Thank you to the editors who, in one way or another, ushered these stories into the world: Robert Fogarty, Michael Griffith, Ronald Spatz, John Irwin, Mary Flinn, Michelle Wildgen, Sven Birkerts, Bill Pierce, William Giraldi, Jill Meyers, Wells Tower, Cara Blue Adams, Margot Livesey, Nick Flynn, Ladette Randolph, Catherine Chung, Meakin Armstrong, and David Lynn.
For their friendship, support and eyes on my work, thanks to Megan Mayhew Bergman, Tom Bissell, Elizabeth Crane, Mary Vassar Hitchings, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Gayle Ligon, Dayna Lorentz, Nicola Mason, and Cal Morgan. Special thanks to Tim Liu.
I am indebted to the MacDowell Colony and to the Corporation of Yaddo for generously providing the time and solitude I needed to write many of the stories in this book. I’m also grateful to Wyatt Prunty, Kevin Wilson, and everyone else at the Sewanee School of Letters, and to Po Hannah, for bringing the magic lighter. Special hanks to Elena Quevedo for giving me a place to land in New York City.
For their love and support, thanks to my children, McKenna, Keaton, Hallie-Blair, and Hudson, and to my parents, John and Dani Utz. And to Scott: first reader, best reader, best friend of twenty-four years—you are my Home.
Note: The phrase “a wicked, unlovely, purely useful thing” in “Decomposition” is a variation of Will Barrett’s description of the telescope case in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman. Earnshaw’s sermons in “Demolition” draw from the last chapter of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. The Hebrew phrase in “Holy Ground” is from the Song of Solomon (by way of Joyce’s Ulysses), and translates, “I am black yet comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.”
Finally, I would like to acknowledge Sherwood Anderson, Barry Hannah, Denis Johnson, Gordon Lish, David Means, Steven Millhauser, Alice Munro, Tim O’Brien, Grace Paley, Mary Robinson, Christine Schutt, and Eudora Welty: Masters of the story form, all.
I Want to Show You More (9780802193742) Page 18