The Best American Short Stories 2018

Contributors’ Notes

MARIA ANDERSON’s fiction is forthcoming or has appeared in the Mississippi Review, the Missouri Review, the Iowa Review, and the Atlas Review. She’s an editor at Essay Press, and she has been awarded residencies from Joshua Tree National Park, the AMK Ranch Research Center in Grand Teton National Park, and the Crosshatch Center for Art & Ecology. She lives in Bozeman, Montana.

■ I lived in Missoula, Montana, for a short time and had always been fascinated by Bonner, the tiny town a couple miles east on the interstate where a few of our friends lived. I wanted to set a story there. I grew up on a cattle ranch outside of town, and spent a lot of time alone as a child, wandering through the woods with our German shepherd. I wanted to work through some of the feelings that go with this kind of deep-seated physical and emotional isolation.

I wrote the first draft of this story at Coal Creek Tap while doing my MFA in Laramie, at the University of Wyoming. It felt easier to focus with people drinking beer and playing cribbage around me. My early readers will remember several especially awful middles and endings to this story—a scene in a strip club with a dancer named Anaconda, a moment in a hotel where men attempt to steal dog semen from a fridge. But what I kept returning to was the main character, and how it feels to have a loved one vanish, whether emotionally or physically, and to know that this is one of the old mysteries you hear about. Someone is there one moment and irreversibly gone the next. Even if that person is right in front of you, you can feel the horror of having lost them already. The horror isn’t that they’re gone, but that this vanishing is unfair and unexplainable.

JAMEL BRINKLEY is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Threepenny Review, Epiphany, and LitMag. He has received scholarships and fellowships from Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also the 2016–17 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is currently a 2018–20 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

■ As I worked on the initial draft of “A Family,” I had a few stories swimming around in my mind: “Old Boys, Old Girls” by Edward P. Jones, “Three People” by William Trevor, and the brilliant reply to that Trevor tale, “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” by Yiyun Li. In addition to those stories, I was, as I came to discover along the way, also thinking about black men and mass incarceration, a changing New York City, the urgency and variety of human companionship, the way a friend can be the love of one’s life, the multiple forms that families can take, and both the speed and stickiness of time. My first working title was “Lena’s Men,” which I’m still fond of in many ways. She’s my favorite person in the piece, the story’s true living link, connecting each of the other principal characters. I decided against that title, ultimately, because I wanted to emphasize all the characters together as one unit, even on the level of grammar. The next working title was “A Kind of Family,” but I decided against that one because I wanted to avoid any unconscious or deliberate misinterpretation on the part of some readers (in, say, the tradition of the Moynihan Report) that I was writing about kind of a family or sort of a family, not quite a family, a family only in degraded form. The title I settled on asserts, simply and directly, what I believe to be true about these characters in the end, who and what they are with one another.

YOON CHOI lives in Anaheim Hills, California, with her husband and four children. Her work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review and New England Review. A current Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is working on a collection of short stories.

■ This story began as a promise to myself, after the last of our children was born, to find an hour a day to write. What I came up with in those hours was perfunctory at best. An old man with Alzheimer’s wanders from home and drowns in a municipal pond. Six thousand words, tops. But one night, as I was typing toward the inevitable, it occurred to me that the old man would probably have a wife. The wife gave me the structure of the story—and then the story itself. Structurally, the use of his/her sections solved the problem of narrating from a single unreliable perspective. But the double narration also raised questions. There was a wife. This probably meant there were children. Maybe even grandchildren. A grandchild in particular. I thought: What if the old man was left alone with his grandson? What if he brought that child to the edge of the water? What if the old woman had left the two of them together, against her better judgment, because of… what? A secret. Suddenly, I was not so sure that the old man would be the one to die. I was not sure about anything at all. That’s when the story found in these pages slowly began to get written.

EMMA CLINE is the author of The Girls, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, and an LA Times Book Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and the Paris Review. In 2014 Cline won the Plimpton Prize from the Paris Review, and in 2017 she was named by Granta as one of the Best Young American Novelists of her generation.

■ I wanted to think about “cost” in this story, both in terms of the actual exchange of goods for a set price, and in terms of the cost of our experiences, what they exact from us. Alice thinks she understands how the world works, but she consistently mistakes surface information—how things look, their external value—for reality. Her life is a kind of recurring anecdote, her painful experiences just fodder for stories. As long as she squints a certain way, keeps certain information from herself, nothing can really hurt or affect her. I didn’t want to moralize about her choices—the danger doesn’t come from what Alice is actually doing, but from her inability to fully inhabit her own life. I wanted the reader to think about what living this way might cost, what the price might eventually be, even if Alice can’t.

ALICIA ELLIOTT is a Tuscarora writer living in Brantford, Ontario, with her husband and child. Her writing has been published by The Malahat Review, New Quarterly, The Walrus, Globe and Mail, VICE, and many others. Her essay “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won Gold at the National Magazine Awards and was published in Best Canadian Essays 2017. Most recently, she was the 2017–18 Geoffrey and Margaret Andrew Fellow at UBC. Elliott is currently Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Fiddlehead, Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths, and a consulting editor at New Quarterly. Her first book of essays is forthcoming from Doubleday Canada in spring 2019.

■ The first line came to me while I was sitting in a coffee shop in a city I didn’t know. “They found him while laying the groundwork for a fast food restaurant.” I wasn’t sure what I was writing about at first, but the idea of consumption loomed large in my mind. I initially tried to write the story about a white family, but nothing was gelling. It always felt wrong, unfinished.

After visiting the Mohawk Institute, otherwise known as the Mush Hole, the residential school closest to my rez, I realized where Henry had gone, and why he hadn’t come back. I realized why I was continually circling back around to the idea of consumption, and why it was so painful that a fast food restaurant was being built on those lands. Canada has fed so many of my people to the monster of colonialism. They’ve stripped away our lands, eroded our rights, stolen our children, then criminalized them, then imprisoned them—all for the purpose of pushing forward white, Western capitalism. A fast food restaurant is the perfect symbol for this sort of capitalistic, colonial consumption.

As soon as I realized Beth and her family were Mohawk, it was like the story opened up. Everything came fast. Everything made sense. What didn’t make sense—what was painful to ask myself—was why I was writing all my characters as white before this. It’s important to recognize the ways that whiteness works its way into our imaginations as Indigenous writers, the way it forces us to diminish our own people, our own stories, and elevate either whiteness itself, or a version of Indigeneity that pleases white audiences. This story helped me realize that my writing didn’t have to do either of those things. My writing could center Indigenous people, voices, and experiences instead.

I’m beyond grateful that this messy, complicated, and (I think) ultimately hopeful story was chosen to be included in this collection. It gives me faith that the old standards of what’s been traditionally considered literary and acceptable are changing. It tells me that Indigenous stories, which we as Indigenous people have always cherished and revered, are finally being cherished and revered by non-Indigenous readers, as well. What a gift.

DANIELLE EVANS is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award, the Paterson Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including the Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, New Stories from the South, and The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, and 2017. She teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.

■ I had sketched out what I thought would be a campus novel someday, where one inciting event triggered a progression of responses, and multiple narrators would tell the story. A few years later, I realized I was most interested in only one of the narrators. Having written a lot about the experience of racism, I wanted to find a different way to inhabit that narrative. I think a lot about the James Baldwin line “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” I wanted to write a story that invited not just empathy but implication, and explored the relationship between the two. I wanted to write about what it is to live always in the present and avoid a sense of history and consequence, which was about race and politics, but also, I realized once I started writing, about the messy spiraling of grief and denial. I was drafting the story during a time when I was spending a lot of time in hospitals, sharing a kind of forced intimacy and vulnerability with some people I realized wouldn’t like me or be likable in other contexts. That grief and intimacy let me get closer to Claire, let me care about her, without forgetting that as much as the story is about her real human grief, it’s also about what the desire to generously and forever forgive some people costs others. A few times during the years I was writing and revising this story, I put it away for a while because I thought the national conversation around Confederate imagery might have changed enough that I’d have to factor it into the story. The story got finished faster than the changing did.

CAROLYN FERRELL’s story collection Don’t Erase Me (1997) was awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award of the Los Angeles Times, the John C. Zachiris Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Literary Review, Ploughshares, and other places; her story “Proper Library” was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ferrell teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with her husband and children.

■ I’d long tried to figure out how to approach the individual pieces of “A History of China” while also thinking about the larger story. Ultimately, I was guided by a few short stories that have helped me consider form and content in new ways: Steven Millhauser’s brilliant “Phantoms” was one such guide, as was Edward P. Jones’s incredible “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” and Alice Munro’s harshly poignant “Wild Swans.” Robin Hemley’s “Sympathy for the Devil: How to Deal with Difficult Characters,” an essay I’ve taught for years, was another beacon.

“A History of China” has its earliest roots in an experience I had with a now-defunct German porcelain company, my first job out of college. I was fascinated by the role a five-piece place setting could play in a world that cherished patterns and platters, soup tureens and replacement soup tureens—a world about which I knew nothing. In fact, I was fired a few months in, my supervisor explaining that I didn’t have what it took to make it in that world. Years later I went and used those dishes to my advantage.

ANN GLAVIANO is a writer, dancer, DJ, and born-and-raised New Orleanian. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Ninth Letter, Prairie Schooner, Fairy Tale Review, the Atlas Review, Slate, and the anthology Please Forward: How Blogging Reconnected New Orleans After Katrina (University of New Orleans Press), among other publications. Her novella, Dickbeer, was published by Amazon’s Day One. Glaviano is an alumna of Louisiana State University and the MFA program at Ohio State.

■ I attended sleepaway summer camp of the traditional outdoors variety from the ages of eight to ten, followed by nerd camp (shoutout to the ADVANCE Program for Young Scholars!) every summer till I was sixteen. Camp changed my life utterly and for the better—in fact, nerd camp was where I took my first creative writing course—so I have a real soft spot for camp stories, plus a wealth of material to draw from.

I came across a writing prompt years ago, and I wish I could credit the source but I can no longer find it, that suggested writing a story about a camp organized around a theme we don’t usually have camps for—such as wife camp. When it was time to start a new story, I pulled out this camp prompt, and I considered other weird camp concepts, and finally I realized that my favorite thing about the prompt was the idea of wife camp. What would one do at a wife camp?

It turns out wife camps exist, usually in a religious context, and this took me down a deep rabbit hole of research on the ways we teach girls, across different cultures, what will be expected of them as women. I looked at initiation rituals, both formal and informal, and superstitions regarding menstruation. I also thought about how baffled kids often are when they first encounter adult behaviors that are upheld as norms but are, from an outsider perspective, bizarre and absurd; I wrote from that place of absurdity. I had a great deal of fun.

I have hated epistolary stories my whole life, starting with Dear Mr. Henshaw (no shade toward Beverly Cleary), but Donald Barthelme changed my mind; the structure of this story was inspired by “Me and Miss Mandible.”

JACOB GUAJARDO is a graduate of MFA@FLA at the University of Florida. His fiction has appeared in Passages North, Hobart, Necessary Fiction, The Mondegreen, and elsewhere. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, but was born and raised in St. Louis, Michigan.

■ This story took two years and eleven drafts to write. It took about the same amount of time to get it published. I grew up in St. Louis, Michigan, the geographic center of the state. My family lived two hours from all of the beaches on the Great Lakes. When we did get to go to the beach (my parents both worked full-time jobs) it was a treat. When we were at the beach, it was like we were a different family. My favorite beaches are in Grand Haven, on the west side of the state, where this story takes place. I loved imagining what it would be like to grow up there. Would a boy like me, a queer, light-skinned halfie, survive? What if he fell in love? What if he fell in love with someone he shouldn’t? Young, queer people of color become adept at hiding, but it’s hard to hide that you are in love.

My dad grew up in a single-parent household with two sisters and two brothers. He’s a first-generation kid. His mom worked hard to give him and his siblings what they had, but not without the help of her friends. I have always known that it takes more than a set of parents to raise kids. I knew I wanted to write about the people who raised me. I knew I wanted to write about beach boys, and I knew I wanted to write about first love.

CRISTINA HENRíQUEZ is the author of three books, including, most recently, the novel The Book of Unknown Americans, which was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Oxford American, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She is also the recipient of an Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award. She lives in Illinois.

■ A few years ago, I went to a hotel by myself for one weekend to do nothing but write. Armed with Japanese whiskey and Goldfish crackers, I holed up in the room, intending to make progress on a novel I’d been struggling with. Instead, I sat down and wrote this story.

It’s rare that I start a story with what could properly be called an idea. For me, the seed is always language, and when the words come, they open a path before me. So I wrote the first line—On the first day, there’s a sense of relief—and continued from there, letting the story reveal itself. It’s a scary way to write, and it requires a certain amount of faith, but by the end of that weekend, I had the first draft. From there, it was a matter of understanding what the story was really about, and one of the things I wanted to show was that in trying to find safety, the main character, this woman, only managed to trade one sort of horror for another.

Although most of the story came quickly, I did labor over the ending. The woman is unraveling, and I wanted the language to do that, too, for that final image to be one not of stasis but of movement, reflecting the change within the character, but also to evoke a kind of lyricism at odds with the bleakness of that change.

KRISTEN ISKANDRIAN’s debut novel Motherest was published by Twelve/Hachette in 2017 and was chosen as a monthly pick by Shondaland, Vanity Fair, The Millions, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as being named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and Lenny Letter. Her short fiction has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Joyland, and Epoch, among others. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama. For more information visit kristeniskandrian.com.

■ My class in elementary school did an overnight at a museum of natural history, although I don’t remember much about it beyond possibly sleeping beneath a terrarium of spiders, and even that detail may be an invention of memory. And, like my narrator, I adore E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. But mostly I wanted to explore longing from the point of view of a preteen, a child, because I think we forget that children experience desire in all kinds of powerful and devastating and transgressive ways. Jill knows who she is and what her strengths are; she doesn’t need anyone to tell her how to be. From that self-assurance springs both her sense of humor and her capacity for deep hurt. I’m unendingly fascinated by where and how our two most human conditions—pain and pleasure—meet, blur, and swallow one another whole.

JOCELYN NICOLE JOHNSON’s essays and short stories have appeared in Guernica, Prime Number, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. Her work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Johnson lives, writes, and loves on her people—her son, husband, friends, and art students—in Charlottesville, Virginia.

■ In 2014, years before Charlottesville became known for a deadly white supremacists’ rally, a black University of Virginia student was detained by local law enforcement after he was turned away from a bar near campus. Moments later, a video showed Martese Johnson pinned to the ground, blood pouring down his face. “I go to UVA!” he shouted, as if he’d once believed those words would shield him. The next week, I recognized his image in the local paper: a boy in a suit, flanked by lawyers, his forehead marked by ten fresh sutures. Looking on, I received some share of this young man’s bewilderment and heartache; it collected in me. A year later, “Control Negro” spilled out.

This short story contains fragments of my mother, my father, my brother; I borrowed details, real and imagined, from their lives growing up in the ’50s and ’60s in the sand hills of South Carolina, a community perverted by Jim Crow racism. It contains a speck of bitterness that settled in me, years ago, after a conversation with a close college friend, who was white. She told me, excitedly, that she’d learned in class about a professor who’d “definitely” disproved the effects of racism. His method, she explained, was to compare the barriers faced by black communities—bondage, violence, discrimination—to comparable difficulties other ethnic groups had contended with—though not in aggregate, she conceded. The professor found that other groups had overcome the same hurdles that crippled black communities. And so, the logic seemed to go, the problem must be with blackness itself, and not the brutality it inspired. What I remember most was my friend’s gleeful conclusion: “He was black!” she said. “The professor, who did the study, was a black man!”

It was only after “Control Negro” found a home at Guernica that I recognized myself in the story. Hadn’t I felt curated during moments of my middle-class upbringing, choreographed even? And now I was watching my own biracial boy come of age in a newly vitriolic and outraged America.

MATTHEW LYONS is the author of dozens of short stories, appearing in Black Dandy, Kzine, and Daily Science Fiction among others. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and more. Born in Colorado, he lives in New York City with his wife.

■ I’ve always been fascinated with the phenomenon of American male rage, and how it’s communicated down from generation to generation, from fathers to sons, more often than not mutating into something far worse than what it was before. In so many ways, that rage is a central driver in our society, and even if our bad decisions sometimes seem sensible, it’s not difficult to track the destruction that they can cause as we flirt with total annihilation. Gods, humans, or something in-between, we all inherit the damage that was done before us. Even though we like to think of ourselves as better, sometimes all we can hope to do is redirect it. Sometimes we can only make things worse.

DINA NAYERI was born in Tehran and arrived in America at ten years old, after two years as a refugee. She is the author of the acclaimed Guardian Long Read “The Ungrateful Refugee” (soon to be a book by the same name), and the winner of an O. Henry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, and fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has been translated into fourteen languages and recently published in the New York Times, the Guardian, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, and others. Her second novel, Refuge, was published by Riverhead Books in 2017.

■ “A Big True” began as an experiment. For months my mother and I had fought about my fiction, which she thinks of as an excuse to twist the truth. “You write these loser parents all the time and you use my details. You lie about me.” “But they’re not you!” I’d say again and again. She said, “And yet somehow you can’t write a parent who’s not a loser, or a child who isn’t perfect.” She was so wrong, but still I set out to prove her even more wrong (yes, I know). I said, “What if I write a story about a parent who’s wildly different from you, a man maybe, whose daughter refuses to understand him? What if I make him an artist and she’s the bland one? What if I show the color in a simple life and the dreariness in a seemingly successful one?” She loved the idea. So I wrote the story. I sent the first draft to her, and I was so nervous about how she’d react. She called me and after a silent beat, she said, “You did it again! Another loser immigrant parent and their amazing kid who knows everything!” A loser? I was in shock. Didn’t she see what I saw, all the love in my story? Didn’t she see that I adored Rahad? That I had adored every displaced mother and father I had ever created from the parts of her and of my father and my grandparents and myself? We fought, of course. I edited. We fought again. Finally, she threw me a bone. “Wyatt is funny,” she said. “I understand the trick he plays at the end. It’s very moving. Very true.”

TÉA OBREHT’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award Finalist and a New York Times best seller. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vogue, and Esquire, among others. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She lives in New York and teaches at Hunter College. Her second novel is forthcoming in 2019.

■ A few years ago, during the penultimate week of a fellowship at the New York Public Library, I had the fortune of taking a tour through the labyrinthine stacks of the Stephen A. Schwarzman building on Fifth Avenue. A controversial renovation had been announced, and for months New Yorkers had debated the logistics and consequences of moving the lion’s share of the collection offsite in order to address concerns that the library’s stacks might be too fragile to continue the twin tasks of housing its books and supporting its weight.

It was eerie to go all the way down into the warm, green-gray catacombs of the old girl and see her skeleton laid bare. Infinities of struts and empty rectangles receded in every direction. Halogen tubes flickered overhead. A right here, a left there, a deserted corridor, a stairwell leading to basement storage. On an otherwise empty shelf at the foot of a metal ladder I barely survived sat a box labeled:

I’m not a note-taking kind of writer (managing to lose every single Moleskine I’ve ever carried has cured me of trying to catch those daily jolts of inspiration) but when I saw these words, I scrambled to grab them, get them down on paper, preserve their correct order. Right away I knew: this was something, a thread, a line if I’d ever seen one. A gift. Just sitting there in the library basement. A title—maybe. I told myself that I would wait as long as necessary for the right story to come along and claim it. Of course, this would turn out to be the one I had already been writing for the better part of a year—though two more years would pass before its hazy, disparate threads (shed hunting, unrequited first love, a father obsessed with littering transgressions) finally came together.

RON RASH is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times best seller Serena, in addition to many prizewinning novels, including The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of both The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

■ As with almost all of my fiction, this story began with an image: a baptism scene on a frozen river. I sensed the time period was the late nineteenth century and that the minister was deeply conflicted about performing the rite. Where the initial image came from I cannot say. It was not derived from anything I’d ever heard of happening. After finishing the first draft, I realized that my naming the child Pearl established a connection to the Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, but that too was, at least initially, subconscious. My perspective on stories is Jungian. They already exist; thus writers are more transmitters than creators. But how well the story will be told is conscious, a matter of craft.

AMY SILVERBERG is a writer and stand-up comedian based in Los Angeles. She’s currently a Doctoral Fellow in Fiction at the University of Southern California. Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Collagist, and elsewhere. She will be performing stand-up on season 6 of Hulu’s comedy showcase Coming to the Stage. She’s now at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.

■ The way I enter stories is almost always through voice; I rarely have a character or premise in mind. I just had that first line in my head for a while—the line of a character saying she made a bet with her father—so I wrote one paragraph and set it aside for months and months. I’m not sure why I decided to pick up the story again, but I know that line ran through my head enough times, stayed with me long enough, that I felt I wanted to revisit it and go from there. Maybe I just had a deadline! At the time, I was teaching an Intro to Composition class that was mostly freshmen, and I met with them three times a week, so I got to know them pretty well. We’d talk often about their relationships with their parents—who had a helicopter mom, whose dad wanted them to really embrace being on their own. I was definitely thinking about that at the time, the myriad of ways in which parents and children learn to let go. Eighteen has always struck me as a very strange, particular age—especially for the kids I was teaching—so many of them were living away from home, but still talking to their parents every day. I’d just read the short story “The Paperhanger” by William Gay and admired the mystery of it, how it seemed to go confidently into an unknown world, a world that felt a little surreal and a little absurd. At least that’s how I remember feeling about the story at the time. I was also in a workshop taught by Aimee Bender, and while I hadn’t set out to write anything with a magical realism element, I’m sure her stories (which I’ve read many, many times) rubbed off on me—or if not the stories, then at least the courage or freedom to go confidently into that so-called unknown world. Finally, I love writing about Los Angeles. I’ve lived here most of my adult life, and I perform comedy here. It still feels exciting that a friend of mine, who works as a waitress, might quit her job at any moment for an acting role. For as long as I’ve lived here, it’s always felt like a city of transition and transformation—that you might be one thing and then become another over the course of a single day will always be compelling to me.

CURTIS SITTENFELD is the best-selling author of five novels—Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, and Eligible—and one story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It. Her books have been selected by the New York Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and People for their “Ten Best Books of the Year” lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into thirty languages. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Esquire, and her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, and on This American Life.

■ I joined Twitter in 2013 and, as someone who had been a social media skeptic, was both surprised and a bit alarmed by how quickly I took to it. (As the saying goes, the twenty minutes I spend on Twitter are the best four hours of my day.) I also thought about the strangeness of the fact that many tweets are exchanged between people whose identities are unclear. If a person from my own past about whom I had ambivalent feelings emailed me, the truth is that I might ignore the email. But if the same person reached out on Twitter, with a jokey username, I might, in the spirit of being a pleasant author, engage in a back-and-forth while having no idea who the person really was. Although I certainly am not famous like Lucy Headrick, it was this strangeness that inspired me to write “The Prairie Wife.” Of course, the story ended up being about a few other things—celebrity culture, forty-something sadness—but its origins are in how weird I find Twitter.

RIVERS SOLOMON writes about life in the margins, where they are much at home. They graduated from Stanford University with a degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and hold an MFA in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers. Though originally from the United States, they currently reside in the United Kingdom. Their debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, is out now.

■ When I wrote “Whose Heart I Long to Stop with the Click of a Revolver,” some years ago now, I’d been thinking a lot about guns—specifically how much I liked them compared to others who hold socially progressive values. I’d never held one myself, but it seemed to me that the world’s bank account, its balance of power, if you will, was mighty in arrears and needed to be set to rights. I couldn’t envision a way of doing that that didn’t involve a gun.

You can’t rape a .38. I first saw that on a vintage photo of a protest march, but I’ve since seen it a number of places, including on advertisements for personal weapons. How strange it was, I thought, the way violence unfolds on both mass and individual scale, how the small violence of a single victim and perpetrator can reflect larger patterns and social values. How rape is a tool in an ongoing war against women. I wanted to write a story about a woman enmeshed in violence, who could not, no matter what, disentangle herself from it, because none of us can.

ESMÉ WEIJUN WANGIS the author of the novel The Border of Paradise, which was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She received a 2018 Whiting Award, was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.

■ The first thing that came to me, with this story, was the singsong rhyme from the very beginning, which led to a few questions: Who is Becky Guo, where is this taking place, and who is telling the story? I wrote most of “What Terrible Thing It Was” in New Orleans in December 2016, right after Trump’s election—it was the beginning of a particular kind of anxiety for myself and most of my loved ones about the country and what was going to be coming next. Part of that felt like paranoia, but a paranoia with far too much truth behind it, which is what led to the inclusion of the narrator’s psychosis and the convergence of her electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) consultation with Election Night. I wanted Wendy to have concerns outside of the election, and she does, but the election in the story and the social concerns surrounding it leave their fingerprints all over that day and her memories of Becky’s murder. I consider it as much a story about trauma as anything else, and a narrative of how new traumas tend to revive old ones.