Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which these stories first appeared, sometimes in slightly altered form:
Los Angeles Review: “A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Microgravitic Reproduction”;
Bat City Review: “A Genealogical Approach to My Father’s Ass”;
Chattahoochee Review: “An Unfinished Man”;
Carolina Quarterly: “Ellie’s Brood”;
Cream City Review: “Everything You Wanted to Know About Astrophysics but Were Too Afraid to Ask”;
Cincinnati Review: “Frustrations of a Coyote”;
Hotel Amerika: “Indulgences”;
Mid-American Review: “In Search of Fortunes Not Yet Lost”;
Four Chambers: “The Catapult of Tooele”;
Red Cedar Review: “The Fertile Yellow”;
Phoebe: “The Foot”;
Fiction International: “The Good Nazi Karl Schmidt”;
Tusculum Review: “Valdosta, After the Flood” (originally as “Valdosta, Left to Ash”);
The Fourth River: “Veyo, Forgotten by the Mormons”;
Bitter Oleander: “Visitation”;
Dislocate: “What the Body Does When It Doesn’t Know What Else to Do”;
Burrow Press Review: “Your Tragedy Is Important to Us.”
It took thirteen years for this book to come together and in that time I have enjoyed a vast support system from various friends, colleagues and mentors.
It would not have been possible without the following individuals: Sam Michel, Peggy Woods, Speer Morgan, and Marly Swick—your artistic insights made these stories better. To a few teachers in particular I owe a debt of gratitude: Margaret Young, who believed in my work when I had no idea what I was doing; John Bennion, who didn’t flinch at my impulsive weirdness and taught me to follow my instincts; Chris Bachelder, who took me back to the basics and encouraged me to write the kinds of stories I wanted to write; Kate Bernheimer, whose fairy-tale workshop was nothing short of miraculous; Trudy Lewis, who taught me the art of restraint; and Karen Russell, whose enthusiasm for my work was infectious.
To my workshop peers in the Creative Writing Programs at UMass Amherst and the University of Missouri—thank you for suffering through early incarnations of these stories. The generosity of your feedback is nothing short of remarkable.
I give a special thanks to Aaron Hellem for poring over manuscripts at the Amherst Brewing Company as we subsisted on jalapeño poppers and fried pickles, believing we were our own lost generation.
Thank you to Peter Conners, Ron Martin-Dent, Daphne Morrissey, and all the good people at BOA Editions for their editorial guidance and aesthetic vision, but most of all for believing in this manuscript and giving it such a wonderful home.
To the editors of the magazines and journals where these stories first appeared—thank you for giving me a chance. To the editors who rejected these stories for one reason or another—you did me an incredible favor: there is little motivation quite like a rejection slip.
Neither would this book be possible without my family. To my somewhat puritanical extended family who might read this—my apologies when these tales invariably offend you, but to censor the imagination is a terrible thing. Thanks to my mother, who taught me the joy of escaping into books. To my father, a master of exaggeration. To my brothers, for their witty banter. To my children, whose weirdness makes me want to turn back the clock.
And above all, to my wife, Jenna, who spent innumerable hours listening to me ramble through these stories and rolled her eyes and shook her head but always believed my work mattered. You are the only one who truly understands me.