by Laura Furman
Helen Simpson, “Diary of an Interesting Year”
It’s always fun when you’re writing to zoom in on what’s uncomfortable—on what causes a silence to fall—and one such touchy subject now is whether we ought to cut back on our rate of consumption for the sake of the future. This suggestion never fails to annoy. Anyway, I wanted to see if I could make interesting fiction from climate change. It’s an undeniably important subject—it’s the elephant on the horizon—but it’s also undeniably difficult, boring (for the nonscientists among us), and horrifying to contemplate. Yes, I thought, that would be really difficult to do, make climate change interesting. Still, I like a challenge, and I went at it from different angles for my fifth story collection, In-Flight Entertainment, treating it as a love story, a dramatic monologue, a satirical comedy, a sales pitch and—the story included here—a dystopian diary. Having said this, I ought to add that I’m not interested in writing polemic. As a reader, I resent fiction that has designs on me. I think the only duty of a writer is to resist writing about what they think they ought to write about—and to write about what stimulates their imagination. Oddly, the subject of climate change did this for me. I sensed dark rich comic pickings, and I wasn’t wrong.
Helen Simpson was born in Bristol, England, in 1956 and grew up near Croydon. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from Oxford with two degrees. She is the author of five collections of stories and a recipient of the Hawthornden Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award. Her collection In-Flight Entertainment will be published in the United States in 2012. She lives in London.
Mark Slouka, “Crossing”
“Crossing” emerged, after a fifteen-year dormancy period, from an act of near-biblical stupidity on my part: in 1994, while crossing a river in the Pacific Northwest with my five-year-old son on my back, I found myself, very quickly, in serious trouble. It didn’t matter that I’d forded the same river many times before without incident; this time, for whatever reason, was different. Even now I don’t like to think about it. There are few things more excruciating than realizing you’ve put your child’s life in danger.
Over the years that followed, I thought about the incident more than once; I knew I wanted to write about it, but I couldn’t find the release, the spring, the image or phrase or note—often dissonant, almost always unexpected—that brings a story to life. Though the organic symbolism of the thing appealed to me, it felt too easy, too finished, inert. So I let it be.
It wasn’t until I came across the anecdote about the medieval priest that flashes through the father’s mind on the story’s last page that I felt the tumblers fall. Of course! I had to leave him midstream, tricked by life, prey once again to his old fears and insecurities. A man poised between his past and his future, between the impossibility of going on and the necessity of it.
On some level, it feels almost ungrateful; I made it out, after all, and today my son could carry me across that river a good deal more easily than I could him. But fiction, I remind myself, is an act of trespass on the territory of the past, and those who have no stomach for it, whose reverence for apparent truths, as opposed to created ones, is too great, probably shouldn’t play.
Both are equally true: We made it. And we’re still, all of us, hip-deep in the current.
Mark Slouka was born in New York City in 1958. He is the author of a collection of stories, Lost Lake; two novels, God’s Fool and The Visible World, which have been translated into sixteen languages; and Essays from the Nick of Time. He is a recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships and is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. His short fiction has appeared there as well as in The Paris Review and Granta, among other publications, and his essays and stories have been anthologized in The Best American Essays and The Best American Short Stories. He has taught at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, and lives outside New York City.
Elizabeth Tallent, “Never Come Back”
The deep background of this story—which may not make itself felt very much in this final draft—are the changes confronting my hometown on the Mendocino coast: old ways of making a living have vanished, and with them the certainties they fostered, so there’s a sense in which people are free to start from scratch but also bewildered by the prevailing scriptlessness. In “Never Come Back” I wanted to write about a young mother who leaves her child and how the grandparents left to care for the child handle an absence they can’t understand but which they inevitably judge. My secret ambition in this story was to kindle empathy for characters whose actions are, on the face of it, indefensible, but which make the deepest kind of sense to them.
Elizabeth Tallent was born in Washington, D.C., in 1954. Her work includes the story collections Honey and Time with Children and the novel Museum Pieces. She teaches in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and lives in California.
Lily Tuck, “Ice”
My husband and I did take a cruise to Antarctica, and since I am both a pessimist and a contrarian, I imagined the worst: the boat hitting an iceberg, sinking, my husband falling overboard, drowning. As it turned out we had a very happy time and, except for the books, the clock, the bottle of sleeping pills, everything that was neatly stacked on our nightstand falling pell-mell to the cabin floor and the obnoxious fellow passenger whose goal it was to drive a golf ball in every country of the world, nothing bad happened. Antarctica is stark and desolate, and despite the presence of birds, penguins, and seals as well as the unexpected beautiful blues of the icebergs, one cannot help but be struck by how insignificant and intrusive the appearance of human beings is in that predominantly white landscape, and I wanted to try to describe how this strange and vaguely hostile environment might affect a long-married couple.
Lily Tuck was born in France in 1939 and lived in South America as a child. She is the author of four novels—Interviewing Matisse or The Woman Who Died Standing Up, The Woman Who Walked on Water, Siam (a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), and The News from Paraguay (winner of the 2004 National Book Award)—a collection of stories, Limbo and Other Places I Have Lived, and a biography, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. Her essay “Group Grief” was included in The Best American Essays 2006. Her novel Probability or I Married You for Happiness will be published in fall 2011. She lives in New York City.
Brad Watson, “Alamo Plaza”
During my family’s leanest years, when I was growing up, we spent our summer vacations (if we got one; sometimes we didn’t, and sometimes they were as brief as three days) on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was always a boy’s disappointment, compared to the Alabama and north Florida coasts, with their natural white sand beaches and comparatively huge waves rolling in. And their much clearer water, very clear and green in north Florida. The real beaches in Mississippi are offshore, on the barrier islands, accessible by private boat or ferry, but we never went out there. We got the Mississippi Sound, which in those days was polluted by bad stuff from plants upriver, by waste from the fishing industry, and I don’t know what-all else. But it did have a charm about it. The whole place seemed calmer, more still, less corrupted by the glitzier and cheaper elements of upscale tourism. The smell—at first alarming and repulsive, then kind of wonderfully rich, a smell you realized was the rank richness of marine life and death—was one I experienced nowhere else, on no other coast, and not in New Orleans or any other coastal city. Except for a grand old hotel or two, most of the lodging was either run-down or modest. And the clientele was pretty much entirely local, Mississippi, with some Louisiana tourists mixed in. So I have fond memories of the place, even though I despised it at the time. These memories, mixed with memories of an imaginatively reclusive childhood, of often feeling like the odd boy out in my own family, were things I tried for a long time to combine in this story. It went into and back out of the desk drawer for many years, as I’d write a draft and fail, put it away, write it again a year or a few later, until it finally felt
right. It feels highly personal, anyway, a story that comes from pretty deep inside. Putting it together, finally, felt like a great and pleasant relief. There was a kind of joyous sadness about it, which I guess is what I often experience when I recall that childhood, that family, mostly gone now.
Brad Watson was born in 1955 in Meridian, Mississippi. His stories have been published in Ecotone, The New Yorker, Granta, The Idaho Review, Oxford American, Narrative Magazine, The Greensboro Review, and The Yalobusha Review, as well as anthologies including The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Story and Its Writer. His story collection Last Days of the Dog-Men received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His novel, The Heaven of Mercury, received the Southern Book Critics Circle Fiction Award (shared with Lee Smith), and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent collection is Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Wyoming and lives in Laramie, Wyoming.
Recommended Story 2011
The task of picking the twenty PEN/O. Henry Prize stories each year is at its most difficult at the end, when there are more than twenty admirable and interesting stories. Once the final choice is made, those remaining are our Recommended Stories, listed, along with the place of publication, in the hope that our readers will seek them out and enjoy them. Please go to our website, www.penohenryprizestories.com, for excerpts from each year’s recommended stories and information about the writers.
Adam Atlas, “New Year’s Weekend on the Hand Surgery Ward, Old Pilgrims’ Hospital, Naples, Italy,” Narrative Magazine.
Publications Submitted
Stories published in American and Canadian magazines are eligible for consideration for inclusion in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Only print editions are considered; that is, online-only publications are not eligible.
Stories must be written originally in the English language. No translations are considered.
Stories may not be submitted by agents or writers. Editors are asked to send the entire issue and not to nominate individual stories.
Because of production deadlines for the 2012 collection, it is essential that stories reach the series editor by May 1, 2011. If a finished magazine is unavailable before the deadline, magazine editors are welcome to submit scheduled stories in proof or manuscript. Publications received after May 1, 2011, will automatically be considered for The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2013.
Please see our website, www.penohenryprizestories.com, for more information about submission to The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.
The address for submission is:
Laura Furman, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
The University of Texas at Austin
English Department, B5000
1 University Station
Austin, TX 78712
The information listed below was up-to-date when The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 went to press. Inclusion in this listing does not constitute endorsement or recommendation by The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories or Anchor Books.
African American Review
Saint Louis University
Humanities 317
3800 Lindell Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 63108
Nathan Grant, editor
aar.slu.edu
quarterly
Agni Magazine
Boston University
236 Bay State Road
Boston, MA 02215
Sven Birkerts
[email protected]
agnimagazine.org
semiannual
Alaska Quarterly Review
University of Alaska Anchorage
3211 Providence Drive
Anchorage, AK 99508
Ronald Spatz, editor
uaa.alaska.edu/aqr
semiannual
Alimentum
PO Box 776
New York, NY 10163
Paulette Licitra and Peter Selgin, editors
[email protected]
alimentumjournal.com
semiannual
American Letters & Commentary
Department of English
University of Texas at San Antonio
One UTSA Circle
San Antonio, TX 78249-0643
Catherine Kasper and David Ray Vance, editors
[email protected]
amletters.org
annual
American Literary Review
PO Box 311307
University of North Texas
Denton, TX 76203-1307
John Tait, editor
engl.unt.edu/alr
semiannual
The American Scholar
1606 New Hampshire Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20009
Robert Wilson, editor
[email protected]
theamericanscholar.org
quarterly
American Short Fiction
PO Box 301209
Austin, TX 78703
Stacey Swann, Editor
americanshortfiction.org
quarterly
ANNALEMMA
Chris Heavener, editor
[email protected]
annalemma.net
semiannual
Another Chicago Magazine
PO Box 408439
Chicago, IL 60640
Jacob Knabb, Michael Meinhardt,
Joris Soeding, editors
anotherchicagomagazine.net
semiannual
The Antioch Review
PO Box 148
Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387-0148 Robert S. Fogarty, editor
antiochreview.org
quarterly
Apalachee Review
PO Box 10469
Tallahassee, FL 32302
Michael Trammell, editor
apalacheereview.org
semiannual
Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies
Department of English and Philosophy
PO Box 1890
Arkansas State University, AR
72467
Janelle Collins, general editor
[email protected]
altweb.astate.edu/arkreview
Arts & Letters
Campus Box 89 Georgia College and State University
Milledgeville, GA 31061-0490
Martin Lammon, editor
[email protected]
al.gcsu.edu
semiannual
The Atlantic Monthly
600 New Hampshire Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20037
Felix DiFilippo, literary editor
theatlantic.com
monthly
Avery
Stephanie Fiorelli, Adam Koehler, Nicolette Kittinger, editors
[email protected]
averyanthology.org
biannual
The Baltimore Review
PO Box 36418
Towson, MD 21286
Susan Muaddi Darraj, senior editor
baltimorereview.org
semiannual
Bellevue Literary Review
Department of Medicine
NYU Langone Medical Center
550 First Avenue, OBV-A612
New York, NY 10016
Ronna Wineberg, JD, senior fiction editor
blr.med.nyu.edu
semiannual
Berkeley Fiction Review
10B Eshleman Hall University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-4500
Caitlin McGuire and Jennifer Brown, managing editors
[email protected]
ocf.berkeley.edu/~bfr
Black Clock
California Institute of the Arts
24700 McBean Parkway
Valencia, CA 91355
Steve Erickson, editor
[email protected]
www.blackclock.org
semiannual
Black Warrior Review
Tuscaloosa, AL 35486
Stephen Gropp-Hess, fiction editor
[email protected]
blackwarrior.webdelsol.com
semiannual
Bloodroot Literary Magazine
PO Box 322
Thetford Center, VT 05075
“Do” Roberts, editor
[email protected]
bloodrootlm.com annual
BOMB
New Art Publications
80 Hanson Place
Suite 703
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Betsy Sussler, editor in chief
[email protected]
bombsite.com
Boston Review
PO Box 425786
Cambridge, MA 02142
Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen, editors
[email protected]