Black Evening

Afterword

From "The Dripping" in 1972 to "The Shrine" twenty years later, these stories represent a significant portion of my life – and significant events along the way. The year the final story was published, I made a further significant choice by leaving Iowa City, where I had lived since 1970, and taking up residence in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the summer of 1992.

My wife and I did it suddenly. Watching a segment of Public Broadcasting's This Old House that was devoted to Santa Fe 's distinctive adobe-pueblo style of architecture, we found the city of holy faith and its surrounding mountains so picturesque that we decided to spend a long weekend visiting there. It was my forty-ninth birthday. I had just finished a long novel, Assumed Identity. A little time off sounded good. But we weren't prepared for the impact that the mystical mountains and the high desert would have on us. In three days, we were looking at houses. On the fourth day, we selected one and flew back to Iowa City to make preparations to move. Three months later, we were living in Santa Fe.

Our decision had nothing to do with a change in our positive feelings about Iowa City. I had wonderful years at the university there. I made lifelong friends there. My wife and I raised a daughter and a son there. It's a special place, and it brought us happiness. But we also lost a son there, and sometimes it's necessary to get away from streets and buildings that cause painful memories.

Sometimes, too, a writer has to redefine himself or, as my wife put it, to start act three. In our new home, at an altitude of seven thousand feet, with wild flowers in front of our adobe house and piñon-treed mountains stretching off in every direction in what the locals call the land of enchantment, the land of the dancing sun, I began to look at things differently. For certain, the move affected my fiction, not just in the obvious way that I stopped writing about the midwest and switched my attention to New Mexico, using Santa Fe as a setting in several pieces.

A deeper change involved theme. The hero of one of my post-1992 novels, Extreme Denial, is a former intelligence operative who comes to Santa Fe to shut out his past and find himself. Substitute "former professor," and it's obvious that I was writing about me. From Matt's death in 1987 until our move to Santa Fe in 1992, I wrote more fiction about grief than I included here. But after settling in our new home, I wrote only one more on the subject, a novel called Desperate Measures in which an obituary writer whose son has died from cancer finds himself trapped in a conspiracy. Surviving, he comes to terms with his loss. In the latter respect, I was writing about myself.

Thus, while this collection doesn't include all my short fiction, it is complete inasmuch as it follows the progress of my imagination until the conclusion of act two when, after twenty-two years, I left Iowa City. Farther into act three, I'll prepare another collection and bring you up to date, sharing more memories with you. Meanwhile, I wasn't prepared for the emotional impact that grouping these stories together had on me. Pieces written years apart acquired new vividness for me when I read them in sequence over a couple of days. In particular, I was struck by how many of these stories are about threats to the main character's family. Philip Klass taught me to think of fiction writing as a form of self-psychoanalysis. "Write about what you most fear," he said. One day, my fear came true.

But I haven't lost my urge to tell stories, and that tells me other fears need to be expressed. The ferret keeps gnawing at my psyche. I persist in going after it.

Let me tell you a story.