by Laura Furman
Gail Jones is the author of two collections of short stories, The House of Breathing and Fetish Lives, and two novels, Black Mirror and Sixty Lights. She teaches in the Department of English, Communication, and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia and lives “in the most remote city in the world,” Perth.
Caitlin Macy, “Christie”
In his introduction to the red book—his Collected Stories—John Cheever wrote, “My favorite stories are those that were written in less than a week and were often composed aloud.” After I finished my novel it took me a long time to get my short-story legs back. Then one day when I was toiling and sweating to get out some other story, “Christie” came to me almost whole. “Christie came from Greenwich, Connecticut,” I thought, “and that was all anyone knew of her background.” This original first line of the story was later edited for clarity but much of the opening passage remains intact, exactly the same as when I first heard it—“heard” because this was a rare instance for me of the composing aloud that Cheever describes. Because I had a lot of fun writing the story, it amused me that readers’ reactions were largely of the “chilling,” “incredibly depressing,” “disturbing,” “sad,” “scary” ilk—a clear instance of one's story having a life of its own, and one that its author could not have predicted. As for the subject matter, I have always been fascinated by girls like Christie Brue-wald née Thorn who move to New York, dye their hair blond, eat frozen yogurt for dinner, snag a man. I hope my soft spot for the Christie type comes through even the angst-y, bitter, teeth-gnashing voice of the narrator.
I am fond of the story for another reason: it proved to me that the daily forced march over the blank page is not necessarily in vain because inspiration may be more likely to come out of it—out of one's daily work— rather than out of a passive, here-I-am-waiting-to-be-inspired stance, something that I had never clarified for myself.
Caitlin Macy is the author of the novel The Fundamentals of Play. She is at work on a collection of short stories, tentatively titled Spoiled. Macy lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
Michael Parker, “The Golden Era of Heartbreak”
This story arose out of the usual straddle: one leg in experience and the other, more weight-bearing leg in a calculated exploitation and exaggeration of same. As always I started with music—the rhythm of the narrator's desire—and landscape—the flat, bleakly beautiful Sound country of northeastern North Carolina. Two other things helped this story along: a Whis-keytown song called “Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight,” and the fact that, while writing it, I was training for an Ironman triathlon, and had self-inflicted suffering on the brain.
Michael Parker is the author of four books of fiction, including the novel Virginia Lovers. His short fiction has appeared in Five Points, Shenandoah, The Oxford American, The Black Warrior Review, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 2002, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. He teaches in the MFA writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Parker lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Dale Peck, “Dues”
This is a funny story. I wrote a preliminary version while housesitting in upstate New York for a friend of a friend. I was in the middle of the country with no one around, and I fell into a pattern of sleeping for two or three hours and being awake for four or five hours, so that I’d find myself waking up at three in the morning and reading and writing until eight and then going back to bed—a staccato rhythm echoed in all the starts and stops in the story. I was also reading a lot of Coetzee at the time (Boyhood, Life & Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians) and so much of his terseness crept into the story that it ended up stymieing me. I put the manuscript away until July 2002, when, through a tangential impulse, I was inspired to pull it out and rewrite it as a September 11 story. My inspiration was the mining accident in Quecreek, Pennsylvania. Nine miners were trapped for three days after an underground stream flooded the shaft they were working in; by the time rescue workers managed to drill into the shaft it was assumed the miners would all be dead, but they all made it. I think the experience reawakened the sense of helplessness many Americans had felt about not being able to rescue anyone from the World Trade Center, and rechanneled it into the herculean efforts that led to the miners’ rescue, and it's this idea—of looking for someone who's dead but finding someone who's alive—that became central to “Dues.” There's actually a second half of the story planned (or a second story with the same character) which takes place at the site of the mining accident, but that's still in note form, and will probably decide to get written, like “Dues,” when I least expect it.
Dale Peck is the author of three novels, Martin and John, The Law of Enclosures, and Now It's Time to Say Goodbye; a memoir, What We Lost; and a collection of essays, Hatchet Jobs. He teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of New School University. Peck lives in New York City.
Frances de Pontes Peebles, “The Drowned Woman”
The idea for “The Drowned Woman” came to me during a plane ride with my mother four years ago. It was a nine-hour flight from Recife to the United States, and neither of us could sleep. The cabin was dark. A movie played. A few restless people padded up and down the aisle in their socks. I don’t know what triggered her memory, but my mother turned to me and said that once, as a little girl, she and her friends saw an unknown woman washed up on the beach with her arm petrified from rigor mortis. I asked questions, and all my mother said was, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Then she fell asleep.
Sitting in that dark plane, I was amazed by the drowned woman, by the stiff arm. But later, I was more amazed by my mother, by the fact that, as a child, she had seen a corpse, washed up and rigid, and had never mentioned it. I started writing about the drowned woman, creating a name and a story for her. After several drafts, the story became less about the woman and more about the little girl.
Frances de Pontes Peebles is a recipient of a Sacatar Artist's Fellowship and a J. William Fulbright Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in Indiana Review and Missouri Review. Peebles lives in Pernambuco, Brazil, with her dogs Oscar, Lorenço, Negão, and Xuxa.
Ron Rash, “Speckle Trout”
When I was a child, I loved to fish the small creek on my grandparents’ farm. Brook trout was the technical name for the fish I caught, but in the North Carolina mountains they were called speckle trout. My grandparents loved to eat them, and I was expected to bring back what I caught for supper. They were beautiful creatures—red and olive spots on their flanks, orange fins—and I always felt some sadness as I slipped them onto my stringer. I was especially haunted by how quickly their bright colors faded. These trout were also rare, found only in small, isolated creeks. As I got older I searched for them in places sometimes a mile or two away from any road, places where a rattlesnake bite or broken leg could have life-threatening consequences. I also ignored a few No Trespassing signs. Unlike the young man in my story, I was never caught, but that fear was always present.
Ron Rash's family has lived in the southern Appalachian mountains since the mid-1700s. He grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University. His poetry and fiction have appeared in many magazines, including Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Georgia Review, New England Review, and Poetry. He is the author of two story collections, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Casualties; three volumes of poetry, Eureka Mill and Among the Believers Raising the Dead; and two novels, One Foot in Eden and Saints at the River. Rash lives in Clemson, South Carolina.
Nancy Reisman, “Tea”
I’m interested in the way that longing can shape one's perceptions of reality and in the delicate balance between hope and self-delusion. One reason I’m drawn to Lillian's character is that I think of her as a realist, a highly pragmatic woman, yet her relation
ship with Abe moves her into wishful, unsteady territory. It's an emotionally fraught mix, but I think this combination of pragmatism and wild hope is what has enabled her to survive and to sustain an unconventional life in a tradition-bound community.
Nancy Reisman is the author of a novel, The First Desire, and House Fires, which won an Iowa Short Fiction Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader, and has also appeared in Five Points, Tin House, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Glimmer Train, among others. Reisman lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Elizabeth Stuckey-French, “Mudlavia”
I began “Mudlavia” years ago. It started with a conversation I had with Harold Watts, a family friend and colleague of my father's in the Purdue University English Department. Harolds mother took him to the Mudlavia Hotel and Resort in 1916, when he was ten years old, hoping to heal his aching knee with mud baths. Harold generously told me all about his visit there, giving me many intriguing details, including a description of the character I call Harry Jones, the cushion man, whom Harold and his mother thought was a gangster.
I wrote an early draft of this story in which I didn’t stray much from the facts Harold told me, but it wasn’t very dramatic and I had to put it aside. From the start, however, I tapped into a voice that I found mesmerizing, and it was the voice that drew me back into the story when I picked it up again over a decade later. When I reread it a plot suggested itself right away, but it took me a number of rewrites until I allowed the inevitable to happen at the end. After finishing this story I didn’t want to leave Mudlavia, so I am in the midst of writing a novel set there.
The real Mudlavia Hotel burned down in 1920. I often wish I could go there. If I could, I know I’d be a much better person.
Elizabeth Stuckey-French is the author of a novel, Mermaids on the Moon, and a collection of short stories, The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa. She teaches at Florida State University. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, and Five Points, among others. Stuckey-French lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
Liza Ward, “Snowbound”
I wrote this story during a bout of loneliness at the end of one very hot summer in Missoula, Montana. The hills had turned brown. Fish struggled in the shallow water of the Clark Fork River, and dark plumes of smoke crowded the horizon. It felt like the end of something. There seemed to be no one anywhere to verify my existence, and I slipped into a strange internal world, dragging this character, Susan, along with me. After a while it was hard to tell who was leading whom. I fantasized about winter, a frozen place white as the moon where new truths emerged, where everything was subjective. I remembered how our garden in Brooklyn looked to me as a girl, buried in snow, our pint-sized terrier hopping through the magic blue light as a confused rabbit might, and the way it felt like the city was yawning. Anything could happen on a snowy day, and I had the feeling that anything could happen in this story. I had no idea where it was going, only that my character was writing her own version of history, assuaging her fear of abandonment with a fictional world where people found each other. She knew she didn’t want to spend her life alone the way her father was going to now that her mother had left. I guess her dream, her invented story, gave her hope.
Liza Ward was born in 1975, and grew up in New York City. Her first novel is Outside Valentine, and her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Antioch Review, Agni Review, Georgia Review, and Best New American Voices. Ward lives in Massachusetts.
Recommended Stories
Ann Darby, “Pity My Simplicity,” Prairie Schooner
Andrea Dezso, “The Numbers,” McSweeney’s
Tamas Dobozy, “The Inert Landscapes of György Ferenc,” Colorado Review
E. L. Doctorow, “Walter John Harmon,” The New Yorker
Stephanie Koven, “The Events Leading up to the Accident,” Antioch Review
Barbara Klein Moss, “Little Edens,” Southwest Review
Alice Munro, “Runaway,” The New Yorker
Paul Murray, “Anubis,” Granta
Julie Orringer, “The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones,” Zoetrope
Michael Redhill, “Long Division,” Zoetrope
Annette Sanford, “One Summer,” New Orleans Review
Shauna Seliy, “Blackdamp,” Alaska Quarterly Review
Katherine Shonk, “The Wooden Village of Kizhi,” Georgia Review
Scott Snyder, “About Face,” Epoch
Jay Teitel, “Luck,” Toronto Life
Publications Submitted
As of this collection, The O. Henry Prize Stories will be published in January rather than in October. The change in schedule has led to a change in title. There was always a difference between the year in which stories were published in magazines and the year in which The O. Henry Prize Stories was published. Although it may appear that we are skipping 2004, in fact, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006, our next collection, will be based on stories originally written in English and published in Canada and the United States in 2004.
Because of production deadlines for the collection, it is essential that stories reach the series editor by November 8 of the year in which they are published. If a finished magazine is unavailable before the deadline, magazine editors may submit scheduled stories in proof or in manuscript. Stories may not be submitted or nominated by agents or writers. Please see our Web site http://www.ohenryprizestories.com for more information about submission to The O. Henry Prize Stories.
The address for submission is:
Professor Laura Furman, The O. Henry Prize Stories
English Department
University of Texas at Austin
One University Station, B5000
Austin, TX 78712–5100
The information listed below was up-to-date as The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 went to press. Inclusion in the listings does not constitute endorsement or recommendation.
580 Split
P.O. Box 9982
Oakland, CA 94613–0982
Julia Bloch, Danielle Unis,
Managing Editors [email protected] www.mills.edu/580Split Annual
96 Inc
P.O. Box 15559
Boston, MA 02215
Julie Anderson, Vera Gold, Nancy
Mehegan, Editors [email protected] www.96inc.com Annual
African American Review
English Department Indiana State University Terre Haute, IN 47809 Joe Weixlmann, Editor http://aar.slu.edu Quarterly
Agni
236 Bay State Road Boston, MA 02215 Sven Birkerts, Editor [email protected] www.bu.edu/agni/Biannual
Alaska Quarterly Review
University of Alaska Anchorage 3211 Providence Drive
Anchorage, AK 99508 Ronald Spatz, Editor [email protected] www.uaa.alaska.edu/aqr Biannual
Alligator Juniper
Prescott College
220 Grove Avenue
Prescott, Arizona 86301
Miles Waggener, Managing Editor
[email protected]
www.prescott.edu/highlights/alligator_juniper.html Annual
American Literary Review
University of North Texas
P.O. Box 13827
Denton, TX 76203–1307
Lee Martin, Editor
[email protected]
www.engl.unt.edu/alr/
Biannual
Another Chicago Magazine
3709 North Kenmore
Chicago, IL 60613
Barry Silesky Editor and Publisher
[email protected]
www.anotherchicagomag.com
Biannual
Antietam Review
41 S. Potomac Street Hagerstown, MD 21740 Philip Bufithis, Editor www.washingtoncountyarts.com Annual
The Antioch Review
P.O. Box 148
Yellow Springs, OH 45387
; Robert S. Fogarty, Editor
www.antioch.edu/review/home.html Quarterly
Appalachee Review
P.O. Box 10469 Tallahassee, Florida 32302 Laura Newton, Mary Jane Ryals,
Michael Trammel, Editors Biannual
Arkansas Review
Department of English and
Philosophy Box 1890
Arkansas State University State University, AR 72467 William M. Clements, General
Editor [email protected] www.clt.astate.edu/arkreview Triannual
Ascent
English Department Concordia College 901 8th Street South Moorhead, MN 56562 W. Scott Olsen, Editor [email protected]
www.cord.edu/dept/english/ascent Triannual
At Length
P.O. Box 594
New York, NY 10185
Jonathan Farmer, Editor
[email protected]
www.atlengthmag.com
Quarterly
Atlanta Review
P.O. Box 8248
Atlanta, GA 31106
Daniel Veach, Editor and Publisher
www.atlantareview.com
Biannual
The Atlantic Monthly
77 North Washington Street
Boston, MA 02114
Benjamin Schwarz, Literary Editor,
and C. Michael Curtis, Senior
Editor (Fiction) [email protected] www.theatlantic.com Monthly
The Baltimore Review
P.O. Box 410
Riderwood, Maryland 21139
Barbara Westwood Diehl, Managing
Editor www.baltimorewriters.org Biannual
Bellevue Literary Review
Department of Medicine NYU School of Medicine 550 First Avenue, OBV-612 New York, NY 10016 Danielle Ofri, Editor-in-Chief www.BLReview.org Biannual
Beloit Fiction Journal
Box 11
Beloit College