by Roxane Gay
TéA OBREHT’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award Finalist and a New York Times best seller. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vogue, and Esquire, among others. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She lives in New York and teaches at Hunter College. Her second novel is forthcoming in 2019.
■ A few years ago, during the penultimate week of a fellowship at the New York Public Library, I had the fortune of taking a tour through the labyrinthine stacks of the Stephen A. Schwarzman building on Fifth Avenue. A controversial renovation had been announced, and for months New Yorkers had debated the logistics and consequences of moving the lion’s share of the collection offsite in order to address concerns that the library’s stacks might be too fragile to continue the twin tasks of housing its books and supporting its weight.
It was eerie to go all the way down into the warm, green-gray catacombs of the old girl and see her skeleton laid bare. Infinities of struts and empty rectangles receded in every direction. Halogen tubes flickered overhead. A right here, a left there, a deserted corridor, a stairwell leading to basement storage. On an otherwise empty shelf at the foot of a metal ladder I barely survived sat a box labeled:
ITEMS AWAITING PROTECTIVE ENCLOSURE
I’m not a note-taking kind of writer (managing to lose every single Moleskine I’ve ever carried has cured me of trying to catch those daily jolts of inspiration) but when I saw these words, I scrambled to grab them, get them down on paper, preserve their correct order. Right away I knew: this was something, a thread, a line if I’d ever seen one. A gift. Just sitting there in the library basement. A title—maybe. I told myself that I would wait as long as necessary for the right story to come along and claim it. Of course, this would turn out to be the one I had already been writing for the better part of a year—though two more years would pass before its hazy, disparate threads (shed hunting, unrequited first love, a father obsessed with littering transgressions) finally came together.
RON RASH is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times best seller Serena, in addition to many prizewinning novels, including The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of both The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
■ As with almost all of my fiction, this story began with an image: a baptism scene on a frozen river. I sensed the time period was the late nineteenth century and that the minister was deeply conflicted about performing the rite. Where the initial image came from I cannot say. It was not derived from anything I’d ever heard of happening. After finishing the first draft, I realized that my naming the child Pearl established a connection to the Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, but that too was, at least initially, subconscious. My perspective on stories is Jungian. They already exist; thus writers are more transmitters than creators. But how well the story will be told is conscious, a matter of craft.
AMY SILVERBERG is a writer and stand-up comedian based in Los Angeles. She’s currently a Doctoral Fellow in Fiction at the University of Southern California. Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Collagist, and elsewhere. She will be performing stand-up on season 6 of Hulu’s comedy showcase Coming to the Stage. She’s now at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.
■ The way I enter stories is almost always through voice; I rarely have a character or premise in mind. I just had that first line in my head for a while—the line of a character saying she made a bet with her father—so I wrote one paragraph and set it aside for months and months. I’m not sure why I decided to pick up the story again, but I know that line ran through my head enough times, stayed with me long enough, that I felt I wanted to revisit it and go from there. Maybe I just had a deadline! At the time, I was teaching an Intro to Composition class that was mostly freshmen, and I met with them three times a week, so I got to know them pretty well. We’d talk often about their relationships with their parents—who had a helicopter mom, whose dad wanted them to really embrace being on their own. I was definitely thinking about that at the time, the myriad of ways in which parents and children learn to let go. Eighteen has always struck me as a very strange, particular age—especially for the kids I was teaching—so many of them were living away from home, but still talking to their parents every day. I’d just read the short story “The Paperhanger” by William Gay and admired the mystery of it, how it seemed to go confidently into an unknown world, a world that felt a little surreal and a little absurd. At least that’s how I remember feeling about the story at the time. I was also in a workshop taught by Aimee Bender, and while I hadn’t set out to write anything with a magical realism element, I’m sure her stories (which I’ve read many, many times) rubbed off on me—or if not the stories, then at least the courage or freedom to go confidently into that so-called unknown world. Finally, I love writing about Los Angeles. I’ve lived here most of my adult life, and I perform comedy here. It still feels exciting that a friend of mine, who works as a waitress, might quit her job at any moment for an acting role. For as long as I’ve lived here, it’s always felt like a city of transition and transformation—that you might be one thing and then become another over the course of a single day will always be compelling to me.
CURTIS SITTENFELD is the best-selling author of five novels—Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, and Eligible—and one story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It. Her books have been selected by the New York Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and People for their “Ten Best Books of the Year” lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into thirty languages. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Esquire, and her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, and on This American Life.
■ I joined Twitter in 2013 and, as someone who had been a social media skeptic, was both surprised and a bit alarmed by how quickly I took to it. (As the saying goes, the twenty minutes I spend on Twitter are the best four hours of my day.) I also thought about the strangeness of the fact that many tweets are exchanged between people whose identities are unclear. If a person from my own past about whom I had ambivalent feelings emailed me, the truth is that I might ignore the email. But if the same person reached out on Twitter, with a jokey username, I might, in the spirit of being a pleasant author, engage in a back-and-forth while having no idea who the person really was. Although I certainly am not famous like Lucy Headrick, it was this strangeness that inspired me to write “The Prairie Wife.” Of course, the story ended up being about a few other things—celebrity culture, forty-something sadness—but its origins are in how weird I find Twitter.
RIVERS SOLOMON writes about life in the margins, where they are much at home. They graduated from Stanford University with a degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and hold an MFA in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers. Though originally from the United States, they currently reside in the United Kingdom. Their debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, is out now.
■ When I wrote “Whose Heart I Long to Stop with the Click of a Revolver,” some years ago now, I’d been thinking a lot about guns—specifically how much I liked them compared to others who hold socially progressive values. I’d never held one myself, but it seemed to me that the world’s bank account, its balance of power, if you will, was mighty in arrears and needed to be set to rights. I couldn’t envision a way of doing that that didn’t involve a gun.
You can
’t rape a .38. I first saw that on a vintage photo of a protest march, but I’ve since seen it a number of places, including on advertisements for personal weapons. How strange it was, I thought, the way violence unfolds on both mass and individual scale, how the small violence of a single victim and perpetrator can reflect larger patterns and social values. How rape is a tool in an ongoing war against women. I wanted to write a story about a woman enmeshed in violence, who could not, no matter what, disentangle herself from it, because none of us can.
ESMé WEIJUN WANGIS the author of the novel The Border of Paradise, which was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She received a 2018 Whiting Award, was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.
■ The first thing that came to me, with this story, was the singsong rhyme from the very beginning, which led to a few questions: Who is Becky Guo, where is this taking place, and who is telling the story? I wrote most of “What Terrible Thing It Was” in New Orleans in December 2016, right after Trump’s election—it was the beginning of a particular kind of anxiety for myself and most of my loved ones about the country and what was going to be coming next. Part of that felt like paranoia, but a paranoia with far too much truth behind it, which is what led to the inclusion of the narrator’s psychosis and the convergence of her electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) consultation with Election Night. I wanted Wendy to have concerns outside of the election, and she does, but the election in the story and the social concerns surrounding it leave their fingerprints all over that day and her memories of Becky’s murder. I consider it as much a story about trauma as anything else, and a narrative of how new traumas tend to revive old ones.
Other Distinguished Stories of 2017
ADICHIE, CHIMAMANDA NGOZI,
Details. McSweeney’s Quarterly, no. 50.
ALEXIE, SHERMAN
A Vacuum Is a Space Entirely Devoid of Matter. Narrative Magazine.
BERNARD, REBECCA
This Is Us Being Alive. Meridian, no. 38.
BOYLE, T. C.
Warrior Jesus. Narrative Magazine.
BROWN, JASON
Instructions to the Living from the Condition of the Dead. Missouri Review, vol. 40, no. 1.
BYNUM, SARAH SHUN-LIEN
Julia and Sunny. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 2.
Likes. The New Yorker, October 9.
CARSON, ANNE
Eddy. Paris Review, no. 221.
CELONA, MARJORIE
Counterblast. Southern Review, vol. 53, no. 2.
CLINE, EMMA
Northeast Regional. The New Yorker, April 10.
CROUSE, DAVID
A Wrong in the World. Sycamore Review, vol. 28, issue 2.
DJANIKIAN, ARIEL
The Assailant. Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 34, nos. 1 & 2.
DOKEY, RICHARD
The Good Earth Grocery. AlaskaQuarterly Review, vol. 33, nos. 3 & 4.
EHTESHAM-ZADEH, SUZI
The Baboon. Fiction International, no. 50.
EISENBERG, EMMA COPLEY
Sundays. Electric Literature, no. 287.
EISMAN, BEN
Goombahs. Sewanee Review, vol. CXXV, no. 3.
EKWUYASI, FRANCESCA
Children of the Light Fellowship. Transition, no. 123.
ESCOFFERY, JONATHAN
In Flux. Passages North, no. 38.
FAJARDO-ANSTINE, KALI
All Her Names. The American Scholar, Summer 2016.
FERRIS, JOSHUA
Life in the Heart of the Dead. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 1.
FOOT, KIM COLEMAN
How to Kill Gra’ Coleman and Live to Tell About It (Vauxhall, NJ c. 1949). Missouri Review, vol. 40, no. 3.
GARSON, SCOTT
West Seventh and Burn Hill Road. Threepenny Review, no. 152.
GIDDINGS, MEGAN
Brittle. Arts and Letters, no. 34.
GILBERT, DAVID
Underground. The New Yorker, February 6.
GOODMAN, ALLEGRA
F.A.Q.s. The New Yorker, September 11.
GREENFELD, KARL TARO
We Not Die. Kenyon Review, vol. XXXIX, no. 5.
GREENMAN, BEN
Right Angles. ZYZZYVA, no. 109.
GROFF, LAUREN
Dogs Go Wolf. The New Yorker, August 28.
GYASI, YAA
Leaving Gotham City. Granta, no. 139.
HAGENSTON, BECKY
In the Museum of Tense Moments. Greensboro Review, no. 102.
HAN, AH-REUM
The Ninki-Nanka. StoryQuarterly, no. 50.
HENDERSON, SMITH
Muscles. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 1.
HOFFMAN, DUSTIN M.
Scraps on Fire. Washington Square Review, no. 39.
HUNT, SAMANTHA
A Love Story. The New Yorker, May 22.
HUYNH, PHILIP
The Forbidden Purple City. Event, vol. 46, no. 2.
ISKANDRIAN, KRISTEN
The Taster. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 1.
JAMES, TANIA
The Liberator. Freeman’s, Fall.
JOHNSON, DANA
Like Other People. ZYZZYVA, no. 11.
JONES, MATT
The Changeling. Ruminate, no. 45.
JULY, MIRANDA
The Metal Bowl. The New Yorker, September 4.
KHONG, RACHEL
My Dear You. Tin House, vol. 18, no. 4.
KINDERVATTER-CLARK, CAITLIN
Runway. Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 34, nos. 1 & 2.
KUMARASAMY, AKIL
New World. Harper’s, August.
LACHAPELLE, MARY
Saab Story. Passages North, no. 38.
LANSBURGH, MATTHEW
Outside Is the Ocean. Ecotone, no. 23.
LAVALLE, VICTOR
Spectral Evidence. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 2.
LEE, HELEN ELAINE
Blood Knot. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 1.
LEEGANT, JOAN
The Book of Splendor. Ascent.
LI, YIYUN
On the Street Where You Live. The New Yorker, January 9.
LOPEZ, BARRY
The Race Goes to the Swiftest. Iowa Review, vol. 46, no. 3.
MACHADO, CARMEN MARIA
Blur. Tin House, vol. 18, no. 4.
Eight Bites. Gulf Coast, vol. 28, no. 2.
MACKIN, WILL
Crossing the River No Name. The New Yorker, June 5 & 12.
MAHAJAN, KARAN
The Anthology. Granta, no. 139.
MAKSIK, ALEXANDER
The Old Masters. Sewanee Review, vol. CXXV, no. 3.
MARCUS, BEN
Blueprints for St. Louis. The New Yorker, October 2.
MCCRACKEN, ELIZABETH
A Walk-Through Human Heart. Zoetrope: All-Story, vol. 20, no. 4.
MCGRANAHAN, MAUREEN
Stylites Anonymous. Cincinnati Review, vol. 14, no. 1.
MCGRAW, ERIN
Ava Gardner Goes Home. Sewanee Review, vol. CXXV, no. 2.
MCNETT, MOLLY
The Final Words to the Emperor Caesar, Son of the God Trajan, from His Young Favorite, Atinous. Fifth Wednesday, no. 20.
MITCHELL, ANDREW
Midnight Drives. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 2.
Going North. Gulf Coast, vol. 28, no. 2.
MOFFETT, KEVIN
City of Trees. LitMag, no. 1.
NUNEZ, SIGRID
The Blind. Paris Review, no. 222.
NWACHUKWU, IHEOMA
Urban Gorilla. Southern Review, vol. 53, no. 2.
OGUNYEMI, OMOLOLA IJEOMA
Jollof Rice and Revolutions. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 2.
OHLIN, ALIX