▪ I’ve always been interested in the Civil War—some of my earliest memories, in fact, may involve flipping fascinatedly through my older brother’s Civil War cards, a staggeringly gory 1962 Topps series that uniformly horrified parents—but I’ve resisted for all these years writing about it because it’s often seemed to me that there’s something unpleasantly precious about the way the subject is often treated. So I was just doing what I usually do—reading bizarrely arcane nonfiction, in this case men’s and women’s Civil War letters—when I was struck by an aspect of them that seemed shockingly relevant to the unhappy position in which we find ourselves today. Even in the very last days of the war, after all of that suffering and all of those losses, letter after letter articulated its conviction that come what may, the South and the North would never reconcile their positions when it came to race, and that the abyss that had opened up in American civic life was never going to close. One Southern woman’s bitter remark gave me such a jolt that it kick-started my entire story. She wrote “The breach between us is so wide that by the war’s end the South can only be all Yankees or no Yankees at all.”
The intensity of the sense that so many Northerners and Southerners shared that nothing had been solved, and that this problem in all likelihood never would be solved, was a little stunning to me. At one point in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Boss Jim Gettys, the protagonist’s nemesis, tells him, “If it was anybody else, I’d say what was going to happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you’re going to need more than one lesson. And you’re going to get more than one lesson.” How had we managed as a country to go through five years of agony with more than three-quarters of a million casualties while still ending up having learned so little? That kind of maddeningly self-destructive mulishness has always attracted me as a subject. It’s also starting to seem, dispiritingly, like one of our central characteristics as a country. There followed, then, one of my usual bathysphere descents into more focused arcane reading, after which I found myself doing what I could to imagine myself inside that recalcitrant Southerner’s position.
MONA SIMPSON has published six novels and still wants to be a writer.
▪ In my twenties, I had two friends who studied trauma: a woman whose research centered on victims, and her fiancé, who put up flyers around campus to attract rapists, without using the word rape. Like many social science studies, it claimed to be about something else, perhaps male sexuality. His questionnaire used the legal definition of rape but never used the word; I remember the phrase “up to and including the use of force.” Occasionally, at university events, a student play, for example, they would see a student they both knew; a favorite from one of the woman’s classes turned out to be one of her fiancé’s rapists. Once married, the newly minted PhDs set up practices. At one point the husband led a group of men on Rikers Island, all of whom except one had killed their mothers. The other had murdered his grandmother with an antique chair. All were victims of sexual abuse.
Until then, I’d reflexively assumed the logic of the final two lines of Auden’s stanza: Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.
But damage, it turns out, is not always reciprocated. My friends the young therapists told me about the vast number of people, a majority, they believed, who spent their lives containing the trauma they’d endured, working not to pass it on.
My interest in the idea of this containment of destructive desire started there, with this work to which my friends have now devoted their lives.
I read research, followed online communities.
Of course, much of what I learned didn’t make it into the story.
JENN ALANDY TRAHAN was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from the University of California, Irvine, with a BA in English and went on to earn her MA in English and MFA in fiction from McNeese State University. It would be cool to be one of those fancy authors and write that she, her husband, her daughter, and two dogs currently divide their time between Los Altos, California, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, but that would not be true. Jenn is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where she was a 2016–18 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction.
▪ Somewhere I read that Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, kept his headphones in to listen to music until the last possible moment before getting into the pool and did this throughout his entire career. There’s that great meme of him in the midst of this prerace ritual at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, getting in the zone. Now, I’m no Michael Phelps, but instead of listening to Future’s “Stick Talk,” I had been rereading The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris to get pumped before a graduate workshop deadline. At the time, I was reflecting on how I killed the majority of my twenties making self-destructive decisions, befriending people who didn’t really care about what happened to me, and trying to impress people who would never see or value the real me. I had recently separated from my first husband and also felt ashamed for being en route to divorce, I felt ashamed for chasing my impractical dreams in graduate school, the list goes on and on. I was tired of feeling ashamed. I wanted to conjure what I had lost over the years: a sense of pride about who I am and where I come from. Out came some notes about Vallejo and a group of young women during a specific time where they felt the strongest and proudest, mainly because they were figuring out how to endure life together and play for the same team. I was still wallowing in self-doubt, however, and my classmate and homie, Sean Quinn, encouraged me to stop beating myself up in front of my laptop and to get out of the house. We ended up at a downtown Lake Charles bar, the now-defunct Dharma. This is where I met Glenn Trahan. Glenn, a Marine, had a swagger about him. His rough-around-the-edges yet good-natured vibe instantly reminded me of the Vallejo boys I grew up with even though Glenn grew up in Cameron, Louisiana. I also got the sense that Glenn wasn’t interested in being anyone else but—unapologetically—himself. Suddenly I had the rest of the words and a story for that workshop deadline; Brent Zalesky materialized as the missing piece. That first draft of this story, originally titled “Take Us Back to Vinyl,” wanted to explore the transportive quality of music and had a thread that constantly pitted the husbands of these women against their memories of Brent Zalesky. I would have loved to have had references to Tupac, The Conscious Daughters, Too $hort, Luniz, Mac Dre, Green Day, and the Smashing Pumpkins in it too, but it became clear that it wasn’t so much about the music of my adolescence, husbands who were not Brent Zalesky, or the rediscovery of vinyl as it was about the indomitable spirit of these young women and the spirit of Brent Zalesky. To echo Violet Lucca on the Harper’s podcast discussing “They Told Us Not to Say This,” Brent Zalesky isn’t so much the object of desire as the object that the “we” of the story strives to be.
The story is very much a valentine to Vallejo, a valentine to the people I grew up with at St. Basil School, and a valentine to my best friends who have stuck by my side through the years, no matter what (I’m looking at you, Marc Martello and James Cho). You could say it’s also a valentine to Brent Zaleskys everywhere—people who inspire you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do, people who show up to watch you play and convince you of your strength and value when others want to insist that you are weak or that you don’t belong. In this way you could say that Adrian Kneubuhl at Harper’s is a Brent Zalesky, and I’m incredibly grateful to him for teaching me how to not only grow as a writer, but as a person. Thank you, Adrian, for encouraging me to listen to my story and my heart.
You could also say this story is a valentine to my muse and my rock, Glenn Trahan, and to my role models—the uplifting professors I’ve been incredibly lucky to learn from at Irvine (Alex Espinoza, Michelle Latiolais, and Lisa Alvarez), McNeese (Chris Lowe, Amy Fleury, Dr. Rita Costello, and Dr. Bärbel Czennia), and Stanford (Dr. Adam Johnson, Elizabeth Tallent, and Chang-rae Lee). I try to emulate all of them in my own classroom and strive to be a Brent Zale
sky on the bleachers for my students—and for my own daughter, Teagan, though I’m fully aware that just by virtue of being her mom, alas, she will never think that I’m cool.
WEIKE WANG is the author of the novel Chemistry, and her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award, a Whiting Award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 prize. She currently lives in New York City.
▪ Stories come to me in waves. I will have an idea, usually a setup, and then in the months after, build out and then in (characters, conflict, place). But all of this is still in my head. For “Omakase,” my husband and I had just gone out for sushi. The chef there was not the chef in this story. The “real” chef was actually perfectly sweet and normal. We made small talk. He told us about the type of fish we were eating and the kind of tools he used. We asked questions and had a good time. Yet what was odd about the meal was that for the entire night my husband and I were the only customers. I just found that setup interesting and rich. What could happen if a couple came here and the chef was slightly off—jilted, perhaps—and overshared as people do when no one is around? How intimate could a conversation get? How much do we really know about each other? And what kind of history goes into an interaction that seems fine and easy on the surface? I thought about the story for over half a year. When I sat down to write it, it was done in a week. Then edits, another week. But the core did not change. Nor did the setup.
Other Distinguished Stories of 2018
Ackerman, Diane
A Visit to Frederik Ruysch’s Cabinets. Conjunctions, 71.
Allingham, Sam
The Intermediate Class. The New Yorker, April 2.
Araki-Kawaguchi, Kiik
Our Beans Grow Fat upon the Storm. Electric Lit, no. 310.
Arthurs, Alexia
Mermaid Rivers. The Sewanee Review, vol. CXXVI, no. 2.
Batkie, Sarah
Departures. One Story, issue 241.
Bergman, Megan Mayhew
Inheritance. The Sewanee Review, vol. CXXVI, no. 4.
Berndt, Nini
Predator. The Southampton Review, vol. XII, no. 2.
Berry, Wendell
A Clearing. The Hudson Review, vol. LXXI, no. 3.
Bossert, Gregory Norman
The Empyrean Light. Conjunctions, 71.
Brinkley, Jamel
I Happy Am. Ploughshares, vol. 44, no. 1.
Brinkley, Jamel
Wolf and Rhonda. American Short Fiction, vol. 21, issue 66.
Brown, Jason
The Last Voyage of the Alice B Toklas. The Missouri Review, vol. 41, no. 3.
Brown, Karen
Spill the Wine. One Story, issue 246.
Campbell, Caitlin
Quarterway House. Boulevard, no. 100.
Challa, Pankaj
Passengers. The Iowa Review, 48/2.
Chang, Lan Samantha
The Cottage. Freeman’s.
Chatagnier, Ethan
Dentists. Glimmer Train, issue 103.
Choate, Hunter
The Mammoth Hunter. West Branch, no. 87.
Coake, Christopher
Getaway. Portland Review, vol. 64.
Dandicat, Edwidge
Without Inspection. The New Yorker, May 14.
Dermont, Amber
So What If I Love You That’s None of Your Business. The Iowa Review, 47/3.
Diaz, Hernán
1,111 Emblems. Playboy, September/October
Djanikian, Ariel
Happiness Is on the Way. West Branch, no. 87.
Domet, Sarah
With Whom. Bridge Eight, issue 7.
Drager, Lindsey
Of Breadcrumbs and Constellations. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 57, no. 3.
Eisenberg, Emma Copley
Forty-Four Thousand Pounds. The Common, issue no. 15.
Eisenberg, Emma Copley
Mama. ZYZZYVA, no. 113.
Engel, Patricia
Aguacero. Kenyon Review, vol. XL, no. 3.
Fitzpatrick, Caitlin
The Laws of Motion. Colorado Review, 45.1.
Ford, Elaine
The Briggait. Water-Stone Review, vol. 21.
Ford, Kelli Jo
Hybrid Vigor. The Paris Review, no. 227.
Ford, Richard
Displaced. The New Yorker, August 6 & 13.
Freudenberger, Nell
Rabbits. The Paris Review, no. 226.
Greenfeld, Karl Taro
Lot 14. Agni, 87.
Greenfeld, Karl Taro
Station 4. New England Review, vol. 39, no. 3.
Groff, Lauren
Under the Wave. The New Yorker, July 9 & 16.
Hansen, Michaela
The Devil in the Barn. American Short Fiction, vol. 21, issue 67.
Heuler, Karen
The Year of His Father. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 57, no. 4.
Hoffman, Alice
The Witch of Chelsea. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 4.
Holladay, Cary
Carbon Tet. The Southern Review, vol. 54, no. 10.
Howard, Tom
Fierce Pretty Things. Indiana Review, vol. 40, no. 2.
Jackson, Jillian
A Leo, Like Jackie O. The Iowa Review, 48/1.
Jackson, Molly
Big Man. Santa Monica Review, vol. 30, no. 2.
Janes, Perry
Terrariums. Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 57, no. 3.
Janno, Abdullahi
Heirloom. Water-Stone Review, vol. 21.
Jen, Gish
No More Maybe. The New Yorker, March 19.
Jensen, Samuel
Aperture. Cimarron Review, issue 204.
Kalotay, Daphne
The Archivists. Consequence, vol. 10.
Kim, Hannah H.
Listen. Kenyon Review, vol. XL, no. 1.
Koekkoek, Taylor
The Wedding Party. The Iowa Review, 47/3.
Lang, Jameelah
Different Animals. The Cincinnati Review, 15.1.
Lahiri, Jhumpa
The Boundary. The New Yorker, January 29.
Li, Yiyun
A Flawless Silence. The New Yorker, April 23.
Lin, Chia-Chia
Practicing. The Paris Review, 224.
Luchette, Claire
New Bees. Ploughshares, vol. 43, no. 4.
Lunstrum, Kirsten Sundberg
Endlings. Ploughshares, vol. 44, no. 3.
Lunstrum, Kirsten Sundberg
Where Have the Vanishing Girls Gone? North American Review, vol. 303, no. 3.
Machado, Carmen Maria
Mary When You Follow Her. Virginia Quarterly Review, 94/2.
Makana Clark, George
Pluto. Glimmer Train, issue 101.
Maren, Mesha
Somewhere South of Wichita. Crazyhorse, no. 93.
McCorkle, Jill
The Lineman. Ecotone, no. 24.
McKanna, Rebecca
Interpreting American Gothic. Colorado Review, vol. 45, no. 2.
Mendelson, Lailee
So, the Cold War Is Over. The Southern Review, vol. 54, no. 1.
Millhauser, Steven
Guided Tour. Tin House, vol. 19, no. 3.
Morley, Grayson
The Henchman. The Iowa Review, 48/2.
Moses, Jennifer Anne
The Goy. Image, no. 98.
Myers, Les
Beth Nine. Glimmer Train, issue 104.
Nadelson, Scott
Perfect Together. Chautauqua, issue 15.
Nadelson, Scott
Sweet Ride. Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 35, nos. 1 & 2.
Newman, Leigh
Slide and Glide. Tin House, vol. 19, no. 4.
Nugent, Benjamin
Safe Spaces. The Paris Review, no. 225.
O’Connor, Stephen
Coyotes. Conjunctions, 71.
Ohlin, Alix
O’Neill, Joseph
The First World. The New Yorker, July 2.
Orner, Peter
The Return. Conjunctions, 70.
Palacio, Derek
La Lucha. Cimarron Review, 203.
Pearson, Joanna
The Whaler’s Wife. Colorado Review, 45.3.
Pease, Emily
Submission. Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 34, nos. 3 & 4.
Pinkerton, Allison
The Bell Game. Image, no. 97.
Porter, Andrew
Vines. The Southern Review, vol. 54, no. 3.
Ramspeck, Doug
Balloon. The South Carolina Review, vol. 51.1.
Rash, Ron
L’Homme Blessé. Ploughshares, vol. 44, no. 2.
Rea, Amanda
Faint of Heart. One Story, issue 237.
Rutherford, Ethan
Ghost Story. Tin House, vol. 20, no. 1.
Santantasio, Christopher
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 45