I moment after I wrote the last sentence I stood up to stretch my legs, wandered over to my bookshelf, and, scanning the titles of the books I’ve tried in the last months to cull, I pulled down Censoring an Iranian Love Story, by Shahriar Mandanipour. When I flipped through the pages, I found a ticket used as a bookmark: the ticket to the Zen garden of Nanzen-ji! There are the stones like leaping tigers pictured on the front of the ticket, the very place I had just been thinking about, trying to figure out whether the scene I described that took place there was imagined or recalled. I have no idea what to make of this coincidence, beyond that things that can’t be explained rationally often fall to writers to investigate, because most respectable professions don’t want to touch them. But all the same, they seem to promise access to regions of the mind, and being, and the world that are otherwise closed off to us.
Whether I really thought I saw Ershadi in the temple in Kyoto, or whether a scene I wrote later became conflated with actual memory over the thirteen years it took me to finally finish the story, I don’t know. During those years, the story absorbed many new experiences: my time watching the Israeli dance company Batsheva rehearse, and getting to know many of its dancers; my friendship with an extraordinary Israeli actress; the arrival of my children.
More coincidences: A few days after the story was published in The New Yorker, I received an email from the son of Abbas Kiarostami, who lives in San Francisco. “Your story has touched so many of my friends,” Ahmad Kiarostami wrote. “I received the link from at least 20 people from all over the globe, including Iran . . . It was as if I was watching a touching love story film.” He offered to introduce me to Homayoun Ershadi the next time the actor was in America. I wrote back and asked whether he thought Ershadi had read the story. He replied almost immediately:
I actually talked to Homayoun’s sister, Toufan (who also helped my father for many years and was a close friend of him), and asked what Homayoun thought about the article. She said he was very emotional after reading it. She said the timing couldn’t have been better. Apparently he is down these days, and your story very much helped him to feel better. She said that since it came out, he’s been getting cheerful calls and texts every single day.” At the end of the email, Kiarostami had attached a screenshot showing Ershadi’s Facebook page, where he’d shared a link to the story.
URSULA K. LE GUIN (1929–2018) was a celebrated and beloved author of twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve children’s books, six volumes of poetry, and four of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebulas, seven Hugos, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, along with the PEN/Malamud and many other awards. In 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016 joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.
MANUEL MUñOZ is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, and two short story collections, Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been recognized with a Whiting Award and three O. Henry Awards. His most recent work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train, The Southwest Review, and Freeman’s. He has been on the faculty of the University of Arizona’s creative writing program since 2008.
▪ My stories are taking longer to write these days. I don’t know exactly why, but the long pauses keep steering me back to story basics. I give myself more room to think about what a story’s center might be and I have let go of the need to resolve every conflict that arises. I’m learning to listen to the stories as they want to tell themselves: I know that sounds odd, but it comes from years of listening to my mother’s stories and only now realizing that I haven’t been fully understanding them. Most of my recent fiction has come from delving again into the stories she has told me, particularly of the deportation years, as I call them, when my father was repeatedly sent back to Mexico before the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act changed our lives and many of those in our Central Valley town of Dinuba, California. I used to think that my parents’ reunification was the only story but, as the first line proved to me, sometimes other pressures took over. When that line came to me, it snapped me out of my recurrent doubt that the “domestic” or the “realist” story can do much in a fraught and complicated world. It reminded me that the infinite ways in which we struggle to keep or make family is more than story enough.
“Anyone Can Do It” appeared in an issue titled “Restoration: Of and About the Environment,” and I want to thank Laura Cogan, Oscar Villalon, and everyone at ZYZZYVA for thinking so generously and broadly about not only the natural world, but the lives of the people who work within it on a daily basis.
SIGRID NUNEZ’s most recent novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. She has published six other novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian American literature. Nunez has been the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. She is writer in residence at Boston University.
▪ The first story I ever published was in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and though I did not go on to write fiction in that genre and am not even a big reader of such fiction, I have often found myself wanting to write about a crime. For “The Plan,” I wanted to write about a certain type of criminal—violent, murderous, misogynistic—and I wanted to write from his point of view. The fierce anger and resentment that appear to consume so many men today was likely among the influences on my desire to explore this killer’s vision of society and his place in it. Also, I have vivid memories of what New York City was like during the seventies, how crime-ridden and seedy and dangerous it was—a very noir place, it seemed to me—and I saw this as the ideal setting for my crime story.
MARIA REVA was born in Ukraine and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Granta, The Journey Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories 2017, and elsewhere. Her musical collaborations include an opera libretto for Erato Ensemble, texts for Vancouver International Song Institute’s Art Song Lab, and a script for City Opera Vancouver. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. “Letter of Apology” is part of a linked story collection, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, forthcoming in spring 2020.
▪ A few years ago I read that the KGB had to stop arresting citizens for telling political jokes in the 1960s, due to the Khrushchev Thaw, but also because it was impossible to lock up the entire Soviet Union. Instead, officers were to engage offenders in a (re)educational conversation and have them submit a letter of apology.
Shortly after I learned this, my father told me that the KGB tried to recruit him to the Honor Guard in the 1980s. He was a model student and athlete, but the last thing he wanted was to guard Lenin’s tomb. (In the end he slipped from the KGB’s clutches—but that’s another story.)
These two sources inspired “Letter of Apology.” I’d already written a story from the perspective of a character who suspects she is being trailed by the KGB, but not one from the perspective of a KGB agent doing the trailing. I wanted to explore the loss of power a secret service agent must have felt, having to chase after citizens for a chat and letter. Finally, I wanted to examine the mechanisms of self-delusion: how does a person escape a terrible truth?
KAREN RUSSELL is the author of the novel Swamplandia! and three story collections, including the recently published Orange World and O
ther Stories. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and son. She currently holds the Endowed Chair of Texas State University’s MFA program, where she teaches as a visiting professor.
▪ My husband and I went to Korčula on our honeymoon, on a tiny ferry that docked at night during a tremendous storm. It seemed as if we were the only living people in the walled medieval city. “Look,” my husband reassured me as we racewalked over the cobblestones, “I see some people right over there.” Lightning illuminated three faceless nuns floating down a gothic staircase. Later we’d laugh about this B-horror-movie tableau, but it wasn’t the nuns who frightened me that night. Something was pursuing us, I felt quietly certain. As we wandered down the silent streets, I had to consciously still my muscles to avoid breaking into a run.
In our hotel, I learned about the vukodlak.
Sometimes translated as “vampire” and other times as “werewolf,” a vukodlak is a body that exhumes itself and wanders the woods after its death. According to Croatian folk belief, the dead could be protected from this fate by severing their hamstrings before burial. As recently as 1770, Dalmatian villagers requested that this “operation” be performed on a loved one’s cadaver. The idea of a posthumous surgeon who operates underground came to me shortly after reading this detail in our guidebook.
I wrote the original draft of “Black Corfu” in a feverish season of hope and fear, while I was pregnant with my son and considering the unlevel landscapes that children inherit from a new vantage point. I remember working on it in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, and I’m sure this story set in a fictional 1620 Korčula was my way of grappling with the rampant injustice in our country. How many people today feel trapped in their orbits, unable to ladder out of poverty, despair? Condemned to work in the shadows while they watch others enjoy health, wealth, safety? The vukodlak seemed like the right vessel for a story about a father’s “zombie” hopes—those undead dreams of freedom that stalk a world where they are as yet unfulfilled. In her incredible work on horror, history, and haunting, Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon describes an agony that I think applies both to this imaginary Korčulan and to so many real people today: “the wear and tear of long years of struggling to survive . . . the deep pain of always having to compete in a contest you did not have any part in designing for what most matters and merits.” It’s the involution of hope that turns the doctor into a monster. You could say “Black Corfu” is a horror story about mobility, in a sense—Blessed are the living, as this subterranean doctor says, who can move.
SAïD SAYRAFIEZADEH is the author of the story collection Brief Encounters with the Enemy, a finalist for the 2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the critically acclaimed memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free, selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Dwight Garner of the New York Times. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and New American Stories, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award for nonfiction, and a fiction fellowship from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His play, Autobiography of a Terrorist, was staged last year by Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco. He currently serves on the board of directors of the New York Foundation for the Arts, and teaches in the creative writing programs at Hunter College, Columbia University, and NYU, where he received an Outstanding Teaching Award.
▪ This piece began as nonfiction, which is to say, as the truth. I had originally intended to title it “How Cigarettes Saved My Life,” because if I had not become addicted to smoking cigarettes at the age of nineteen, I would not have been self-aware enough to realize that, two years later, I was following a similar trajectory with crack cocaine. This guiding principle comprised the final four pages of the story, and the final four pages of the story were eventually, with great reluctance and remorse, completely cut. Many other facts were cut as well, and many others were bent and reshaped in the interests of make-believe. Even so, I continued to try to cleave as closely as I could to reality, perhaps as a way to make direct use of what I’d experienced, but also because I’ve always believed that the truth is generally more compelling than invention.
For instance, a few years ago I was riding the public bus through my hometown of Pittsburgh, where I’d gone back to visit for the weekend. At some point in the trip, an elderly black man got on and took the seat directly in front of me. He was probably about seventy years old, give or take, toothless, clearly poor, dressed in baggy, monochrome clothes. And yet, as the bus ride continued, something semiconscious began to take shape in my mind, something distressing but insistent, until I finally realized that this seventy-year-old man was not seventy years old, nor was he, in fact, a stranger to me, but rather a friend of mine: when we were in our early twenties we had worked at a restaurant together, played pickup basketball together, and, yes, smoked crack cocaine together. He’d been tall and handsome back then. He’d been a standout former high school basketball player, and a so-so former college player. I don’t think he’d ever gotten his degree, which was one reason why he was living in the projects and working at a restaurant as a busboy with zero prospects for anything more. I remember that we’d spent one summer afternoon walking around Pittsburgh, off from work, nothing to do, too hot to play basketball, and both of us trying our best to avoid broaching crack. He would sometimes tell me how he’d stare in the mirror and speak to himself in the third person, almost as a mantra, with optimism and conviction. “This isn’t you,” he’d say. Meaning, this life of smoking crack wasn’t at essence who he was, and that he could, through sheer will, surmount it.
Months later, after I’d gone and gotten professional help, and after I’d stopped associating with anyone who had had anything to do with crack, he called me one night. It was Saturday, around ten o’clock, and he needed money . . . for his brother. His brother had just gotten home from the military and he was eligible for health insurance, but he had to pay the premium now, right now—Saturday night at ten o’clock—and if he didn’t pay it now, he’d never be able to have health insurance. Could I lend his brother forty dollars? No, I was sorry, but I could not. And that was the last I spoke to him until that bus ride in Pittsburgh, twenty-five years later, where I’d tapped him on the shoulder and we’d stood and hugged each other, and I’d tried to pretend that there was nothing remotely unsettling about his appearance. He told me he worked construction now, which I wasn’t sure I believed, and I told him I lived in New York City. He wanted to know if I’d been there for 9/11. 9/11 had been fifteen years earlier. That 9/11 was his immediate association with New York City seemed to me to be a sure indication of the amount of trauma he’d been dealing with, then and now. I was very aware of that mantra he’d uttered years earlier, “This is not you,” and of its brutal, unsparing conclusion.
All of this is why I wrote the story. None of it made it in.
ALEXIS SCHAITKIN’s debut novel, Saint X, is forthcoming in February 2020; it will be translated into French, Spanish, German, Italian, Dutch, and Hungarian. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ecotone, Southwest Review, and the Southern Review, among other venues, and her fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband, the historian Mason B. Williams, and their son.
▪ Jen’s job writing descriptions of houses for a realtor is very similar to a job I held for a few years in graduate school. To be honest, it was a job whose potential as material I was aware of from the very beginning. Architecture is such a classic metaphor for story. And this job—stepping into someone else’s home and observing, tiptoeing in the dark through a house where people are living their inimitable lives—was so like the writer’s task.
But for years I found the work impenetrable to being written about. I was living in Charlottes
ville, Virginia, and like Jen in the story, I was mostly writing about houses in the city’s many suburban developments. There was Avinity Estates, Redfields, Riverwood, Chesterfield Landing, Dunlora Park—all of these names that are simultaneously hyperevocative and hollow, sometimes even nonsensical. In a single spring, I wrote about six townhouses of the same model in one development—they were identical, but I needed to make each one sound unique. So the reality of the work was just pretty . . . tedious.
Then, one day, my boss gave me an address way out of town. The house was completely dazzling, and it had an observatory, just like the house in the story. After years of visiting nothing but suburban sprawl, it was surreal to step into this incredible house out in the middle of nowhere. That was the very obvious inspiration for the story.
But as the story came together, it was all of the other houses I’d visited that fueled its essential questions: what makes something authentic versus imitative or ersatz, and does this distinction even matter, and if so, how and why—in architecture, in writing, in life? One of my biggest anxieties as a writer is always “Is this good, or does it just sound good?” Laying that bare, exposing it through Jen’s voice, was scary, but also exciting.
JIM SHEPARD has written seven novels, including The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for excellence in Jewish literature, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the PEN/New England Award for fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner, and most recently The World to Come. He’s also won the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Williams College.
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