by Junot Díaz
DANIEL J. O’MALLEY’s stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Meridian, and Third Coast, among other publications. He was born and raised in Missouri and currently lives in West Virginia, where he teaches at Marshall University.
• A few summers ago, my friends were out of town, so I was picking up their mail and turning on lights in the evening to make their apartment appear inhabited. Then some days I just more or less inhabited it. I’d go over with a book and a drink and sit for a while. Their apartment was on the second floor, with a screened porch that overlooked my own downstairs apartment across the street. One afternoon I was sitting up there, and I started imagining this boy. He was looking out of a window and he could see an elderly couple on a bridge. The first draft happened quickly. I wrote it there on the porch, on a small pad of paper. For a few weeks I played around with the sentences. About a year later, I did some more tinkering, and the story went on a bit longer so the boy could try to make sense of some things.
KAREN RUSSELL is the author of the story collections St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, the novella Sleep Donation, and the novel Swamplandia! She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.
• Recently, I moved to Oregon, a happily haunted state where the past cohabits with the present—you see this everywhere, in the architecture, in the cemeteries, in the web of trails and campsites. I live in Portland, where Mount Hood is like a senile triangle on our horizon, flickering in and out of view. Last summer, I took my family on a trip to see the stunning Timberline Lodge, a ski resort in the Mount Hood National Forest built by the W.P.A. and the C.C.C. in the 1930s. An army of young men, fighting the nationwide depression by raising a winter wonderland, a fantasy lodge. Black-and-white photographs of these workers’ faces I found poignant and haunting. There is a trapped-in-amber quality to their hope and hunger still sparkling in the past.
What stopped me in my tracks was the ski lift—all of the frozen chairs, hanging in space, mobbed by dragonflies. A chairlift in July is somehow a terrifying sight—another uncanny gift from Oregon. Like those photographs, stare at it long enough, and you are possessed by the lurching illusion that it’s about to start moving . . .
For me, “The Prospectors” is a story about two young women whose hopes are not unlike those of the C.C.C. boys. Our history reveals cycles of boomtowns and ghost towns, greed, optimism, frenzied speculation, collapse, and the resuscitation of hope. I wanted the story to explore what it might feel like for two friends to mature in the middle of such a boom-to-bust cycle. I thought of Clara and Aubby as being inspired by the speculators and adventurers and prospectors of the nineteenth century: the question that Clara asks, “Who would we be, if we lived somewhere else?,” launches them into a sort of co-authored speculative fiction. They are striking out on their own, and the real gold they’re panning for is horizon light.
The word “prospecting” wound up feeling very resonant to me. The idea of staking not just a literal but an existential claim, trying to moor yourself in space. Clara and Aubby do this for each other—their friendship is an anchor. They go to a party where their hosts demand that the young women mint them into reality; what could be more dangerous than refusing to do this for a person? I loved the idea of a story about two friends who survive the painful collapse of a fantasy, of a phantom structure of reality, and live to tell the tale.
YUKO SAKATA’s stories have appeared in Missouri Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Iowa Review, and Vice.com. Born in New York, she grew up in Hong Kong and Tokyo and has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She currently lives in Queens with her husband and young daughter.
• The story began with the setting: Japan, summer, the sound of cicadas thick in the air. I keep returning to Japan as the setting for my stories because I am intrigued by the place and its culture as something simultaneously my own and foreign, and this gives me an awkward yet curious distance from which to explore it as a fictional environment. In it I found Toru, the character similar to myself in temperament and nothing much else, and followed him to the end (albeit many times over).
SHARON SOLWITZ’s collection of stories, Blood and Milk, won the Carl Sandburg Prize from Friends of the Chicago Public Library and the prize for adult fiction from the Society of Midland Authors; it was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Awards for her individual stories, published in magazines such as TriQuarterly, Mademoiselle, and Ploughshares, include the Pushcart Prize, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, the Nelson Algren Literary Award, and grants and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council. A story appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012. Currently her essay on Alice Munro can be found in Writer’s Chronicle, and a story online on the American Literary Fiction website. Her most recent novel, Once, in Lourdes, is under contract. She teaches fiction at Purdue University and lives in Chicago with her husband, the poet Barry Silesky.
• In my grad school days, in a daylong workshop run by Gordon Lish—former editor from Esquire, then at the “red hot center” of the literary universe—participants read the first line of whatever they were working on and Lish allowed them to continue if the line passed muster. My first line, “My sister is not as pretty as I am,” failed on account of adorability (his term). My self-promoting, self-aggrandizing narrator would put a reader off. The story should be told, said Lish, by the less pretty sister. But that pretty woman has always interested me, someone who started life with all the fairy’s gifts.
Fast-forward twenty years, and our son Jesse dying of cancer. After the blank, and the grief, and the intermittent depression, came a time when I wanted to write about Jesse, not by plumbing my memory for details and nuances, but by writing the story of his illness as if it were happening to someone else. I don’t know why; it was all I wanted to write. Now I’m in the midst of a collection of interrelated stories, or maybe it’s a novel in stories, about a fictional family with a boy with cancer. The mother in my book, Theadora, had been, in high school, prettier and smarter than her younger sister.
HÉCTOR TOBAR is the author of four books, including the novels The Tattooed Soldier and The Barbarian Nurseries. His nonfiction work Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of Thirty-three Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a New York Times bestseller; it was adapted into the film The 33. The Barbarian Nurseries was a New York Times Notable Book and won the California Book Award Gold Medal for fiction. Tobar earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of California–Irvine and has taught writing and journalism at Pomona College and the University of Oregon. He is the son of Guatemalan immigrants.
• “Secret Stream” grew out of my long love affair with the city of Los Angeles. Like the story’s protagonists, Sofia and Nathan, I too am a loner who has found respite in solitude by wandering through LA’s peculiar natural and manmade landscapes. The subcultures of stream mappers and bicycling historians actually exist in Southern California: I wrote about them back in my days as a columnist with the Los Angeles Times. The stream itself is real too, but remains unknown to most Angelenos. I’ve always been awed by the implausibility of finding natural springs and flowing groundwater in a place that’s so dry and asphalt-covered. The boy that Sofia and Nathan see building the little bridge over the stream with his father—that’s me, more than forty years ago. I grew up in Hollywood, and playing in a creek in nearby Griffith Park is one of my earliest childhood memories.
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN is an “old head, retired from university teaching.” Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, and the story collection God’s Gym. He is the recipient of two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Rea Award for the Short Story, a MacArthur “genius”
grant, and many other awards.
• It doesn’t ever get any easier to write—why should it—the urge/impulse/need/stamina are the gifts as a writer I value most—even readers less important than the good luck to want to write most mornings when I wake up.
I walk the Williamsburg Bridge lots and lots because it is close to my apartment on the Lower East Side. I walk everywhere around the city but most often the bridge—long—sometimes like pacing in a cell, sometimes like riding a big sky-blue Pegasus. Sport, pastime, destination unknown, nowhere else to escape to, dark tunnel, the light I’m pretty sure won’t be there when tunnel ends. Simple really—very much like the impulse to write a story. I’ve often got no idea where the thought to cross the bridge comes from or where it will land me, but my feet and body parts get a chance to speak along with whatever else happens to be along for the ride that day—Olé—off we go, humping away. Who knows what evil lurks in the minds/hearts of us all. A story desires and sets out to see what is there—and sometimes finds a bridge—with a history, names, walkers, jumpers, memories, etc.—so starts across.
Other Distinguished Stories of 2015
ABEL, HEATHER
Desire and Other Isms. AGNI, no. 82.
ACEVEDO, CHANTEL
The Execution of the Guitar. Epiphany, Fall 2015.
ALMOND, STEVE
Dritter Klasse Ohne Fensterscheiben. Ecotone, no. 19.
ARNOLD, CHRIS FELICIANO
Cracolandia. Kenyon Review online.
BARTON, MARLIN
Watching Kaylie. New Madrid, vol. 10, no. 1.
BAUSCH, RICHARD
The Lineaments of Desire. Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 91, no. 4.
BAXTER, CHARLES
Avarice. Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 91, no. 1.
BLUE, LUKE DANI
Bad Things That Happen to Girls. Colorado Review, vol. 42, no. 3.
BRIERE, TIFFANY
Soucouyant. Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 91, no. 1.
BYERS, MICHAEL
Stone. Cincinnati Review, vol. 12, no. 2.
CANTY, KEVIN
The Florida Motel. Granta, no. 131.
CARDENAS, MAURO JAVIER
Dora and Her Dog. ZYZZYVA, no. 104.
CARL, ALAN STEWART
Exhibitions of the Formerly Living. Fifth Wednesday Journal, no. 17.
CASPERS, NONA
Frontiers. Cimarron Review, no. 190.
CHOUDHRY, ROOHI
The End of Coney Island Avenue. The Normal School, vol. 8, no. 1.
CHOUDHRY, ROOHI
This Is What We Could Have Been. Kenyon Review, vol. 37, no. 6.
CUNNINGHAM, MICHAEL
Little Man. The New Yorker, August 10 & 17.
DAVIS, JENNIFER S.
Those Less Fortunate. Tin House, vol. 16, no. 4.
DOENGES, JUDY
Promised Land. Glimmer Train, no. 93.
DORFMAN, ARIEL
The Gospel According to Garcia. The New Yorker, November 2.
ENGEL, PATRICIA
Ramiro. ZYZZYVA, no. 104.
FENKL, HEINZ INSU
Five Arrows. The New Yorker, August 3.
FITZPATRICK, LYDIA
Safety. One Story, no. 207.
FUENTES, GABRIELLE LUCILLE
The Elephant’s Foot. One Story, no. 211.
GAITONDE, VISHWAS R.
Pigs Is Pigs and Eggs Is Eggs. Iowa Review, vol. 45, no. 1.
GALCHEN, RIVKA
Usl at the Stadium. The New Yorker, October 12.
GALM, RUTH
New Mexico, 1957. Kenyon Review online.
GLAVIANO, ANN
Rapture. Prairie Schooner, vol. 89, no. 1.
GOLD, GLEN DAVID
Animals I Have Known. ZYZZYVA, no. 104.
GOLDIN, LOOMIS ALLYSON
The Seldom Scene. Pleiades, vol. 35, no. 2.
GONZALES, KEVIN A.
Villa Boheme. Ploughshares Solos Omnibus, vol. 3.
GORDON, PETER
Elevator Rides. Southern Review, vol. 51, no. 2.
GREENFELD, KARL TARO
Tracking Gap. ZYZZYVA, no. 103.
GREWAL-KÖK, RAV
The Bolivian Navy. New England Review, vol. 36, no. 4.
GWYN, AARON
Dead Right There. Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 91, no. 1.
HADERO, MERON
Mekonnen aka Mack aka Huey Freakin Newton. Boulevard, no. 91.
HANES, KEN
I Am What I Was. Massachusetts Review, vol. 56, no. 3.
HEINY, KATHERINE
Cranberry Relish. Chicago Quarterly Review, vol. 19.
HORROCKS, CAITLIN
Mermaid and Knife. Gulf Coast, vol. 27, no. 1.
JANSMA, KRISTOPHER
Chumship. ZYZZYVA, no. 105.
JOHNSON, ADAM
Interesting Facts. Harper’s Magazine, June.
JONES, EMILY K.
American Sign Language. Redivider, vol. 12, no. 2.
KING, LILY
When in the Dordogne. One Story, no. 212.
KING, STEPHEN
A Death. The New Yorker, March 9.
KING-SANCHEZ, TRACY M.
That Sigourney-Weaver Thang. The Normal School, vol. 8, no. 1.
KOKERNOT, SARAH
Pleasure to Make Your Acquaintance. Crazyhorse, no. 87.
KRISHNA, PRAVEEN
Efficient Breaches: A Romance. Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 91, no. 4.
KROUSE, ERIKA
The Pole of Cold. One Story, no. 204.
LAWSON, APRIL AYERS
Vulnerability. ZYZZYVA, no. 104.
LENNON, J. ROBERT
Breadman. The New Yorker, January 19.
LOSKUTOFF, MAXIM
Come Down to the Water. Southern Review, vol. 51, no. 3.
LOUIS, LAURA GLEN
From the Museum of Found Things. Antioch Review, vol. 73, no. 3.
LOVAAS ISHIHARA, MATEAL
Crossing Harvard Yard. New England Review, vol. 36, no. 4.
MAAZEL, FIONA
Dad’s Just a Number. Ploughshares, vol. 41, no. 2.
MAKKAI, REBECCA
The Museum of the Dearly Departed. Iowa Review, vol. 45, no. 1.
MANNING, TERRANCE, JR.
Before All the Laughing Left. Witness, vol. 27, no. 1.
MARRA, ANTHONY
The Grozny Tourist Bureau. Zoetrope: All-Story, vol. 19, no. 3.
MATOS, NICOLE
The Unbroken Child. American Short Fiction, vol. 18, no. 59.
MCDERMOTT, ALICE
These Short, Dark Days. The New Yorker, August 24.
MCGUANE, THOMAS
The Driver. The New Yorker, September 28.
MCMILLAN, ERIC
What Is This You Do. Witness, vol. 28, no. 1.
MCPHEE, MARTHA
Magic City. Tin House, vol. 17, no. 12.
MOGELSON, LUKE
Peacetime. The New Yorker, April 27.
MURPHY, YANNICK
Caesar’s Show. Conjunctions, no. 65.
MUSTAFAH, SAHAR
Failed Treaties. Bellevue Literary Review, vol. 15, no. 2.
NARAYANAN, KALPANA
The Bachelor Father. Granta, no. 130.
NARDONE, MAI
Stomping Ground. American Short Fiction, vol. 18, no. 59.
NETTESHEIM, TINA
Everybody. Narrative.com
OATES, JOYCE CAROL
Fleuve Bleu. Kenyon Review, vol. 37, no. 5.
OKPARANTA, CHINELO
Accent Reduction. StoryQuarterly, no. 48.
O’NEILL, TRACY
Her Lousy Shoes. Granta, no. 131.
PALMA, RAUL
Eminent Domain. Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 32, nos. 3 & 4.
PANCIERA, CARLA
The Kind of People Who Look at Art. New England Review, vol. 36, no. 2.
PATE, JAMES
The Fire Breathers. Pembroke Magazine, no. 47.
PEEBLES, FRANCES DE PONTES
The Crossing. Zoetrop
e: All-Story, vol. 18, no. 4.
PHETTEPLACE, DOMINICA
The Story of a True Artist. ZYZZYVA, no. 105.
PIERCE, THOMAS
Tarantella. Zoetrope: All-Story, vol. 19, no. 1.
PRITCHARD, MELISSA
Mrs. Wisdom. Southwest Review, vol. 100, no. 4.
PUCHNER, ERIC
Mothership. Tin House, vol. 16, no. 3.
QUATRO, JAMIE
Wreckage. Ecotone, no. 19.
RADIN, ROBERT
Live Action English. Apple Valley Review, vol. 10, no. 1.
ROMM, ROBIN
Ars Parentis. ZYZZYVA, no. 103.
RUFFIN, MAURICE CARLOS
The One Who Don’t Say They Love You. Iowa Review, vol. 44, no. 3.
SEARS, ELIZABETH
The Interrogator Recites a Love Song. Witness, vol. 27, no. 1.
SHEKAR, SUJATA
Akola Junction. StoryQuarterly, no. 48.
SMITH, GRACE SINGH
The Promotion. Santa Monica Review, vol. 27, no. 1.
SOLIS, OCTAVIO
Sonia’s New Smile. Chicago Quarterly Review, no. 19.
SUNDER, SHUBHA
Jungleman. Narrativemagazine.com.
SUNDER, SHUBHA
The Footbridge. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 54, no. 1.
SWAMY, SHRUTI
A Simple Composition. AGNI, no. 81.
TORDAY, DANIEL
A Dispatch from Mt. Moriah. Glimmer Train, no. 93.
TRAN, AN
A Clear Sky Above the Clouds. Southern Humanities Review, vol. 49, no. 1.
TROY, JUDY
Sorry. Kenyon Review, vol. 37, no. 6.
VAN DEN BERG, LAURA
Volcano House. American Short Fiction, vol. 18, no. 60.
VAN REET, BRIAN
The Chaff. Iowa Review, vol. 45, no. 1.
WANG, MICHAEL X.
Further News of Defeat. New England Review, vol. 36, no. 2.
WANG, XUAN JULIANA