By the time the story reached its climax, I felt that the responsibility was on me in the same way as it was on Valerie. My initial guilt (as well as Valerie’s) prevented me from being a neutral bystander. I needed this child to be saved for my sake, and not just the child’s or Valerie’s. I was so engaged with the story that I felt that it was my peace at stake here.
Most successful short stories have the power to move you emotionally or stimulate you intellectually, or even simply to entertain you. But only a few truly great ones can directly involve you like that, breaking and shaping you into something new.
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Lara Vapnyar came to the United States from Russia in 1994. She is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Goldberg Prize for Jewish fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and Vogue.
Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019
The Writers on Their Work
Alexia Arthurs, “Mermaid River”
Some stories feel closer than others. I wrote “Mermaid River” during my first year in Iowa, where I’d moved for graduate school. I was thinking about a few things: I was twenty-four, and had the terrible sense that my family, or my idea of them as individuals and as a unit, was fracturing. My brother was experiencing the United States as a black man. I was the farthest I had ever been from my mother and two siblings, which was a kind of relief. I was thinking about loving through and in spite of distance. I was also remembering Canarsie, the Caribbean neighborhood I had left behind in Brooklyn. In that place, I’d known Caribbean mothers, like Samson’s mother, who left children behind in the care of loved ones, with the hopes of settling in the United States and eventually sending for them. In writing “Mermaid River,” I was also thinking about tourism and how much of a place and the history of a place is done away with and reimagined for outsiders.
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Alexia Arthurs was born in Jamaica in 1988 and moved with her family to Brooklyn in 2000. She has published short stories in Granta, Small Axe, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, Shondaland, BuzzFeed, and The Paris Review, which awarded her the Plimpton Prize in 2017.
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, “Julia and Sunny”
I wrote the opening of this story several years ago and then put it away for a long stretch of time as other parts of life happened. But it’s always a relief to have something to return to, even if it’s only a few paragraphs, and especially if you haven’t written for a while and are feeling uncertain about how and where to begin again. When I returned to it, I was thinking about how much I enjoy reading stories that consider the overall shape of a thing—a career, a romantic history, the course of a friendship—and how often I reread the work of Alice Munro and Joan Silber to experience this pleasure. I wanted to try to write a story like that, and out of my attempt came this story, which I think may be just as much about the failure to discern an overall shape as it is about the shape itself—in this case, the shape of a marriage. Or the shape of two marriages. Two marriages that seem to share a single shape until it’s revealed that they don’t. With this story I was interested in voice, too; I wondered if a conversational, digressive, lightly offered voice could still convey the deep sense of loss that has compelled its narrator to speak.
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Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Tin House, Glimmer Train, The New Yorker, and The Best American Short Stories. She was born in Houston, grew up in Boston, and now lives in Los Angeles.
Patricia Engel, “Aguacero”
Every Colombian has been touched by the violence of a civil war that lasted over half a century. Though I was raised in the United States, I have known many people who were kidnapped or who’ve had family members kidnapped. In some cases, captives were killed, but in others, victims were eventually released and expected to just go on with their lives, often keeping silent about their imprisonment. The father of one of my best friends was held for five months; I remember the terror the family endured, how they navigated the estrangement once he came home when everything about him, from his appearance to the way he spoke, had changed. I wanted to write about intimate violence and an unlikely friendship, strangers who find comfort in each other for a time, and how, despite our fragility and impermanence, not only our traumas but the people who touch our lives in good ways can remain with us forever.
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Patricia Engel was born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey. She is the author of The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris; and Vida, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Young Lions Fiction Award, and winner of Colombia’s national book award. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her books have been widely translated, and her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and elsewhere. Engel currently teaches creative writing at the University of Miami.
Tessa Hadley, “Funny Little Snake”
Some stories begin with a very decisive seed or insight, but although “Funny Little Snake” has a very particular flavor now, it actually began rather indefinitely. All the extravagant period detail came later on: first of all, I just liked the idea of that conjunction of three females—mother, daughter, and stepmother. It felt almost like a shape I could put down anywhere, and make something interesting. Then next I had that opening, with the buttons, the helpless gesture of the child holding up her arm for fastening. I had round brown buttons like those on a dress myself, when I was a little girl in the 1960s—although nothing in my actual life apart from the buttons and that dress bore any resemblance to the material in the story. My childhood was much safer and more ordinary, thank goodness. From the buttons the whole of the rest of it unfolded. In the original three-women shape I had expected the mother and stepmother to begin in antagonism and end with a warmer mutual insight. But as the character of Marise began to elbow itself so fiercely onto the page, I realized that would be sentimental. Not that the story doesn’t have its sympathy with Marise—some sympathetic insight, into her origins and history. But I knew there was no reconciliation possible between her and Valerie. And that was when I understood that the story must end in high drama—a real rescue from danger, like the one in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, when the Jewish antique dealer smuggles the children out from the house of the wicked bishop. That filmic sequence was my inspiration, in writing the closing pages of the story.
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Tessa Hadley was born in 1956 in Bristol, England, and grew up there. She has written seven novels—Accidents in the Home; Everything Will Be All Right; The Master Bedroom; The London Train; Clever Girl; The Past, which won the Hawthornden Prize; and Late in the Day—and published three collections of short stories, Sunstroke, Married Love, and Bad Dreams. She publishes short stories regularly in The New Yorker, reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books, and is a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. In 2016, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. She lives in London.
Sarah Hall, “Goodnight Nobody”
“Goodnight Nobody” was written after several life-changing events over the last few years—most especially the birth of my daughter and the death of my mother. I also became a single parent during that period. It was a time of emotional extremes and physical difficulty, but also processing the existential nature of these events was incredibly challenging. Fiction doesn’t provide answers to those big questions of life and death, but it can be companionable—for readers and for the writer—in the asking of them.
I was reading Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown to my daughter a lot, and every time I got to the blank page that says “Goodnight nobody” I would feel a kind of existential vertigo. Oddly it wasn’t a wholly unpleasant sensation, more like some kind of exposure of truth. One more event triggered the writing of this particular story. There was a report in the British news about a newborn baby that had been killed by a dog in a northern town close to where I was brought up. How to explain such things? I suppose Jem, the mature questioning child in the story, is trying to simply comprehend mortality. She is, in the end, walking up to a mortuary door by herself. Don’t we all, at some point?
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Sarah Hall was born in 1974 and raised in the Lake District in Cumbria. She received an MLitt in creative writing from St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of five prizewinning novels—Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, Daughters of the North, How to Paint a Dead Man, and The Wolf Border—and two short story collections, The Beautiful Indifference and Madame Zero. Her third collection, Sudden Traveller, will be published in 2019. Hall is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award. She lives in Norwich, Norfolk, England.
Isabella Hammad, “Mr. Can’aan”
While writing “Mr. Can’aan” I remember describing the experience to a friend as “sticky”—the story was coming out with excruciating slowness, at a rate of something like a sentence a day. But while the process was difficult, by the time I reached the finish line and looked back over what I had written, I did not see much I wanted to revise. This was a pleasant surprise at the end of a dark, sticky tunnel.
I did not have a logical conception of the story as I began, only a feeling. I also had a few ideas and influences floating around in my head: the work of the Lebanese artist Walid Raad, certain short stories by Alice Munro, the lives of several Palestinian historians I knew, the films of Olivier Assayas. These four things all had something to say about the life of stories: what stories can “do” in the world, the way they are passed along, how they act upon others. For me that seemed particularly relevant to Palestine. Sometimes it can feel as though Palestine has more substance in the stories people tell about it (to themselves, to others) than it has in reality.
Something else those four influences explored, or at least conjured in me, was a sense of time that wasn’t straightforward or predictable. And from the beginning, “Mr. Can’aan” felt like a story that was going to leap through time.
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Isabella Hammad was born in London. Her work has been published in Conjunctions and elsewhere, and she was the 2018 winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for fiction. Her first novel was The Parisian. She lives in New York.
Caoilinn Hughes, “Prime”
The triggering incident or moment for “Prime” took place when I was a schoolgirl of thirteen or fourteen. Call it twenty years ago. I was a writer by then and I viscerally recall that day: the dizzy, momentous feeling that comes when inspiration (or the catalyst needed to make something decent) drops in. But I only wrote poetry at the time, and I knew that a poem was not the form for what I wanted to render. When I got around to fiction writing in my twenties, I started with the novel and wrote several of those before ever attempting a short story. “Prime” is the second short story I’ve written. It is the only form “Prime” could have taken. After all those years writing poetry and novels, I felt ready to try to realize it on the page. I didn’t know how the story would play out or how it would be told—the span of time, point of view, setting, characters, all of that—I just had the box and the abstract role of a teacher. Everything else arrived by writing slow slowly slow and erasing every false note. Do they really think her coat is made of carpet? I would go back and forth on such things for hours, until I realized that the problem was in thinking of them. I had to enter the circle of we, come what may. The writing process was frightening because the story asks a lot of a reader and I believed (as I wrote it) that it wanted a reader—that we wanted the reader there as a friend—to fill the eighth chair. But readers are not always benevolent, and I was afraid for the children (and for myself) to introduce another unreliable, unpredictable presence into their/our world.
Little did I know how they would turn the tables on their teacher and on the reader both—not to be playful or coy or manipulative or to placate, but to unburden our heavy adult heads, and to demonstrate youth’s wild courage and resilience.
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Caoilinn Hughes was born in Ireland in 1985. Her first novel, Orchid and the Wasp, was shortlisted for the Butler Literary Award. Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence, won the Irish Times’s Shine/Strong Award. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2018, Hughes won the Moth Short Story Prize.
John Keeble, “Synchronicity”
I don’t think the buffalo were in on the start of the story. I think it started being about tractor repair, which is probably a pretty dull subject for many readers, but the buffalo came into it fairly early on. First, it occurred to me that I’d seen a neighbor canning buffalo tongues, a delicacy. It went from there. There were two young buffalo bulls that were kept in a marginal pen on a farm. As they grew older they became fearsome, and there was the place the story was set, eastern Washington, which in that summer was the site of fires. Hundreds of thousands of acres burned and so the desecration that the buffalo as a species had already endured extended incrementally. Then there was the small herd of buffalo from the Kalispel Reservation that passed into the fires. As the writing developed, there came to be people in it, who are always necessary to stories. There was a family who made connections with the two buffalo and for whom the buffalo became expressive of significant things in their natures—foolish pride, misplaced ownership, sadness, and finally despair. An unnamed narrator observes all of it.
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John Keeble was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and raised in Saskatchewan and then in California, and so has dual citizenship. He is the author of six novels, including his most recent, The Appointment: The Tale of Adaline Carson. He is the author of Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound, which won a Washington State Governor’s Writers Day Award. His collection of short stories is Nocturnal America. He was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Keeble’s novel Broken Ground was selected as one of the best books in the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission’s exhibit Literary Oregon, One Hundred Books, 1800–2000. He lives in eastern Washington.
Rachel Kondo, “Girl of Few Seasons”
The story drew its inspiration from my father, whose younger sister Beverly was handicapped by illness when she was very young. Beyond a black-and-white photo taken of her just prior to her illness, I don’t know much about her because my father has said very little. And I don’t think it’s because the memory of her is lost to him, though more than fifty years have passed, but rather the opposite—his experience of Beverly before, his witnessing of his mother’s grief after, all of it remains alive and vivid still. I suppose I feel drawn to those places where pain is exquisite and words are few. I’m interested in a sort of silence, not as a marker of failed communication, but as a possible measure of impossible loss.
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Rachel Kondo was born and raised on Maui, Hawaii. Her most recent writing has appeared in Electric Literature and Indiana Review. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, she now lives in Los Angeles.
Alexander MacLeod, “Lagomorph”
In my head, “Lagomorph” is a story about time and about change and about the decisions we make when we are apportioning the little bit of care we send out into the world. I was interested in the way people love animals differently than they love people and I gave Gunther just a touch of supernatural longevity so that he and the narrator would be lock
ed into a relationship that moved well beyond normal limitations. The unnervingly silent way that rabbits pay attention to everything around them was also important to me. I wanted Gunther to just be there with my couple for a long, long time, a quiet witness, taking it all in. Then, in the end, I wanted to imagine these two people coming together again inside his head. I wanted to see their lives as his memory so that, in some weird reversal, when the two of them couldn’t exist together in any other way, they would eventually end up belonging to him.
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Alexander MacLeod was born in 1972 in Inverness, Nova Scotia, and grew up in Windsor, Ontario. His first book, Light Lifting, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Book Prize, and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The collection was also recognized as a book of the year by the American Library Association, The Globe and Mail, and Amazon.ca. MacLeod lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and teaches at Saint Mary’s University.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 46