New York Times. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and New American Stories, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award for nonfiction, and a fiction fellowship from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His play, Autobiography of a Terrorist, was staged last year by Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco. He currently serves on the board of directors of the New York Foundation for the Arts, and teaches in the creative writing programs at Hunter College, Columbia University, and NYU, where he received an Outstanding Teaching Award.
▪ This piece began as nonfiction, which is to say, as the truth. I had originally intended to title it “How Cigarettes Saved My Life,” because if I had not become addicted to smoking cigarettes at the age of nineteen, I would not have been self-aware enough to realize that, two years later, I was following a similar trajectory with crack cocaine. This guiding principle comprised the final four pages of the story, and the final four pages of the story were eventually, with great reluctance and remorse, completely cut. Many other facts were cut as well, and many others were bent and reshaped in the interests of make-believe. Even so, I continued to try to cleave as closely as I could to reality, perhaps as a way to make direct use of what I’d experienced, but also because I’ve always believed that the truth is generally more compelling than invention.
For instance, a few years ago I was riding the public bus through my hometown of Pittsburgh, where I’d gone back to visit for the weekend. At some point in the trip, an elderly black man got on and took the seat directly in front of me. He was probably about seventy years old, give or take, toothless, clearly poor, dressed in baggy, monochrome clothes. And yet, as the bus ride continued, something semiconscious began to take shape in my mind, something distressing but insistent, until I finally realized that this seventy-year-old man was not seventy years old, nor was he, in fact, a stranger to me, but rather a friend of mine: when we were in our early twenties we had worked at a restaurant together, played pickup basketball together, and, yes, smoked crack cocaine together. He’d been tall and handsome back then. He’d been a standout former high school basketball player, and a so-so former college player. I don’t think he’d ever gotten his degree, which was one reason why he was living in the projects and working at a restaurant as a busboy with zero prospects for anything more. I remember that we’d spent one summer afternoon walking around Pittsburgh, off from work, nothing to do, too hot to play basketball, and both of us trying our best to avoid broaching crack. He would sometimes tell me how he’d stare in the mirror and speak to himself in the third person, almost as a mantra, with optimism and conviction. “This isn’t you,” he’d say. Meaning, this life of smoking crack wasn’t at essence who he was, and that he could, through sheer will, surmount it.
Months later, after I’d gone and gotten professional help, and after I’d stopped associating with anyone who had had anything to do with crack, he called me one night. It was Saturday, around ten o’clock, and he needed money . . . for his brother. His brother had just gotten home from the military and he was eligible for health insurance, but he had to pay the premium now, right now—Saturday night at ten o’clock—and if he didn’t pay it now, he’d never be able to have health insurance. Could I lend his brother forty dollars? No, I was sorry, but I could not. And that was the last I spoke to him until that bus ride in Pittsburgh, twenty-five years later, where I’d tapped him on the shoulder and we’d stood and hugged each other, and I’d tried to pretend that there was nothing remotely unsettling about his appearance. He told me he worked construction now, which I wasn’t sure I believed, and I told him I lived in New York City. He wanted to know if I’d been there for 9/11. 9/11 had been fifteen years earlier. That 9/11 was his immediate association with New York City seemed to me to be a sure indication of the amount of trauma he’d been dealing with, then and now. I was very aware of that mantra he’d uttered years earlier, “This is not you,” and of its brutal, unsparing conclusion.
All of this is why I wrote the story. None of it made it in.
ALEXIS SCHAITKIN’s debut novel, Saint X, is forthcoming in February 2020; it will be translated into French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, and Hungarian. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ecotone, Southwest Review, and the Southern Review, among other venues, and her fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband, the historian Mason B. Williams, and their son.
▪ Jen’s job writing descriptions of houses for a realtor is very similar to a job I held for a few years in graduate school. To be honest, it was a job whose potential as material I was aware of from the very beginning. Architecture is such a classic metaphor for story. And this job—stepping into someone else’s home and observing, tiptoeing in the dark through a house where people are living their inimitable lives—was so like the writer’s task.
But for years I found the work impenetrable to being written about. I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, and like Jen in the story, I was mostly writing about houses in the city’s many suburban developments. There was Avinity Estates, Redfields, Riverwood, Chesterfield Landing, Dunlora Park—all of these names that are simultaneously hyperevocative and hollow, sometimes even nonsensical. In a single spring, I wrote about six townhouses of the same model in one development—they were identical, but I needed to make each one sound unique. So the reality of the work was just pretty . . . tedious.
Then, one day, my boss gave me an address way out of town. The house was completely dazzling, and it had an observatory, just like the house in the story. After years of visiting nothing but suburban sprawl, it was surreal to step into this incredible house out in the middle of nowhere. That was the very obvious inspiration for the story.
But as the story came together, it was all of the other houses I’d visited that fueled its essential questions: what makes something authentic versus imitative or ersatz, and does this distinction even matter, and if so, how and why—in architecture, in writing, in life? One of my biggest anxieties as a writer is always “Is this good, or does it just sound good?” Laying that bare, exposing it through Jen’s voice, was scary, but also exciting.
JIM SHEPARD has written seven novels, including The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for excellence in Jewish literature, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the PEN/New England Award for fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner, and most recently The World to Come. He’s also won the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Williams College.
▪ I’ve always been interested in the Civil War—some of my earliest memories, in fact, may involve flipping fascinatedly through my older brother’s Civil War cards, a staggeringly gory 1962 Topps series that uniformly horrified parents—but I’ve resisted for all these years writing about it because it’s often seemed to me that there’s something unpleasantly precious about the way the subject is often treated. So I was just doing what I usually do—reading bizarrely arcane nonfiction, in this case men’s and women’s Civil War letters—when I was struck by an aspect of them that seemed shockingly relevant to the unhappy position in which we find ourselves today. Even in the very last days of the war, after all of that suffering and all of those losses, letter after letter articulated its conviction that come what may, the South and the North would never reconcile their positions when it came to race, and that the abyss that had opened up in American civic life was never going to close. One Southern woman’s bitter remark gave me such a jolt that it kick-started my entire story. She wrote “The breach between us is so wide that by the war’s end the South can only be all Yankees or no Yankees at all.”
The intensity of the sense that so many Northerners and Southerners shared that nothing had been solved, and that this problem in all likelihood never would be solved, was a little stunning to me. At one point in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Boss Jim Gettys, the protagonist’s nemesis, tells him, “If it was anybody else, I’d say what was going to happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you’re going to need more than one lesson. And you’re going to get more than one lesson.” How had we managed as a country to go through five years of agony with more than three-quarters of a million casualties while still ending up having learned so little? That kind of maddeningly self-destructive mulishness has always attracted me as a subject. It’s also starting to seem, dispiritingly, like one of our central characteristics as a country. There followed, then, one of my usual bathysphere descents into more focused arcane reading, after which I found myself doing what I could to imagine myself inside that recalcitrant Southerner’s position.
MONA SIMPSON has published six novels and still wants to be a writer.
▪ In my twenties, I had two friends who studied trauma: a woman whose research centered on victims, and her fiancé, who put up flyers around campus to attract rapists, without using the word rape. Like many social science studies, it claimed to be about something else, perhaps male sexuality. His questionnaire used the legal definition of rape but never used the word; I remember the phrase “up to and including the use of force.” Occasionally, at university events, a student play, for example, they would see a student they both knew; a favorite from one of the woman’s classes turned out to be one of her fiancé’s rapists. Once married, the newly minted PhDs set up practices. At one point the husband led a group of men on Rikers Island, all of whom except one had killed their mothers. The other had murdered his grandmother with an antique chair. All were victims of sexual abuse.
Until then, I’d reflexively assumed the logic of the final two lines of Auden’s stanza: Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.
But damage, it turns out, is not always reciprocated. My friends the young therapists told me about the vast number of people, a majority, they believed, who spent their lives containing the trauma they’d endured, working not to pass it on.
My interest in the idea of this containment of destructive desire started there, with this work to which my friends have now devoted their lives.
I read research, followed online communities.
Of course, much of what I learned didn’t make it into the story.
JENN ALANDY TRAHAN was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a BA in English and went on to earn her MA in English and MFA in fiction from McNeese State University. It would be cool to be one of those fancy authors and write that she, her husband, her daughter, and two dogs currently divide their time between Los Altos, California, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, but that would not be true. Jenn is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where she was a 2016–18 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction.
▪ Somewhere I read that Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, kept his headphones in to listen to music until the last possible moment before getting into the pool and did this throughout his entire career. There’s that great meme of him in the midst of this prerace ritual at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, getting in the zone. Now, I’m no Michael Phelps, but instead of listening to Future’s “Stick Talk,” I had been rereading The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris to get pumped before a graduate workshop deadline. At the time, I was reflecting on how I killed the majority of my twenties making self-destructive decisions, befriending people who didn’t really care about what happened to me, and trying to impress people who would never see or value the real me. I had recently separated from my first husband and also felt ashamed for being en route to divorce, I felt ashamed for chasing my impractical dreams in graduate school, the list goes on and on. I was tired of feeling ashamed. I wanted to conjure what I had lost over the years: a sense of pride about who I am and where I come from. Out came some notes about Vallejo and a group of young women during a specific time where they felt the strongest and proudest, mainly because they were figuring out how to endure life together and play for the same team. I was still wallowing in self-doubt, however, and my classmate and homie, Sean Quinn, encouraged me to stop beating myself up in front of my laptop and to get out of the house. We ended up at a downtown Lake Charles bar, the now-defunct Dharma. This is where I met Glenn Trahan. Glenn, a Marine, had a swagger about him. His rough-around-the-edges yet good-natured vibe instantly reminded me of the Vallejo boys I grew up with even though Glenn grew up in Cameron, Louisiana. I also got the sense that Glenn wasn’t interested in being anyone else but—unapologetically—himself. Suddenly I had the rest of the words and a story for that workshop deadline; Brent Zalesky materialized as the missing piece. That first draft of this story, originally titled “Take Us Back to Vinyl,” wanted to explore the transportive quality of music and had a thread that constantly pitted the husbands of these women against their memories of Brent Zalesky. I would have loved to have had references to Tupac, The Conscious Daughters, Too $hort, Luniz, Mac Dre, Green Day, and the Smashing Pumpkins in it too, but it became clear that it wasn’t so much about the music of my adolescence, husbands who were not Brent Zalesky, or the rediscovery of vinyl as it was about the indomitable spirit of these young women and the spirit of Brent Zalesky. To echo Violet Lucca on the Harper’s podcast discussing “They Told Us Not to Say This,” Brent Zalesky isn’t so much the object of desire as the object that the “we” of the story strives to be.
The story is very much a valentine to Vallejo, a valentine to the people I grew up with at St. Basil School, and a valentine to my best friends who have stuck by my side through the years, no matter what (I’m looking at you, Marc Martello and James Cho). You could say it’s also a valentine to Brent Zaleskys everywhere—people who inspire you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do, people who show up to watch you play and convince you of your strength and value when others want to insist that you are weak or that you don’t belong. In this way you could say that Adrian Kneubuhl at Harper’s is a Brent Zalesky, and I’m incredibly grateful to him for teaching me how to not only grow as a writer, but as a person. Thank you, Adrian, for encouraging me to listen to my story and my heart.
You could also say this story is a valentine to my muse and my rock, Glenn Trahan, and to my role models—the uplifting professors I’ve been incredibly lucky to learn from at Irvine (Alex Espinoza, Michelle Latiolais, and Lisa Alvarez), McNeese (Chris Lowe, Amy Fleury, Dr. Rita Costello, and Dr. Bärbel Czennia), and Stanford (Dr. Adam Johnson, Elizabeth Tallent, and Chang-rae Lee). I try to emulate all of them in my own classroom and strive to be a Brent Zalesky on the bleachers for my students—and for my own daughter, Teagan, though I’m fully aware that just by virtue of being her mom, alas, she will never think that I’m cool.
WEIKE WANG is the author of the novel Chemistry, and her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award, a Whiting Award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 prize. She currently lives in New York City.
▪ Stories come to me in waves. I will have an idea, usually a setup, and then in the months after, build out and then in (characters, conflict, place). But all of this is still in my head. For “Omakase,” my husband and I had just gone out for sushi. The chef there was not the chef in this story. The “real” chef was actually perfectly sweet and normal. We made small talk. He told us about the type of fish we were eating and the kind of tools he used. We asked questions and had a good time. Yet what was odd about the meal was that for the entire night my husband and I were the only customers. I just found that setup interesting and rich. What could happen if a couple came here and the chef was slightly off—jilted, perhaps—and overshared as people do when no one is around? How intimate could a conversation get? How much do we really know about each other? And what kind of history goes into an interaction that seems fine and easy on the surface? I thought about the story for over half a year. When I sat down to write it, it was done in a week. Then edits, another week. But the core did not change. Nor did the setup.