As a teenager, I realized that the rigid collective family memory didn’t leave much room for me to grow. The vast past magically stopped at the margins of my own memory, like a sea licking at the shore, teasing, never quite reaching my toes. The past became ambiguous. It had the power to connect and to isolate, to soothe and to constrict.
I chose the fall of the Berlin Wall for the ending of this story because it is such a powerful image of liberation and offers a peaceful contrast to the horrors of World War II. Children have vivid imaginations, but even as a child, I never dared to dream that the Wall might come down in my lifetime. It was a fixture, one side painted, the other gray, a little like my German grandparents’ past and present.
Many aspects of “Past Perfect Continuous” are based on real characters and events. I rearranged these and invented parts to join the fragments to create a story that is like life itself—highly subjective and continually reinvented.
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Dounia Choukri was born in East Berlin in 1976 and grew up in Bonn, where she attended the Lycée Français. She has studied in Germany, France, and the United States, and holds an MA in American literature. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Folio, and The Bitter Oleander. She lives in Bonn.
Viet Dinh, “Lucky Dragon”
“Lucky Dragon” is based on a true event—there actually was a fishing vessel, Lucky Dragon No. 5, that got caught in the fallout of the Bikini Atoll nuclear test. I wanted to blend the story of that boat’s crew with a love of mine: Japanese kaiju films. I grew up watching an unholy number of horror movies (around 666, to be exact), so the concept of the monstrous has always fascinated me. Indeed, the Lucky Dragon No. 5 incident was dramatized at the start of Godzilla. Although I had always intended for my fishermen to be similar to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, I discovered the legend of the ningyo, the Japanese mermaid (generally depicted as a hideous creature, as opposed to the seductive beings of Western myth), which gave their transformation a more definite shape. Furthermore, I came across an article that detailed the reception of the returning Japanese POWs in Japan itself. Upon learning the struggles they faced within their own society, I was able to connect the men’s increasing monstrosity with a metaphor that was both personally and culturally significant. Then, I simply let everything mutate.
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Viet Dinh was born in Vietnam and grew up in Colorado. He attended Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston, and currently teaches at the University of Delaware. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Delaware Division of the Arts. His stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Witness, Fence, Five Points, Chicago Review, The Threepenny Review, and Best American Non-required Reading. His debut novel, After Disasters, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He lives in Delaware.
Anne Enright, “Solstice”
I wrote this story for a short-story event that I was hosting in Dublin on the night of the solstice, December 21, in 2016. It was many years since I had attempted a short story, and I thought about this failure as I drove home from town one evening in late November. It was a few short weeks after Trump was elected president of the United States. My children, who had spent the spring of that year in school in New York, were upset about the election result, as were their parents. These felt like truly dark days, and one way or another, it was an emotional journey home. I resolved to use whatever thing I saw or heard when I walked in the door of the house as the basis for a story. I would sit down after dinner and just write.
When I walked into the house, I found one child talking ecopolitics and the other talking about two long-dead cats. I also realized how wonderful they were. The finished story also contains the story of how it got written, and this pleases me no end. I changed everything about the little family—I flipped genders, ages, I changed the issues they faced—but I kept this essential insight about the end of darkness and the first glimmerings of hope.
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Anne Enright was born in Dublin. She has published two collections of short stories, published collectively as Yesterday’s Weather; one book of nonfiction, Making Babies; and six novels, including The Forgotten Waltz, which was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; The Green Road, which was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016 and won the Irish Novel of the Year 2015; and The Gathering, which was the Irish Novel of the Year and won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. She is the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. She lives and works in Dublin.
Brad Felver, “Queen Elizabeth”
I had been working on this story for a long time before I stumbled upon its proper shape. It started as a series of fragments about a couple in love, which is to say boring and tedious fiction. Then my personal life intervened: my son was born. As a new father, I suddenly knew what story I had been trying, and failing, to tell. I was writing a grief story, but until then, it lacked a central trauma—the death of a child. I simply couldn’t, and still can’t, fathom how parents deal with losing a child. What I did know was that this trauma was the wedge I needed to separate my happy couple. Still, writing a grief story tends to be a foolish venture for anyone not named Chekhov. They so easily become tiresome, lethargic affairs. Grief depicted on the page often feels static. A story about a couple stuck in grief suffers from the exact same ailment as a story about a couple stuck in happiness. So I had to find ways to stimulate that grief, to animate it. Enter the beguiling magic of art: I had already been writing those short fragments, and they allowed me to slide through space and time. This kept me from letting my characters passively wallow and introduced a temporal component to the equation. Examining how grief mutates over long stretches of time ended up being fascinating work.
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Brad Felver was born in St. Marys, Ohio, in 1982. His fiction and essays have appeared widely in magazines such as Colorado Review, Hunger Mountain, and New England Review. His forthcoming debut collection, The Dogs of Detroit, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. He lives in northern Ohio.
Tristan Hughes, “Up Here”
Occasionally, trying to recall the origins of a story can leave you feeling a bit like a hapless paleontologist, searching beds of shale and finding only frustrating gaps in the fossil record. But the origins of this story remain clear to me. I can trace them to a specific place and time; a single day, a single afternoon.
It was summer, and I was in love and living in a remote corner of northwestern Ontario. And I was at a party. Like the best parties, it was one of those impromptu affairs, where a few neighbors gather and the sun shines and you lose track of time and the world becomes a little golden. It didn’t take much to make it an idyll: we were by a lake in the middle of a great forest. Late in the afternoon, I was talking to one of my neighbors when he told me, very matter-of-factly, that he had to get up early the next morning to put down his friend’s old dog. We must have spoken about other things. I must have swum and laughed and drunk with everybody else. But the spell had been broken, and in its wake crept a nameless sense of disarray. That night I wrote “The day of the dog” in a notebook and didn’t open it again for two years.
When I did, that unsettling feeling seemed to waft up from the page like the remembered scent of a pressed flower. Sometimes you know you have a story because something leaves you with a residue of feeling you can’t shake off; it sits in the pit of your stomach, and you don’t know what it is yet, or what it means, or what form it will take. And then, as I began to write, it took on a form: a love story—and a pastoral. All the original elements were there—a sunlit clearing in a forest, a lake glittering in the light, an old dog—but what came later was the animating pulse that brought them together, the realization of what had been there the whole time. An inky rippling
across the water, a rustling among the green leaves. Et in Arcadia ego.
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Tristan Hughes was born in Atikokan, a small town in northern Ontario, and brought up on the Welsh island of Ynys Môn. A winner of the Rhys Davies short story prize, he is the author of four novels, Eye Lake, Revenant, Send My Cold Bones Home, and Hummingbird, as well as a collection of short stories, The Tower. He is currently a senior lecturer in creative writing at Cardiff University and lives in Wales.
Dave King, “The Stamp Collector”
I wrote the first draft of this story in graduate school in 1998. It was a time (like all times) when gay guys were focused on seeming straight-acting, and because that’s so irritating I came up with Louis, who’s not at all straight-acting. Who in fact, with his hair salon, boxer briefs, and old disco poster, is a bit of a cliché. This led me to Joe, who’s more conventionally desirable but who nevertheless thinks Louis is the cat’s meow. I knew I did not want to justify Joe’s passion—who knows how love works?—but I began to write about a relationship in which the two are unequal in a whole bunch of ways: sexiness, ambition, capability, wealth, joie de vivre, vulnerability, and so on.
I showed the story to the class, and one comment stayed with me. How come, a student wondered, my work usually included a somehow differently abled character, often skulking around the edge of the plot? It had to do with having a disabled brother, but I’d never registered the reflex myself, and it got me thinking about the structures we create intuitively.
More drafts got written. I changed Joe from a chronic drunk to a guy struggling with sobriety and recast Mrs. Prevala to make her less of a stage villain, but mostly I tried to figure out Stevie’s function. This led to deepening the echoes among the Louis/Joe, Stevie/Louis, and Stevie/dad pairs, and when, several drafts in, the old man finally dried Joe’s head with the dish towel, the cycle of compassion I was going for notched forward. I had found something that captured Joe’s unrooted place in the world yet still advocated for his right to be as he was.
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Dave King was born in Meriden, Connecticut, and grew up in a suburb of Cleveland. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Village Voice, Nuovi Argomenti, and elsewhere, and he’s the author of a novel, The Ha-Ha, which won the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. He divides his time between Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley.
Jamil Jan Kochai, “Nights in Logar”
“Nights in Logar” was born of a brief memory. In 2005, when I was twelve years old, my family and I traveled back to my parents’ home village in Logar, Afghanistan. At the time, the country was only a few years into the U.S. occupation, and Logar was still relatively safe. Then this one morning, my mother’s family’s guard dog, whose name was actually Budabash (bless his heart), got loose on the roads of the village. My older uncles frantically rushed after it, worrying the fierce dog might attack someone. Without asking permission, my younger uncles and my brother and I decided to follow them. At some point, I became afraid of the chase, and my younger uncles left my brother and me under a mulberry tree. We waited there for many hours until night fell, and then, worrying about bandits and soldiers and djinn, we walked back home on our own, almost getting lost in the process.
Ten years later, I was remembering this memory. I saw the dirt roads, the mulberry tree, and the black mountains in the distance, and I wondered what might’ve happened if I’d gone along on the chase. If I hadn’t been afraid of the adventure. And so the story began.
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Jamil Jan Kochai was born in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1992. His family was from Logar, Afghanistan. He is a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first novel, 99 Nights in Logar, is forthcoming. He lives in West Sacramento, California.
Jo Lloyd, “The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies”
This story began with a rain-soaked walk over Welsh hills where silver-lead mining has left pools and scars and ruined stone buildings. HM, who shaped and exploited and suffered this landscape, was going to be a few lines in a different story, but he kept expanding, by turns vain, ambitious, self-pitying, greedy, ridiculous, ruthless.
The story is set at a time when an almost medieval seventeenth century was turning into an almost modern eighteenth. On the one hand, it was widely believed that ore could be found with divining rods and required the warmth of the sun to grow. On the other, the Industrial Revolution was lumbering into motion, bringing not just gunpowder and the first steam engines, but a profit in moving people off the land and into mines and factories.
As I was working on this story, the Brexit vote was taking place in the United Kingdom and the election campaign in the United States. I had not set out to draw any kind of parallels, but they kept prodding at me. Sometimes I thought I saw HM himself popping up on Twitter. The story’s ending crept out of the darkness on the morning after the U.S. election.
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Jo Lloyd was raised in South Wales. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Glimmer Train, Best British Short Stories, and elsewhere. She lives in Oxford.
Michael Parker, “Stop ’n’ Go”
Like most of the stories that make it off my desk, “Stop ’n’ Go” is stitched together from other (failed) stories, as well as those stray and necessary fragments from which stories are compiled: my own puzzlement at the shifting narrative techniques of advertising, the experience of getting stuck behind pickups driving twenty miles per hour on a farm-to-market road where the posted speed limit is at least fifty-five, and some memories my ninety-three-year-old father shared with me.
The brunt of the story comes from my father, who fought—and, like the farmer in the story, was wounded—in World War II. Though he rarely spoke of those days, he did tell me once that after D-Day, his regiment was sent to supervise the cleaning up of Dachau. The detail about the Roma hanging around after the camp was liberated because they had no place to go seemed to haunt him more than being shot. (Or at least I choose to interpret it so, based on the way he told the story or the way I remember his telling it.)
As for the character of the retired farmer, I would like to think that he is not, in fact, merely spiteful of those motorists who are in a hurry to get somewhere for reasons he deems trifling. In his way, he is trying to regulate his memories, to bring order to all the things he saw in his youth that made no sense to him then and make even less sense now. His refusal to shift gears and speed up has nothing to do with where he’s going and everything to do with where he’s been.
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Michael Parker is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. A new novel is forthcoming in spring 2019. He is the Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he has taught since 1992. He lives in North Carolina and Texas.
Mark Jude Poirier, “How We Eat”
In my twenties, before eBay ruined the thrill of the hunt and turned everyone into experts, I spent too much time scouring Tucson’s thrift stores and garage sales for pop-culture detritus (treasures). “How We Eat” is grounded in this period of my life. I used to imagine a subculture of scroungers—people who beat me to all the good stuff and resold it at antique malls and flea markets. As with all my writing, though, this story’s seed is a character: Brenda. I don’t know her specific origins; she’s nothing like my mother. Her brand of selfish immaturity and savvy knowledge of all things collectible is unique, and it kind of scares me, but I lived with her in my head for months before I started typing this story. Like the narrator, I was a neurotic kid who feared that abduction, torture, and murder were waiting around every corner, and in eighties southern Arizona, there were plenty of lurid news stories to feed my anxiety. These stories continue to weasel their
way into my fiction today.
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Mark Jude Poirier grew up in Tucson. He’s the author of two collections of short fiction and two novels, and the coauthor of a farcical graphic novel. Films he has written have played at the Sundance Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, and in theaters all over the world. He lives in New York City.
Michael Powers, “More or Less Like a Man”
I have in common with this narrator an almost paralyzing fear of being drawn into conversations with strangers on airplanes or really in any situation where I won’t be able to make a polite exit once the well of small talk runs dry. I shouldn’t be this way, I know. It’s a bad habit for any fully grown person to avoid these kinds of chance encounters, but for obvious reasons, it’s especially bad for a writer. In part the story grew out of an impulse—like the impulse that leads the tongue to prod an aching tooth—to put some inquisitive pressure on this irrational fear: Where does it come from? What is it about? To that end I did what just about every story, in one way or another, ultimately does: put two people together and get them talking, give them each a reasonable level of awe and trepidation at the enormous mystery of another person, give them each a history that they feel compelled both to share and to hold back, and watch to see what happens.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Page 38