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 succe
ssful 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.
The Best American Short Stories 2015 Page 44