by Laura Furman
But the first draft, which I completed in graduate school, included a loyal re-creation of my mother’s telling: old man finds cigarette butts, queries neighbors accusingly, and later exposes himself as a smoker. When I shared the story with my workshop, almost every reader said this element in particular, the sequence of events that “actually happened,” felt contrived. In later drafts, I dismantled the anecdote, but by then the setting and characters were more fully formed, including the grumpy Gordon Lippincott. My mother’s anecdote had functioned as a kind of scaffolding for my own story. It was an early lesson for me in how reality both can and can’t serve fiction.
Samar Farah Fitzgerald was born in Athens, Greece, and grew up in northern New Jersey. She was the recipient of a 2011–2012 Artist Fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Story Quarterly Online, The Carolina Quarterly, Avery, and The L Magazine. She completed her MFA at the University of Wisconsin, where she received the August Derleth Prize and the Friends of Creative Writing Award. She lives in Staunton, Virginia, and teaches creative writing at James Madison University.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “Aphrodisiac”
The origin of this story was not an incident or a character but a situation—one that has often fascinated me: someone’s desire for another turning into an obsession that destroys all of his nobler qualities and higher striving. However, there is nothing of that in Naina and Kishen’s early encounter, when she moves into his family home as his brother’s young bride. She is high-spirited and playful, and Kishen is enchanted with her and wants to spend all his time in her company, more and more neglecting his earlier ambition of writing the Great Indian Novel.
As the years pass, his obsession grows rather than diminishes, even though she becomes obese with childbirth and suckling the infants clinging to her great breasts. Something primeval enters her personality, physically present in the old servant she has brought from their more backward part of the country. This crone emanates the atmosphere of their desert home and its purdah quarters where previous generations of women lived locked up, honing their secret potions and spells to use against the world. Sensing all this as part of Naina’s personality, Kishen’s obsession with her is no longer an enchantment but an enchainment, against which he has no strength left to struggle. Instead, as the situation changes and his mother begins to sicken and die, Naina takes on an ever more sinister manifestation: as the goddess of destruction, blood-dripping, death-dealing, Kali herself. Maybe India herself, feared and adored by those who have become enthralled by her. I have to admit that none of this came to me consciously but evolved within the situation of the story, so by the time I had finished writing (as often happens to me at the end of a story) I looked at it and understood: “So that’s what it was all about.”
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany in 1927 and escaped to England with her parents in 1939. She went to school and college in London, where she met and married the Indian architect C. S. H. Jhabvala. They lived in India from 1951 to 1975. Her first novel was published in 1955. Twelve more novels were published, including Heat and Dust and A Backward Place, and six collections of short stories. From 1962 on, she wrote most of the screenplays for the films of Merchant Ivory. Jhabvala lived mostly in New York, with frequent return visits to India.
While The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 was in production, we learned that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala had died on April 3, 2013, in New York. We will miss her stories and her tonic view of mankind. —Laura Furman
Nalini Jones, “Tiger”
We were a houseful of allergies when my brother, sister, and I were kids, and when I wrote the earliest version of this story, I’d been thinking about the desperate shape our longing for animals used to take. We could not simply admire the herd of goats we encountered one summer in Rhode Island; we must clearly chase the poor beasts from one end of the field to another in our determination to befriend them. We loved the goats! Soon the goats would love us! Surely, if we were patient and spoke in soothing voices—a Secret Garden–derived method we trusted entirely—my sister and I could train a goat to stand still while we hoisted our brother onto its back.
Occasional visits to India offered all sorts of other unsuitable animal attachments. We did once fall in love with a family of stray cats, one of many affections that marked us as foreigners.
I’ve now become so wholly loyal to my dog that simply remembering such devotion to cats was a taxing imaginative exercise—so much so that in the first version of this story I neglected to do very much with the people. The whole narrative was overrun by cats. The editor of my story collection very wisely advised me to put it aside.
A few years later, I picked up the story again because I was thinking about one of its characters, Essie. In the novel I’m writing, her habit of addressing people who aren’t there takes a strange turn, and I found I needed to know how all that began. I hadn’t intended to rewrite the story; at first I was just revisiting some of the passages to see what they suggested about Essie at that point in her history. It was a consultation, nothing more. But then I began to rework a few pages, trying to learn more about her so that I could carry that new understanding into the pages of the novel. As I kept exploring, the story seemed to rearrange itself, taking on a new shape. And eventually I realized it wasn’t part of the novel at all; it was becoming something else entirely.
Nalini Jones was born in Rhode Island and grew up in Ohio and New England. She is the author of What You Call Winter, a story collection, and her fiction has appeared in Ontario Review and Elle India, among other publications. Her essays have been anthologized in AIDS Sutra and Freud’s Blind Spot. In 2012, she won a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Jones teaches in the graduate writing program at Fairfield University and lives in Connecticut.
Kelly Link, “The Summer People”
I have had a hard time figuring out what to say about “The Summer People.” I wrote it during a period in which my two-year-old daughter (born at twenty-four weeks) had recently been released from the hospital for the first time, a period in which we were still living away from home, in order to stay close to her doctors and Boston Children’s Hospital. I suppose it makes sense that this is a story about parents and children, about caretakers and about a longing to leave the place where you are. It has all sorts of borrowed things in it: among others, a title from a Shirley Jackson story.
What I thought about, as I was writing, was the overlap between folklore about fairies and stories of alien encounters. I was writing at an intersection of two genres, young adult and steampunk, and I wanted this to be a story in which someone was making beautiful clockwork objects for mysterious purposes. (Another metaphor, I suppose, for fiction in general. The writer Howard Waldrop says that all stories function as metaphors for the act of writing.) Most of my stories come out of various combinations of genres and genre conventions.
Kelly Link is the author of three collections, most recently Pretty Monsters. She has edited various anthologies, and with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, she has run Small Beer Press since 2001 and publishes the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and has taught at Columbia University, Stone-coast, Smith College, and the Clarion Workshops. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
George McCormick, “The Mexican”
This story began with another story: William Kittredge’s excellent “Stone Boat.” In it he writes, “Orange blossoms had smelled yellow at twilight.” When I first read that sentence I identified with its synesthesia, and immediately I began to imagine a world in which such an observation wouldn’t simply be “nice,” but actually matter.
I read Kittredge’s story on a Thursday and by the next morning, writing between classes in an empty blue book a student had left behind, I began “The Mexican.” On Saturday I wrote to the story’s end, on Sunday I typed it up. Later tha
t week I gave a draft of it to a couple of friends, who read it and offered several cogent suggestions. I made the corrections, and by Thursday—one week after I’d read “Stone Boat”—I had a story of my own. However, what I don’t want to convey here is that just because the story came quickly that it also came easily. It did not. Nothing written with care comes easily.
George McCormick is the author of the story collection Salton Sea. His fiction has appeared in Willow Springs, CutBank, Santa Monica Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. He is a recipient of a Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts individual artist grant, and he works in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Cameron University. He divides his time between Lawton, Oklahoma, and Cooke City, Montana.
Melinda Moustakis, “They Find the Drowned”
I’ve spent a lot of time fishing in Alaska with my uncle, Sonny, who tells amazing stories. So I’d always wanted to put a story he told me about a woman who saves a drowning moose on paper in some way. I often combine stories I’ve heard while fishing on the river with scientific research and the tall-tale aspect of letting fiction stretch, the way a good story stretches over time—how that decent-sized salmon you reeled in one lovely day becomes, in the series of retellings, a monster of a catch in the middle of a blizzard. Usually, this combining process yields a story that is finished within a few months. But not so with “They Find the Drowned.” This story is the story that almost wasn’t, in many ways, and is the result of a process that took about six years. There were numerous times I thought that this material would remain tucked away in a drawer. I had all of these pieces, these mosaic tiles of words, and it took a process of distilling and rearranging and rewriting to find the right alchemy for this modular story. I knew I had the sequence down when I finally found the title and each piece had its own arc and also fit into the overall narrative. I’d had other stories with similar structures find publication, but “They Find the Drowned” became the last unpublished story in my collection and I had mostly given up on sending it out before it was accepted by Hobart. Such a strange journey for a strange story, at least in my experience.
Melinda Moustakis was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and raised in Bakersfield, California. She received her MA from the University of California, Davis, and her PhD in English and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. Her debut collection, Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, won the Flannery O’Connor Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. She was named a 2011 “5 Under 35” writer by the National Book Foundation and is a 2012–2013 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.
Alice Munro, “Leaving Maverley”
My husband’s father was a night cop. He used to get some warm moments from cold nights walking the streets by ducking into the Lyceum Theatre. He was a well-read school dropout (a common thing in those days—lack of funds) and took a dim view of the plots, but had fun.
Also a World War II scandal, a married teacher leaving respectable husband for penniless young vet—somehow I just wound these up and the girl appeared—plenty of dour Christians in that (my) home town, and I went along to see what would happen to them—the preacher getting in, then out—and the two shorn creatures left at the end. Not completely shorn, though, having got along as best they could.
I have been writing stories for sixty years. For quite a while I thought that was a prelude to writing novels (when children and housework eased off). It didn’t turn out to be—disappointed publishers in my wake. Then one Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson, told me to keep writing stories and the word novel would never cross his lips. I did, and it didn’t, and here I am at this preposterous age having the usual hellish good time, which is how you could describe writing. And so happy to be in it.
Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published thirteen original collections of stories—Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; The View from Castle Rock; Too Much Happiness; and Dear Life—as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and Selected Stories collections. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes; England’s W. H. Smith Book Award; the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award, Rea Award for the Short Story, and Lannan Literary Award; and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.
Derek Palacio, “Sugarcane”
I have never been to Cuba. My father was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1950, but his family left the country just a few years later. “Sugarcane” mixes bits from his memory (a distant recollection of my grandfather on horseback, a family-run sugarcane plantation, strong coffee) with disparate facts culled from sporadic research (the economics of sugar production, socialized medicine, a palpable military presence). My father, like the protagonist Armando, is a surgeon, though the character is not in any way based on him. Regardless, I owe my father a debt of gratitude for letting me incorporate parts of his past into my storytelling. This piece, however, was born from a fact before being colored in by inherited memory: I’d read somewhere that during the sugarcane harvest the military would block off the roads and stand guard as the stalks were transported from field to refinery. They worried the crops would be stolen and sold on the ever-expanding black market. The idea that sugar had the potential to become an illicit product in Cuba stayed with me for a long, long time. Eventually there emerged a set of characters (an unmarried doctor, an arrogant son, a plantation manager, a nomadic seamstress) who could participate in that potential criminality and be affected by it, I hope in engaging ways.
Derek Palacio was born in Evanston, Illinois, but mostly grew up in Greenland, New Hampshire. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. “Sugarcane” was his first published story and is part of a collection he is currently working on. His story “A History of Civility” appeared in Puerto del Sol. He is the codirector of the Mojave School, a nonprofit creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. He lives and teaches in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
Jamie Quatro, “Sinkhole”
“Sinkhole” is the only story I’ve ever written that came to me as a grand-scale, amorphous idea: to write a combination sex/exorcism scene in which neither person realized what was happening to the other. That was all I had. No image or character, not even a fragment of dialogue. It was baffling, because for me the creative process usually works in reverse: a small object or sensory moment—a torn sweater sleeve, the sound of snow tires on ice—will present itself, and will feel lit up with a kind of numinous quality; imbued, somehow, with the potential to extend beyond itself. I’ll begin to sketch the image, having only a vague sense of where I’m headed, but trusting—willing myself to trust—that something True will show up along the way. I’ll draft and redraft until the story surfaces. The process feels inductive, alchemical, moving outward from the material to the immaterial; meaning distilled from image, spirit from matter.
Yet here was this implausible notion. I couldn’t shake it. Individually, the two elements felt like insurmountable challenges. Sex scenes are just plain difficult to write. And exorcism in a short story? Other than Chris Adrian, I couldn’t think of anyone who’d attempted it. But to combine them? I knew I couldn’t pull it off. Could I write about exorcism believably, much less an exorcism during the sex act? Under what circumstances could such a thing happen? How could a pries
t—the only person who can perform the rite—have sex during an exorcism?
Then—as so often happens, if I’m awake to it—a real-life event gave me what I needed. One of the churches in our little mountaintop town hosted an outreach event on the playground of the elementary school, just a few blocks from our house. The entire community was invited. Free ice cream, live bluegrass, dogs welcome! They set up a tent and brought in an actor who played different versions of God (waiter, sheriff, etc.). I wrote the opening scene in “Sinkhole” after taking notes at the event, realizing that this God-actor was somehow involved in the sex/exorcism story, and that my characters would be evangelical Protestants. I wrote the last scene next, revising the Catholic exorcism as a faith-healing. The rest of the story revealed itself from there. Still, it took me two years to finish. At one point I had the main character running with a .380 Colt Mustang duct-taped to his torso. Thank goodness for an early reader who said, “Er, lose the gun and you might have something here.”
Jamie Quatro was born in San Diego, California, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Tin House, The Oxford American, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection, I Want to Show You More, was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Quatro is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and holds graduate degrees from the College of William and Mary and the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She lives in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.