by Roxane Gay
EMMA CLINE is the author of The Girls, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, and an LA Times Book Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and the Paris Review. In 2014 Cline won the Plimpton Prize from the Paris Review, and in 2017 she was named by Granta as one of the Best Young American Novelists of her generation.
■ I wanted to think about “cost” in this story, both in terms of the actual exchange of goods for a set price, and in terms of the cost of our experiences, what they exact from us. Alice thinks she understands how the world works, but she consistently mistakes surface information—how things look, their external value—for reality. Her life is a kind of recurring anecdote, her painful experiences just fodder for stories. As long as she squints a certain way, keeps certain information from herself, nothing can really hurt or affect her. I didn’t want to moralize about her choices—the danger doesn’t come from what Alice is actually doing, but from her inability to fully inhabit her own life. I wanted the reader to think about what living this way might cost, what the price might eventually be, even if Alice can’t.
ALICIA ELLIOTT is a Tuscarora writer living in Brantford, Ontario, with her husband and child. Her writing has been published by The Malahat Review, New Quarterly, The Walrus, Globe and Mail, VICE, and many others. Her essay “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won Gold at the National Magazine Awards and was published in Best Canadian Essays 2017. Most recently, she was the 2017–18 Geoffrey and Margaret Andrew Fellow at UBC. Elliott is currently Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Fiddlehead, Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths, and a consulting editor at New Quarterly. Her first book of essays is forthcoming from Doubleday Canada in spring 2019.
■ The first line came to me while I was sitting in a coffee shop in a city I didn’t know. “They found him while laying the groundwork for a fast food restaurant.” I wasn’t sure what I was writing about at first, but the idea of consumption loomed large in my mind. I initially tried to write the story about a white family, but nothing was gelling. It always felt wrong, unfinished.
After visiting the Mohawk Institute, otherwise known as the Mush Hole, the residential school closest to my rez, I realized where Henry had gone, and why he hadn’t come back. I realized why I was continually circling back around to the idea of consumption, and why it was so painful that a fast food restaurant was being built on those lands. Canada has fed so many of my people to the monster of colonialism. They’ve stripped away our lands, eroded our rights, stolen our children, then criminalized them, then imprisoned them—all for the purpose of pushing forward white, Western capitalism. A fast food restaurant is the perfect symbol for this sort of capitalistic, colonial consumption.
As soon as I realized Beth and her family were Mohawk, it was like the story opened up. Everything came fast. Everything made sense. What didn’t make sense—what was painful to ask myself—was why I was writing all my characters as white before this. It’s important to recognize the ways that whiteness works its way into our imaginations as Indigenous writers, the way it forces us to diminish our own people, our own stories, and elevate either whiteness itself, or a version of Indigeneity that pleases white audiences. This story helped me realize that my writing didn’t have to do either of those things. My writing could center Indigenous people, voices, and experiences instead.
I’m beyond grateful that this messy, complicated, and (I think) ultimately hopeful story was chosen to be included in this collection. It gives me faith that the old standards of what’s been traditionally considered literary and acceptable are changing. It tells me that Indigenous stories, which we as Indigenous people have always cherished and revered, are finally being cherished and revered by non-Indigenous readers, as well. What a gift.
DANIELLE EVANS is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award, the Paterson Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including the Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, New Stories from the South, and The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, and 2017. She teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.
■ I had sketched out what I thought would be a campus novel someday, where one inciting event triggered a progression of responses, and multiple narrators would tell the story. A few years later, I realized I was most interested in only one of the narrators. Having written a lot about the experience of racism, I wanted to find a different way to inhabit that narrative. I think a lot about the James Baldwin line “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” I wanted to write a story that invited not just empathy but implication, and explored the relationship between the two. I wanted to write about what it is to live always in the present and avoid a sense of history and consequence, which was about race and politics, but also, I realized once I started writing, about the messy spiraling of grief and denial. I was drafting the story during a time when I was spending a lot of time in hospitals, sharing a kind of forced intimacy and vulnerability with some people I realized wouldn’t like me or be likable in other contexts. That grief and intimacy let me get closer to Claire, let me care about her, without forgetting that as much as the story is about her real human grief, it’s also about what the desire to generously and forever forgive some people costs others. A few times during the years I was writing and revising this story, I put it away for a while because I thought the national conversation around Confederate imagery might have changed enough that I’d have to factor it into the story. The story got finished faster than the changing did.
CAROLYN FERRELL’s story collection Don’t Erase Me (1997) was awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award of the Los Angeles Times, the John C. Zachiris Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Literary Review, Ploughshares, and other places; her story “Proper Library” was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ferrell teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with her husband and children.
■ I’d long tried to figure out how to approach the individual pieces of “A History of China” while also thinking about the larger story. Ultimately, I was guided by a few short stories that have helped me consider form and content in new ways: Steven Millhauser’s brilliant “Phantoms” was one such guide, as was Edward P. Jones’s incredible “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” and Alice Munro’s harshly poignant “Wild Swans.” Robin Hemley’s “Sympathy for the Devil: How to Deal with Difficult Characters,” an essay I’ve taught for years, was another beacon.
“A History of China” has its earliest roots in an experience I had with a now-defunct German porcelain company, my first job out of college. I was fascinated by the role a five-piece place setting could play in a world that cherished patterns and platters, soup tureens and replacement soup tureens—a world about which I knew nothing. In fact, I was fired a few months in, my supervisor explaining that I didn’t have what it took to make it in that world. Years later I went and used those dishes to my advantage.
ANN GLAVIANO is a writer, dancer, DJ, and born-and-raised New Orleanian. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Ninth Letter, Prairie Schooner, Fairy Tale Review, the Atlas Review, Slate, and the anthology Please Forward: How Blogging Reconnected New Orleans After Katrina (University of New Orleans Press), among other publications. Her novella, Dickbeer, was published by Amazon’s Day One. Glaviano is an alumna of Louisiana State University and the MFA program at Ohio State.
■ I attended sleepaway summer camp of the traditional outdoors variety from the ages of eight to ten, followed by nerd camp (shoutout to the ADVANCE Program for Young Scholars!) every summer till I was sixteen. Camp changed my l
ife utterly and for the better—in fact, nerd camp was where I took my first creative writing course—so I have a real soft spot for camp stories, plus a wealth of material to draw from.
I came across a writing prompt years ago, and I wish I could credit the source but I can no longer find it, that suggested writing a story about a camp organized around a theme we don’t usually have camps for—such as wife camp. When it was time to start a new story, I pulled out this camp prompt, and I considered other weird camp concepts, and finally I realized that my favorite thing about the prompt was the idea of wife camp. What would one do at a wife camp?
It turns out wife camps exist, usually in a religious context, and this took me down a deep rabbit hole of research on the ways we teach girls, across different cultures, what will be expected of them as women. I looked at initiation rituals, both formal and informal, and superstitions regarding menstruation. I also thought about how baffled kids often are when they first encounter adult behaviors that are upheld as norms but are, from an outsider perspective, bizarre and absurd; I wrote from that place of absurdity. I had a great deal of fun.
I have hated epistolary stories my whole life, starting with Dear Mr. Henshaw (no shade toward Beverly Cleary), but Donald Barthelme changed my mind; the structure of this story was inspired by “Me and Miss Mandible.”
JACOB GUAJARDO is a graduate of MFA@FLA at the University of Florida. His fiction has appeared in Passages North, Hobart, Necessary Fiction, The Mondegreen, and elsewhere. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, but was born and raised in St. Louis, Michigan.
■ This story took two years and eleven drafts to write. It took about the same amount of time to get it published. I grew up in St. Louis, Michigan, the geographic center of the state. My family lived two hours from all of the beaches on the Great Lakes. When we did get to go to the beach (my parents both worked full-time jobs) it was a treat. When we were at the beach, it was like we were a different family. My favorite beaches are in Grand Haven, on the west side of the state, where this story takes place. I loved imagining what it would be like to grow up there. Would a boy like me, a queer, light-skinned halfie, survive? What if he fell in love? What if he fell in love with someone he shouldn’t? Young, queer people of color become adept at hiding, but it’s hard to hide that you are in love.
My dad grew up in a single-parent household with two sisters and two brothers. He’s a first-generation kid. His mom worked hard to give him and his siblings what they had, but not without the help of her friends. I have always known that it takes more than a set of parents to raise kids. I knew I wanted to write about the people who raised me. I knew I wanted to write about beach boys, and I knew I wanted to write about first love.
CRISTINA HENRíQUEZ is the author of three books, including, most recently, the novel The Book of Unknown Americans, which was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Oxford American, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She is also the recipient of an Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award. She lives in Illinois.
■ A few years ago, I went to a hotel by myself for one weekend to do nothing but write. Armed with Japanese whiskey and Goldfish crackers, I holed up in the room, intending to make progress on a novel I’d been struggling with. Instead, I sat down and wrote this story.
It’s rare that I start a story with what could properly be called an idea. For me, the seed is always language, and when the words come, they open a path before me. So I wrote the first line—On the first day, there’s a sense of relief—and continued from there, letting the story reveal itself. It’s a scary way to write, and it requires a certain amount of faith, but by the end of that weekend, I had the first draft. From there, it was a matter of understanding what the story was really about, and one of the things I wanted to show was that in trying to find safety, the main character, this woman, only managed to trade one sort of horror for another.
Although most of the story came quickly, I did labor over the ending. The woman is unraveling, and I wanted the language to do that, too, for that final image to be one not of stasis but of movement, reflecting the change within the character, but also to evoke a kind of lyricism at odds with the bleakness of that change.
KRISTEN ISKANDRIAN’s debut novel Motherest was published by Twelve/Hachette in 2017 and was chosen as a monthly pick by Shondaland, Vanity Fair, The Millions, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as being named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and Lenny Letter. Her short fiction has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Joyland, and Epoch, among others. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama. For more information visit kristeniskandrian.com.
■ My class in elementary school did an overnight at a museum of natural history, although I don’t remember much about it beyond possibly sleeping beneath a terrarium of spiders, and even that detail may be an invention of memory. And, like my narrator, I adore E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. But mostly I wanted to explore longing from the point of view of a preteen, a child, because I think we forget that children experience desire in all kinds of powerful and devastating and transgressive ways. Jill knows who she is and what her strengths are; she doesn’t need anyone to tell her how to be. From that self-assurance springs both her sense of humor and her capacity for deep hurt. I’m unendingly fascinated by where and how our two most human conditions—pain and pleasure—meet, blur, and swallow one another whole.
JOCELYN NICOLE JOHNSON’s essays and short stories have appeared in Guernica, Prime Number, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Her work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Johnson lives, writes, and loves on her people—her son, husband, friends, and art students—in Charlottesville, Virginia.
■ In 2014, years before Charlottesville became known for a deadly white supremacists’ rally, a black University of Virginia student was detained by local law enforcement after he was turned away from a bar near campus. Moments later, a video showed Martese Johnson pinned to the ground, blood pouring down his face. “I go to UVA!” he shouted, as if he’d once believed those words would shield him. The next week, I recognized his image in the local paper: a boy in a suit, flanked by lawyers, his forehead marked by ten fresh sutures. Looking on, I received some share of this young man’s bewilderment and heartache; it collected in me. A year later, “Control Negro” spilled out.
This short story contains fragments of my mother, my father, my brother; I borrowed details, real and imagined, from their lives growing up in the ’50s and ’60s in the sand hills of South Carolina, a community perverted by Jim Crow racism. It contains a speck of bitterness that settled in me, years ago, after a conversation with a close college friend, who was white. She told me, excitedly, that she’d learned in class about a professor who’d “definitely” disproved the effects of racism. His method, she explained, was to compare the barriers faced by black communities—bondage, violence, discrimination—to comparable difficulties other ethnic groups had contended with—though not in aggregate, she conceded. The professor found that other groups had overcome the same hurdles that crippled black communities. And so, the logic seemed to go, the problem must be with blackness itself, and not the brutality it inspired. What I remember most was my friend’s gleeful conclusion: “He was black!” she said. “The professor, who did the study, was a black man!”
It was only after “Control Negro” found a home at Guernica that I recognized myself in the story. Hadn’t I felt curated during moments of my middle-class upbringing, choreographed even? And now I was watching my own biracial boy come of age in a newly vitriolic and outraged America.
MATTHEW LYONS is the author of dozens of short stories, appearing in Black Dandy, Kzine, and Daily Science Fiction among others. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and more. B
orn in Colorado, he lives in New York City with his wife.
■ I’ve always been fascinated with the phenomenon of American male rage, and how it’s communicated down from generation to generation, from fathers to sons, more often than not mutating into something far worse than what it was before. In so many ways, that rage is a central driver in our society, and even if our bad decisions sometimes seem sensible, it’s not difficult to track the destruction that they can cause as we flirt with total annihilation. Gods, humans, or something in-between, we all inherit the damage that was done before us. Even though we like to think of ourselves as better, sometimes all we can hope to do is redirect it. Sometimes we can only make things worse.
DINA NAYERI was born in Tehran and arrived in America at ten years old, after two years as a refugee. She is the author of the acclaimed Guardian Long Read “The Ungrateful Refugee” (soon to be a book by the same name), and the winner of an O. Henry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, and fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has been translated into fourteen languages and recently published in the New York Times, the Guardian, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, and others. Her second novel, Refuge, was published by Riverhead Books in 2017.
■ “A Big True” began as an experiment. For months my mother and I had fought about my fiction, which she thinks of as an excuse to twist the truth. “You write these loser parents all the time and you use my details. You lie about me.” “But they’re not you!” I’d say again and again. She said, “And yet somehow you can’t write a parent who’s not a loser, or a child who isn’t perfect.” She was so wrong, but still I set out to prove her even more wrong (yes, I know). I said, “What if I write a story about a parent who’s wildly different from you, a man maybe, whose daughter refuses to understand him? What if I make him an artist and she’s the bland one? What if I show the color in a simple life and the dreariness in a seemingly successful one?” She loved the idea. So I wrote the story. I sent the first draft to her, and I was so nervous about how she’d react. She called me and after a silent beat, she said, “You did it again! Another loser immigrant parent and their amazing kid who knows everything!” A loser? I was in shock. Didn’t she see what I saw, all the love in my story? Didn’t she see that I adored Rahad? That I had adored every displaced mother and father I had ever created from the parts of her and of my father and my grandparents and myself? We fought, of course. I edited. We fought again. Finally, she threw me a bone. “Wyatt is funny,” she said. “I understand the trick he plays at the end. It’s very moving. Very true.”