Moira McCavana, “No Spanish”
The acquisition of language, which exists at the center of this story, is endlessly fascinating to me. The experience that I’m always hungry for, both in fiction and in my life, is the sensation of passing from a state of disorientation to orientation—that short window in which things just begin to organize themselves around you. When, in a new city, for instance, you enter an alleyway already with the vague sense of where it will deposit you. I grew up surrounded by my grandfather’s paintings of his home, the Spanish Basque Country, and my father’s stories of growing up in Troubles-era Northern Ireland, both of which have heavily influenced my work.
I spent the summer before writing this story living myself in Spanish, learning the way in which language can simulate that alleyway—that anticipation of arrival—over and over again. Of course, in the Basque Country, during this period, the relationship between Spanish and Basque varied from town to town, even from family to family. In “No Spanish,” Basque is the new, unfamiliar language, though always at the back of my mind, and, I hope, lurking in the back of the story, is the notion that for many, many people, that painful transition happened the other way around.
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Moira McCavana was born in 1993 in Boston and raised there. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, she received the Le Baron Russell Briggs Prize Honors Thesis award and the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for her short fiction, which has appeared in The London Magazine and elsewhere. McCavana lives in Madrid, Spain.
Kenan Orhan, “Soma”
I think this story is actually about İzzet’s father. He is the only one who seems to realize that his son is chasing a phantom aspiration. In fact, I too believed İzzet was right in his desire to get an electrical engineering degree to become a turbine mechanic because this was his escape from the mine, from all the terrible things the mine means to İzzet, but I was wrong.
This story is smarter than I am; it is my shortest piece, and I wrote it in a week, so there was very little opportunity for me to get in the way of it. I had to reread it before I could comment on it, and in the rereading since its publication, the ending has taken on a cold suspension, a terrible impossibility for change. İzzet has surrendered himself to the false notion that to be in the air is to be something different, but his father, thinking between bites of watermelon, is acutely aware that it is the same to go up a turbine as it is to go down a mine. Though he might not admit it to İzzet, he believes in his swimming. He is the only one who wants his son to dream bigger, to try to get far, far out of town, to escape from the village, and he tries to articulate this, but he has problems with words; he can’t say it just right. And because of this, I didn’t realize until I reread it that İzzet’s end is a failure. He stakes his relationships in the village, his education prospects, and his future career on a race across the Hellespont only to convince himself that this short lapse from the gravity of the mine is a complete break with it when in reality he is eager to return to the village. He seems to me only alive while balancing on the surface of the water, a rare moment of transcendence that should be not a means to an end but an end in itself. İzzet should become a swimmer; his failure is in never realizing it.
İzzet’s father is unable to cause a change in his son. He can’t speak the spell that would magically alter his son’s destiny. Neither can I; it took me this long just to see that İzzet’s father, the little character at the corner of the story so full of aborted hope, is actually the center around which the fiction orbits. What can we possibly do when our heart tells us there is a right thing to do but this right thing to do is not emotionally accessible to us?
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Kenan Orhan was born in 1993 in Overland Park, Kansas, where he grew up. His stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Common, and elsewhere. He recently finished a collection of stories set in Turkey and is at work on a novel. He lives in Kansas City.
Valerie O’Riordan, “Bad Girl”
At the heart of “Bad Girl” is an exploration of the tangled mess around friendship, sex, vulnerability, and grief. I wrote it partly in response to Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, a novel that I’ve loved for almost twenty years; the complexities of teenage girls’ friendships are an endlessly fascinating topic. I was interested, too, in exploring the aftermath of trauma: in this story, Cheryl’s mother has recently died, and Cheryl is struggling to find a way to understand herself in the wake of that catastrophic loss. At the time I was working on a series of interlinked stories set in a fictional suburb of Manchester, and so the setting—a rather insalubrious pub called the Glory Hole—was already familiar to me, and in fact I went on to write further pieces about many of the more peripheral characters in this story, including one exploring the backstory of Cheryl’s friend Tania. I’m still a little hung up on both characters—perhaps one day they’ll make it into a novel.
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Valerie O’Riordan was born in 1980 and grew up in Dublin, Ireland. She has an MA and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Manchester, and she also studied at Trinity College Dublin. O’Riordan teaches fiction writing at the University of Bolton. Her short stories have been published in Tin House, Unthology, The Lonely Crowd, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, and Fugue. She won the Bristol Short Story Prize, and she is a senior editor at The Forge Literary Magazine and coeditor of the review site Bookmunch. O’Riordan lives in Manchester, England.
Stephanie Reents, “Unstuck”
I have a good friend who has hated her house for as long as I’ve known her, which is going on twenty years. I happen to like her house, not because I don’t see its flaws, but because it has sheltered me during some dark times. She has, too.
At some point, perhaps after my friend described yet another way the house was a bitter disappointment, I decided to memorialize it. Like her, I’m a bit of a contrarian. Of course, I couldn’t make a whole story about its popcorn ceilings and poured-concrete floors. The horror! Something needed to happen, but what? I let my first pages sit for a little while—six months? a year?—until one day when I was bored or disillusioned with some other half-finished project, I reread the beginning and realized it would be really funny if Liza, the protagonist, found herself haunted by a ghost who was making the house that she loathed, and was intent on neglecting, a bit nicer. In fiction, answers always lead to more questions, but that joke kept me writing, even as I gradually learned that the story wasn’t as funny as I initially thought.
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Stephanie Reents was born in 1970 and grew up in Boise, Idaho. She’s the author of a story collection, The Kissing List, and I Meant to Kill Ye, an account of her attempt to come to terms with the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Her awards include a Rhodes Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and the Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship for writing from the Rhode Island Foundation. Her short fiction has appeared in Epoch and Bennington Review, among other journals. She teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Souvankham Thammavongsa, “Slingshot”
Whenever I encountered an old woman in a story she was always unattractive or sick or dying or a burden to those around her. It made me angry to see that. I was also annoyed with romantic stories with a young woman at the center who always gets her man. I wanted to write a love story where not getting your man can feel deep, profound, freeing. I wanted to say love isn’t everything and it isn’t enough. It can fail you even when it’s there.
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Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in 1978 in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Light. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, Noon, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her first story collection, How to Prono
unce Knife, is forthcoming. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Doua Thao, “Flowers for America”
This story has as its source two anecdotes. When my maternal grandmother was dying, we were able to obtain for my aunt, the only one left from either side of my family to have stayed back in Laos, permission to visit on an emergency visa. Obtaining the visa involved a doctor’s written note that said, This patient is dying, and she would like to see her oldest daughter one last time. If at all possible, it is imperative that this daughter’s visit be expedited. While my aunt was here in the States, my mother asked her how she was surviving. My aunt, who is terrified of water, replied that for a living she woke in the dark before dawn and plied the waters of Laos in her narrow fishing boat. To do all of this without a husband, from my vantage point, was a pretty heroic deed.
The second anecdote contains a pot of flowers. When I moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, for graduate school, my mother gave me, of all the things she could think of, a pot of her coveted, special flowers. The superstition behind these flowers, as told by my mother, is that only men could coax life from their bulbs, or, to put it another way, the flowers only grew for men. My mother’s belief in this superstition was underscored by the fact that, when she was first given some bulbs, they refused to grow when planted. The following year, she dug up the bulbs and gave them to my uncle. Under his care, they grew so prolifically that he returned the flowers in a bushel-sized pot to my mother. Due to its unwieldiness—I think now that pot must have been close to seventy pounds of dirt and flowers—my mother kept the flowers outside, and the pot was quickly stolen in broad daylight for the flowers’ medicinal value. These flowers, my mother’s gift when I moved away, were an expression of trust, I see now, that perhaps I, being a son and someone whose curiosity is such that I would even care to ask about a superstition behind a plant, would look after them. When winter arrived and the flowers dropped their petals, I stopped watering them, and the following spring, when I knew there was something I was supposed to do to help bring them back to life, I did nothing at all, and they remained dormant—some too rotted to salvage when I finally dug them up—the rest of my time in Greensboro. It was my aunt’s courage, my mother’s odd choice in a gift, the value of the flowers, and the superstition behind them that I kept returning to, so I wrote this story.
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Doua Thao was born in the Phanat Nikhom refugee camp in Thailand. He first immigrated to Madison, Wisconsin, and then settled in Milwaukee. His writing has appeared in Crab Orchard Review and Reservoir. He lives in Milwaukee.
Weike Wang, “Omakase”
Two years ago, my now-husband and I moved to New York. Every person I met said the city takes some getting used to and I would get used to it in about two years. Now everyone says five years. Once I hit five, they will say ten. I wrote the story when I was at the height of my frustration with the city subway system. The event of getting hit in the face with a shoe happened to me on the L and while rubbing my left cheek, I consoled myself by saying that I would be able to write this someday.
In “Omakase,” a couple goes out for sushi. What makes this specific sushi night different? My husband and I go out to sushi a lot. We usually have a good time. But I thought, let me change this couple and change the good time. Let me change the sushi chef. (The omakase chef we go to is so nice I sometimes have to remind him that I suffer from acute sarcasm.) When I sat down to write the story, I wrote it in four days. My best writing comes when I don’t overwork it. But I did keep reminding myself that I was writing to this idea: in what ways can these three characters interact with one another so that by the end, everyone leaves a bit unsatisfied? After the story came out, I had many responses. Someone asked me if I thought women on the whole overthought. (On the whole? You mean, all four billion of us?) Someone else asked me if I thought men on the whole overexplain. (Similar response.) I didn’t get it, another said, was the story about race? Naturally, questions of gender and race are never simple. And what reads “off” to one may not have any effect on another. While nuance is crucial to fiction, it is often overlooked in real life. Yet if we, as different people, are to find common ground, we need to think about the in-betweens. The question I get asked the most is if the couple stays together. My usual response is, Does that matter? But if the person is adamant, I then ask, Well, what do you think? After the person tells me, I nod, ask another question.
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Weike Wang was born in Nanjing and grew up in China, Australia, Canada, and the United States. She is the author of Chemistry, and her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Kenyon Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as awards from the Whiting Foundation and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35. She lives in New York City.
Liza Ward, “The Shrew Tree”
A heavy wet snow fell one of those last nights my husband and I lived together in rural Montana. The following day was warm, glittery with sunshine, a balmy wind coming over the Swan Range. I went for a walk. I thought maybe I’d just keep walking into the mountains and never come back. I didn’t want to return to the East Coast, where my husband had gotten a grant to farm oysters, but there seemed to be no choice. I made it as far as the top of the hill, where I found a bird with a missing wing flapping around in a futile circle. I wasn’t the kind to look away and keep on walking. Nor was I going to gather it in a box and drive eighty miles to a wildlife sanctuary. At least I wasn’t that kind anymore. I knew what I had to do. I picked up a stone and crushed it.
Soon after leaving the valley, I gave birth to a daughter. I wrote nothing for many years. She went to preschool on the other side of town. The land was wilder over there, tangled with brush and skunk cabbages and a barbwire fence that kept the cows from wandering out of the dilapidated dairy farm. My daughter’s teacher had once lived on the farm but didn’t anymore, because she was too fond of the cows. We met sometimes during the weekends, sitting in tiny chairs at the round tables in my daughter’s classroom. The wood was a screen hiding the farm, which she spoke of with a quiet smile that glinted at the corners with a touch of animosity. Did I know riding a horse was a means of domination, and a weed was only a weed if you didn’t like where it was growing? She fed the robins every season, and kept the mice as pets instead of trapping them. It was from her that I learned about the bitterness of dandelion in a cow’s milk, that you should never toss to a child the empty phrase Good job! It was important for the child to think for herself.
I keep seeing the bird flapping in the snow as I think about the germination of this story. I think about what happens to a girl without confidence, and the preschool teacher who opened my imagination again. She told me a lilac dug up and left exposed for a whole season can still take root and bloom again. Somewhere between the tenacity of the root ball and the bird I killed came Gretel and her story.
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Liza Ward was born in 1975 and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of the novel Outside Valentine. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Best New American Voices 2004, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005, Vogue, AGNI, Tin House, and other publications. She lives in Duxbury, Massachusetts.
Bryan Washington, “610 North, 610 West”
This one happened pretty quickly. I’d been living between Houston and New Orleans at the time, working on a bunch of linked stories. Their protagonist was giving me trouble, I couldn’t really figure him out, so I found myself going further and further into his past and the people who shaped him: chief among them being his mother. And the way she moved through the world. And how that conflicted with everything around her, and how that conflict reverberated in her home. I don’t know if they’d actually say it, but the narrator and his mother are the two people who understand each other best in their lives—so, once I understo
od that, the piece unspooled in a day or two. A gift.
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Bryan Washington has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, One Story, Catapult, and elsewhere. His first collection of stories, Lot, was published in 2019. He lives in Houston, Texas.
John Edgar Wideman, “Maps and Ledgers”
Writing for me is one means of making my way around a world that always changes, a world different each time I look—my story is titled “Maps and Ledgers” because maps and ledgers are reconstructions that perform work similar to work that all stories I write perform for me—keeping track, locating, accounting, managing the chaos of time—maps and ledgers are imagined recordings of the form a world, if it stood still, might assume—to consult a map or ledger is to pretend it could represent a reliable approximation of something that is, itself, reliable—as if the evidence of the senses, the mind, is actually capable of arriving at that certainty expressed when a person exclaims, “Been there, done that”—maps and ledgers are games we play as if the rules and instructions invented for those games might stand outside time, somehow evade or at least circumvent change—though a changing world never ceases to be different each time I look (or don’t look).
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 47