The Best American Short Stories 2015
Page 45
One can find beginnings in numerous places, of course, but I recall being at a reading in 2010 and a woman in the audience asking me why I was so obsessed with parents losing their children. I had no good answer for her. I have never lost a child and, at that stage, never even lost a parent. But it struck me that the language of my attempted reply was hampered by the fact that there was no single word for a parent who had lost a child. Odd, given that the English language has (depending on how you classify a word) anywhere from a quarter-million to a million words, and the fact of losing a child is such a deeply traumatic event. Do we not have a specific word precisely because it is so harrowing? This lack of a proper word seemed like an almost hymn-singing absence.
I began to ask people if they knew of an exact word that might work. Most languages failed. There was a phrase in Sanskrit and I learned later that there were words in Arabic as well, but I thought the Hebrew word sh’khol was the closest. It was so deeply onomatopoeic as well, with the sh implying silence and the khol having a distressing sharpness. I hungered to build a story around it.
There were other things I wanted to explore as well. I have long wanted to write about Ireland’s dwindling Jewish community, especially in the context of the collapse of the economy there. Also, I had begun to hear a lot of stories about autistic children and the difficulties parents were having with adopted children. What fascinated me was the unknown history: how whole lives get absorbed into new landscapes and indeed new mythologies. I also wanted to sneak in a few references to other countries, so while the story was to unfold in the West of Ireland, it also takes place in Russia and the Middle East, all stories funneling themselves into one story.
So, all of these things became a collision of obsessions.
Still, the trouble with fiction is that it often makes too much sense, and we allow our obsessions to narrow themselves. Characters with their conscious actions, plotlines unrolling themselves in inexorably stable ways, everything neat, ordered, controlled. You always want to keep the critical heckler alive in yourself. I found myself wanting to write a story that would be grounded in action, but still elusive, tenebrous, and certainly unfilmable. Nothing is ever, eventually, found out.
Funnily enough I think it’s one of the first times I’ve put a mobile phone in a story. I wanted to see how I could get rid of the furniture of the modern world.
ELIZABETH McCRACKEN is the author of five books, the most recent of which, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, won the 2014 Story Prize. She teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.
• Years ago, I was noodling around on a novel about a woman who disappeared from a suburban street, and I wondered where she might have gone to. This was the kind of idle wondering that is really procrastination: maybe I’ll come up with something more interesting than the book I’m working on now. One of the possibilities: a cult in Canada, centered around a girl who’d sustained a traumatic brain injury, whose mother declared her a saint.
That idea stayed in my head, faint but persistent, a song I couldn’t quite remember. More than ten years later, I was on leave from my teaching job, trying to finish a collection of stories. I was writing at a great rate, story after story. Not since I’d been in graduate school had I had the thought Need to work on the next thing, but what, what? Toward the end of the semester, I remembered the brain-injured girl, but now—having become a parent myself in the years that had passed—I was interested in the parents. Generally I know the shape of a story when I begin it, but this one I didn’t, which is possibly why it’s so long. It was the last story I wrote in the collection.
Also, I once had a French personal trainer named Didier who did take an inexplicable dislike to me, and I am delighted to have my revenge in these pages.
THOMAS McGUANE is a member of the American Academy of Arts and letters, a National Book Award finalist, and the recipient of numerous writing awards. His stories and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and The Best American Sports Writing. The author of fifteen books, he lives with his family on a ranch in Montana.
• I started out with some vague ideas about the energy industry, about a more pastoral version of the West, and about the skills learned through agriculture, and how they would finally clash. This was in danger of remaining pretty abstract, pretty ideological, not to mention uninteresting until occupied by human beings, characters I had on hand; and my feeling for the country I was talking about. The energy industry and its taxation on the earth is concentrated in specific places. The extraction of oil from shale through fracking has befallen parts of North Dakota and Montana. Its profits are astronomical. Few dare to stand up in the face of this tidal wave of money. The arrival of hookers, drug gangs, and gunmen in guileless prairie towns and their credulous boosters has been unspeakable. You need to see such broad things through the eyes of individuals in order to make plausible fiction. As usual, this often calls upon a writer’s capacity for finding voices for the voiceless. Nothing new about that, but it can be a challenge when, as in the case of “Motherlode,” there is such extraordinary distance between these lives and the forces that rule them.
MAILE MELOY is the author of two novels, two story collections, and a young adult trilogy. Her story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It was one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the year. She has received the PEN/Malamud Award, the E. B. White Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Paris Review. She grew up in Helena, Montana, and lives in Los Angeles.
• There are sometimes elements floating in the back of my mind that I want to use, long before I ever figure out how to do it. The story from the past in “Madame Lazarus” was one of those: I wanted to write about the strangeness of life in postwar France, where those who survived, whether they had resisted the German occupiers or collaborated, stayed out of the way or hunted the resisters down, were all living alongside one another. But I hadn’t found a way in; it was too big and uncontrollable a subject. Then I started writing the story of a man trying to resuscitate a small dog, and I realized that there was space inside it for the other story, and they each made the other possible.
I also learn things about stories after they’re finished. As soon as “Madame Lazarus” was published, I started getting letters and e-mails from friends and strangers about the deaths of beloved dogs. They were beautiful, heartbreaking stories, and I hadn’t expected them. I thought the story was about human illness and aging, the breakdown and betrayal of the body (and, in the past, of a country). I thought those were the things people would respond to, but I was wrong. In the outpouring of grief, I realized that people’s love for their dogs is very pure, when there’s little in love that is pure. The responsibility for a dog is total, and the sense of failure when they die is enormous. Other loves are guarded—the character’s love for his children, his ex-wife, his partner, the boy in the past, the housekeeper—but the love for the dog isn’t, and his inability to save that one pure thing is at the heart of the story. Readers knew it when I didn’t.
SHOBHA RAO is the author of the forthcoming collection of short stories An Unrestored Woman. Her work has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Water~Stone Review, PoemMemoirStory, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a residency at Hedgebrook and is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, as well as a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She lives in San Francisco.
• This story is part of a collection that focuses on the Partition of India and Pakistan. I had been working on the collection for some time when I was awarded a residency at Hedgebrook, on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. While there—housed in a lovely cabin overlooking Useless Bay—I knew I wanted to explore a moment of terrifying conflict, and the choices we are forced to make during such moments. I also knew I wanted to write it in the guise of a relationship between a middle-aged woman an
d a young boy. I wanted the relationship between them to be platonic, yet intense. While walking along the shores of Useless Bay, the sentence “I was widowed long ago” occurred to me. I’m not sure why, or how, perhaps the wind, the shimmering water, the clouded glimpses of a faraway island. Still, it stayed with me, and I thought of all the marriages I have known, and of how, in so many of them, widowhood comes long before a death. It didn’t seem sad to me, certainly not tragic: we mourn the people we have been, we mourn the people we are with, we mourn what the years have made us. It is life; it is the basic machinery of life. Once that aspect was decided, to put the woman and the boy on a train, to have that train attacked, to have the woman choose the boy over the husband, and then to have the train burned to the ground, all came relatively quickly. Violence, after all, is not difficult. Humanizing that violence is what is difficult.
JOAN SILBER is the author of seven books of fiction, including Fools, longlisted for the National Book Award and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Size of the World, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction; and Ideas of Heaven, finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. She’s also the author of The Art of Time in Fiction. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program.
• When Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, I heard a radio report about older residents of housing projects who impressed volunteers with how well they managed without electricity or water. (My neighborhood, the Lower East Side, was in the dark zone, so I knew what they dealt with.) I began to think about self-reliance and the situations that call it forth, and the character of Kiki started to form. I had wanted for a while to get Turkey—a place I’ve happily visited a few times—into a story. And I wanted Kiki viewed by a younger female character, with her own ideas about risk and frontiers. Once I’d given Reyna a boyfriend at Rikers Island, I saw the story heightening. I wanted the two women to understand each other just fine but view each other across a great divide, where neither envies the other. I assumed “About My Aunt” was done when I finished it, but it has become the first chapter of a novel.
ARIA BETH SLOSS is the author of Autobiography of Us, a novel. Her short fiction has been published in Glimmer Train, Five Chapters, Harvard Review, and One Story, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Iowa Arts Foundation, the Yaddo Corporation, and the Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in New York City.
• I am not a natural storyteller. By which I mean narrative—the spine around which a story is built—does not come easily to me. Construction is slow, laborious, feasible only after I’ve scored some image or scrap of dialogue with a thousand tiny lines, trying to see if it will bleed.
In this case, I got lucky. A few weeks after my daughter was born, I picked up Alec Wilkinson’s The Ice Balloon, an account of the nineteenth-century inventor S. A. Andrée’s ill-fated attempt to reach the North Pole via hot air balloon. I was bone-tired, half-drunk on hormones and joy. In other words, primed. For days, that image dogged me: a balloon fueled by ambition, sailing over Arctic tundra.
Not long after, my husband went back to work. My days retained their strange new softness, the baggy shape of time delineated by feeding, washing, and soothing. Men leave, I told a friend, incredulous. Women can’t. Patently false, but I had my blood. Not long after, I sat down and began to write.
LAURA LEE SMITH is the author of the novel Heart of Palm. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, as well as New England Review, the Florida Review, Natural Bridge, Bayou, and other journals. She lives in Florida and works as an advertising copywriter.
• I really like cars. I don’t know much about them, but I grew up in a family where most of the men loved and worked on cars, and I married a man who shares that passion. I wanted to write a story about a car, and I remembered that when I was much younger—twenty-one? twenty-two?—I almost bought a used Corvair. I had money down on it and everything, but my father talked me out of it, citing the instability of the car’s rear-engine design. We argued about it. It was a beautiful old car, white with a red-leather interior, and I wanted it even though I knew it might be unsafe. In the end I lost the argument, and the kind lady who had taken my deposit gave me back my $200. I ended up buying a Dodge Challenger (what a name!—another car story one day, perhaps), but I never forgot that Corvair. So when I started playing with ideas for a car story I decided to give that latent desire for a Corvair to a character and see what would happen. Once I had Theo on the road, moving southward through the Florida heat on a quest for this car that he unreasonably, irrationally wants, the story started to tell itself. In reading up on some of the car’s details, I stumbled across the infamous Ralph Nader judgment that the Corvair was “unsafe at any speed.” I thought it would make a great title.
JESS WALTER is the author of eight books, most recently the novels Beautiful Ruins (2012) and The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009) and the story collection We Live in Water (2013). He was a National Book Award finalist for The Zero (2006) and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Citizen Vince (2005). His fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2012, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Esquire, and many others. He lives with his family in Spokane, Washington.
• “Mr. Voice” grew out of that first line: Mother was a stunner. Sometimes a line just pops into your head, like a song lyric. You know it’s right, so for once in your life, you don’t tinker with it. You stare at it, try different second lines, walk around wondering, Who said that? Then the characters start to come into focus: a girl, her beautiful mom, Claude. I’d wanted to write a story for a while set in the early to mid ’70s: home intercoms, Wild Kingdom, waterbed stores, and the 1974 Spokane World’s Fair. It was one of those stories that kept surprising me as I discovered a bit more of it every day—Oh, so she turns out to be . . . Ah, then he is . . . Right, so they are . . . I have two daughters and when I got to the end of the first draft and wrote Tanya’s line (“Nobody gets to tell you what you look like, or who you are”) I realized that’s what I wanted to tell my own daughters and, sentimental goof that I am, I started crying.
Other Distinguished Stories of 2014
ACEVEDO, CHANTEL
Strange and Lovely. Ecotone, no. 17
ACKERMAN, ELLIOT
A Hunting Trip. Salamander, no. 39
AHMAD, AAMINA
Punjab: The Land of Five Rivers. Normal School, vol. 7, issue 2
BASSINGTHWAITE, IAN
Reichelt’s Parachute. The Common, issue 8
BAXTER, CHARLES
Sloth. New England Review, vol. 34, nos. 3–4
BAZZETT, LESLIE
Studies in Composition. New England Review, vol. 34, nos. 3–4
BELLOWS, SIERRA
Buffalo Cactus. Gulf Coast, issue 2
BERGMAN, MEGAN MAYHEW
Romaine Remains. Agni, issue 79
BRAZAITIS, MARK
The Rink Girl. Ploughshares, vol. 40, no. 1
BROCKMEIER, KEVIN
The Invention of Separate People. Unstuck
BROOKS, KIM
Hialeah. Glimmer Train, issue 91
BRUNT, CHRISTOPHER
Next Year in Juarez. Ploughshares, vol. 40, no. 4
BYERS, MICHAEL
Boarders. American Short Fiction, vol. 17, issue 58
CARLSON, RON
One Quarrel. zyzzyva, no. 100
CASTELLANI, CHRISTOPHER
The Living. Ploughshares: Solos Omnibus
CHAON, DAN
What Happened to Us? Ploughshares, vol. 40, no. 1
CLARE, OLIVIA
Quiet! Quiet! Yale Review, vol. 102, no. 4
CROSS, EUGENE
Miss Me Forever. Glimmer Train, issue 91
DIAMOND, JULIE
Debt. narrative
DOBOZY, TAMAS
The Tire
Swing of Death. Able Muse, no. 18
DUPREE, ANDREA
New Brother. Ploughshares, vol. 40, nos. 2 & 3
DURDEN, EA
The Orange Parka. Glimmer Train, issue 91
EVENSON, BRIAN
Maternity. Ploughshares, vol. 40, nos. 2 & 3
FREEMAN, RU
The Irish Girl. StoryQuarterly, 46/47
FRIED, SETH
Hello Again. Tin House, vol. 15, no. 3
GILBERT, DAVID
Here’s the Story. The New Yorker, June 9 & 16
GOODMAN, ALLEGRA
Apple Cake. The New Yorker, July 7 & 14
GORDON, MARY
The Fall. Yale Review, vol. 102, no. 3
GORDON, MARY
What Remains. Ploughshares, vol. 40, no. 4
GREENFELD, KARL TARO
Zone of Mutuality. American Short Fiction, vol. 17, issue 57
GRONER, ANYA
Buster. Meridian, no. 33
GUTHRIE, ROBERT
What I Think About When It Swings Me Low. Pembroke Magazine, no. 46
GYASI, YAA
Many Sons. Callaloo, vol. 37, no. 2
HAIGH, JENNIFER
Sublimation. Ploughshares, vol. 40, no. 1
HALE, BABETTE FRASER
Drouth. Southwest Review, vol. 99, no. 3
HEINY, KATHERINE
The Rhett Butlers. The Atlantic, October
HITZ, MARK
Shadehill. Glimmer Train, issue 92
HOUCK, GABRIEL
When the Time Came. The Pinch, vol. 34, issue 2
HUYNH, PHILIP
The Fig Tree of Knight Street. Event, vol. 43, no. 2
JACKS, JORDON
Don’t Be Cruel. Yale Review, vol. 102, no. 2
JACKSON, GREG