The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”

“What You Pawn I Will Redeem” started out simply as a writing exercise. I thought, “Hey, I’ll take highly stereotypical urban characters (homeless Indian, Korean grocery store owner, white cop, white pawnshop owner) and see if I can write a story that humanizes all of them. I’ll make them decent and loving.” I wrote the first draft very quickly in a few hours really, and thought it was cute and sentimental, so I set it aside. A year or so later, as I was gathering stories for my latest collection, Ten Little Indians, I came across the story again, reread it, and was surprised by its quiet power. I don’t think I’ve published anything that's ever received as much fan mail. Heck, I got fan mail from writers who haven’t liked anything else I’ve ever done. This story's journey still feels magical to me.

Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington, a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He is the author of Ten Little Indians, The Toughest Indian in the West, and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, among other books. Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons.

Wendell Berry, “The Hurt Man”

I am always pleased when I know that a story I have imagined has grown from a real story. This is pleasing to me because I always need assurance of the connection between imagination and reality. “The Hurt Man” grew out of a family story about my great-grandmother. That story came to me a long time ago in only a few sentences, and so what I have imagined surely bears little resemblance to what actually happened. The old story grew into imagination, so to speak, over many years. It became writable finally when I began to see it as an episode in the early life of Mat Feltner, a character I began writing about in 1960.

Wendell Berry has farmed a hillside in his native Henry County, Kentucky, for over thirty years. He is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and essays, including Jayber Crow, Citizenship Papers, and, most recently, his collected stories, That Distant Land. A former professor of English at the University of Kentucky, he has received numerous awards for his work, including the T S. Eliot Award, the Atken Taylor Award for Poetry, and the John Hay Award of the Orion Society. Berry lives and works in Kentucky with his wife, Tanya Berry, and their children and grandchildren, who live and farm nearby.

Kevin Brockmeier, “The Brief History of the Dead”

I wrote “The Brief History of the Dead” in November of 2002. Whenever I’m beginning the sort of narrative that I hope might turn into a novel, I try to approach the first chapter as though it were an independent short story, as a way of easing myself into the water. That was what happened with “The Brief History of the Dead,” and the story has indeed become the first chapter of a novel-in-progress. William Maxwell, whose “The Thistles in Sweden” is one of my all-time favorite stories, talks about using an image or a metaphor as a way of developing the structure of his books: he would envision a tree with its center cut out, for instance, or a walk across flat ground toward distant mountains, and he would adopt that image as a sort of imaginative compass while he was writing. The image I had in mind as I wrote “The Brief History of the Dead” was that of one thing spreading open inside another-doors opening within doors opening within doors. Most of the doors never close, and my hope was that this would give the city and its inhabitants a sense of ongoing existence in the mind of the reader. I tried to fit as much of the life of the city into the story as I could-as much of the landscape, as many of the people, and as many of their dreams and expectations and notions about the place where they found themselves-while I elaborated on my central premise, that of a world of the dead-but-still-remembered undergoing its own quiet apocalypse.

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novel The Truth About Celia, the story collection Things That Fall from the Sky, and two children's novels, City of Names and the forthcoming Grooves; or, the True-Life Outbreak of Weirdness. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, among other publications, and have been included twice before in The O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Timothy Crouse, “Sphinxes”

To my mind, one mark of a true human being is the desire to know, and to share knowledge, once acquired. What motivates me to write my stories is the need to come to grips with an actual situation, and, having understood its deepest meanings, express its multiplicity of levels. Since this story, which still remains alive in me, required much elaboration, I have to admit, paraphrasing Paul Valéry, that I prefer one reader who reads it several times to many who read it once.

When beginning the story, I made this note: “Being-God?-leaves us free within a prison.” Not for nothing do we have the concepts of the no, the yes, the perhaps. How wonderful when the yes or the no presents itself as a clear choice; but this world is the kingdom of the perhaps. In my perception, the Great Teacher is a bystanding witness to this same problem of the no, the yes, and the regrettable perhaps. What a collection of sphinxes play on the keyboard of this planet.

Timothy Crouse has been a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, and the Washington columnist for Esquire, writing numerous articles for these and other publications, including The New Yorker. His 1974 book, The Boys on the Bus, was reissued in 2003. He translated, with Luc Brébion, the Nobel laureate Roger Martin du Gard's Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort. The new version of Anything Goes that he coauthored with John Weidman was staged at the Royal National Theatre, London. He is writing a book of short stories, collaborating on a screenplay, and cotranslating works by the Chilean poet David Rosenmann-Taub. Crouse lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Charles D’Ambrosio, “The High Divide”

I just checked the folder in my computer where I’ve kept the various versions of “The High Divide” and there are, no kidding, 116-plus there's a sheaf of papers in my old Steelcase file cabinet that includes typewritten scenes and scribbled notes and a handful of rejections from people who, I would love to imagine, had some ideas that this story was destined to knock around, alone and unloved, stupid and blind, until it found its present shape and home. Of course, going forward the floundering hardly felt that way. Despite writing lots of versions over the course of twelve years, there was very little agony involved in making the story-it just seemed that every two or three years I’d haul it out and write a bunch of drafts and forget about it until the next time. It was like owning a pet that didn’t need to be fed very frequently. Big and little things changed along the way. At one point the crazy father was on the loose and the narrator lost the tip of his tongue when a basketball fell on his head. The dead mother was alive and the whole family lived in a bungalow in West Seattle with blackberry vines scrabbling up through the floor. Somewhere in all this the story ballooned to about twelve thousand words. In order to reduce the word count, I had to lock the nutty father away in a mental institution. Committing the father also softened the narrator's anger, which in turn cut down the number of personal cruelties in the story. The pain spread out beyond the petty question of personal fairness, widening into sympathy. All the quotes were removed from the dialogue-which is how I’d had it originally-and that fixed a tonal problem, since all the dialogue was written to sound reported rather than realistic. Thus my first vague impulse was integrated back into the narrator's voice. The sentences felt healthy and true again. The engine driving the story had always been anger, but in the last stages of rewriting a new note of love crept in. If anger is endless and the deepest urge of love is toward completion, then love, I’d have to say, did the trick-however unliterary that insight may seem.

Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of The Point and Other Stories and The Dead Fish Museum. His fiction appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and various anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories. His nonfiction appears regularly in Nest Magazine and The Organ Review of Arts. D’Ambrosio lives in Portland, Oregon.

Ben Fountain, “Fantasy for Eleven Fingers”

I was sitting at my daughters piano recital watching all those kids ripping the keyboard in that extraordinary way which we tend to take for granted, the fingers hitting the keys bam-bam-bam-bam as if each separate finger had its own brain, and two things occurred to me more or less simultaneously. One, that artistic skill and achievement of this sort are an everyday miracle that ought to blow our minds, and, two, how would throwing an extra finger into the mix change things? I walked around with those notions for a couple of days, pretty sure that I wanted to write a story about a piano prodigy, a young girl, with eleven fingers, and after a few more days I realized that I’d begun thinking about her in the context of that lost, hyperattenuated world of the Jewish intelligentsia of fin de siècle Vienna. Which felt right to me; after that it was just a question of doing the work.

Ben Fountain grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina, graduated from the University of North Carolina and Duke University Law School, and practiced law in Dallas before quitting to write fiction. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Threepenny Review, Zoetrope, and The Pushcart Prize, and in 2002 he won the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award. He is working on a novel set in Dallas, where he lives with his wife and their two children.

Paula Fox, “Grace”

My family and I took in a small stray dog many years ago. She was rather like Grace, both timid and stubborn. The title refers not only to the dog in the story, but also to John Hillman's implied evolution to a state of grace.

Paula Fox was born in 1923, and in the 1960s began to publish both novels and books for young people. Since her first novel, Poor George, and first book for children, Maurice's Room, she's published another twenty-eight books, the most recent a memoir, Borrowed Finery. Fox lives in New York City.

Nell Freudenberger, “The Tutor”

I started writing this story during a two-month stay in Bombay. I knew I was writing a book that would take place mostly in India, but I didn’t like the idea of “looking for” stories. At the same time I made choices that seem, in retrospect, suspiciously scavengerish: I rented a room in a family-owned boardinghouse that doubled as a maternity hospital; I pestered a Parsi friend to take me walking around the Towers of Silence, the sacred compound where Zoroastrians expose their dead; I spent an inordinate amount of time convincing the staff of the historic David Sassoon library to give me reading privileges. Some of my happiest (but least “exotic”) days in Bombay were spent with a friend of a friend from home, who had set up a business tutoring high school students for college entrance exams. One afternoon he mentioned that the teenage girls he taught were bored by poetry, with the exception of Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress.” The idea that sixteen-year-old girls in Bombay were responding to Marvell fascinated me; according to my friend, they immediately understood the poem as a seduction strategy. That got me started, and I finished the story after I came home to New York. I hope that my feeling for Bombay is in “The Tutor,” but I also know that the core of the story is something native to me: my own response to certain poems as a teenager. I worried that being away from home would either keep me from writing stories, or help so much that I would depend on it; I like the idea that my friend's anecdote, for which I’m grateful, is one I could have heard at home. Maybe stories aren’t such delicate things that a trip over the ocean can make or break them.

Nell Freudenberger's stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta. Lucky Girls, her first book, won the PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award for Fiction. She has taught English in Bangkok and New Delhi. Freudenberger lives in New York City.

Tessa Hadley, “The Card Trick”

For me, the oddest thing about this story, “The Card Trick,” is that inside it I have made up the whole career of an imaginary celebrated novelist, John Morrison; and even some of his work. This is not something I’ve ever done elsewhere. It was surprisingly easy to supply the biography, and an impression of the novels; much easier than making up one's own work. I just imagined a whole oeuvre, absolutely of its period, intense and melancholy, austere. I thought of a writer I’d love to discover, and read. Well, of course, I didn’t actually have to write John Morrison's novel, only imagine how it ought to be, if it was really good: which is the easy bit. In retro- spect, I’m struck by my cheek in inventing him. He's almost too much- too big-to be used only in one story; I am playing with the idea of bringing him into something else, to do him justice, make his influence on the history of the novel more strongly felt and pervasive. The idea of bringing Literature into literature, so to speak, really interests me. All my own living has been so saturated with my reading, it seems a kind of lie to leave books out of books.

But the germ of the story began with the card trick itself: the only even moderately good one I know. I did try to write enough into the story so that anyone who cared to follow it could see how it was done. I remember learning this trick as a child, from a boy, in fact (reversing what happens in the story), son of a family friend. I had been too shy to talk to him, until we came together over this trick. I remember the wonderful sense of power it gave me, dissolving awkwardness and incapacity, giving me a way of performing with a mastery that otherwise I didn’t seem to have. The twist, that the trick seems to hand over mastery from the performer to the subject who unknowingly deals out, is an adult irony overlaid onto the child's excitement. I have made it have something to do with sex, with the way women have sometimes made themselves abject in order to keep control. Gina-unknowingly, of course-may be up to something like this, in her teenage helplessness.

Tessa Hadley was born in Bristol, England. She has published two novels, Accidents in the Home and Everything Will Be All Right, and her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Big Issue, among others. She is the author of Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, and teaches English and creative writing at Bath Spa University College. Hadley has lived in Cardiff, Wales, for more than twenty years.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “Refuge in London”

In earlier years I wrote mostly about India-or rather, my experience of India-but later I more often turned back to my European background. Although of course the characters and setting of “Refuge in London” are the usual lies and fusions that the fictional memory performs, I did grow up as a refugee in London during the war years. And I did sit for a once-famous artist, who was also a refugee and couldn’t afford another model; and he did read Beaudelaire to me from a little book he must have acquired in Paris during his youthful years there. Later, when he returned to Germany (where he again became successful), he gave me that book and I took it with me to India. I still have it there. He had drawn a bookplate for me and pasted it inside, and that is the only drawing of his I possess.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany in 1927 and escaped to England with her parents in 1939. She went to school and college in London, where she met and married the Indian architect C. S. H. Jhabvala. They lived in India from 1951 to 1975. She published her first novel in 1955, and since then has published twelve novels, including Heat and Dust and A Backward Place, and six collections of short stories. She has written most of the screenplays for the films of Merchant Ivory, with whom she has been associated since 1962. Jhabvala lives in New York, with frequent return visits to India.

Edward P. Jones, “A Rich Man”

In Lost in the City, there is a story, “A New Man,” which has a teenager, Elaine Cunningham, who runs away from home and is never found. “A Rich Man” takes place several years later. I may well have had a need to say something about what happened to Elaine. So I created “A Rich Man.” Elaine is not the primary focus of the new story, but we have some idea of where she is headed.

Edward P. Jones is the author of The Known World, a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and Lost in the City, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1992. He is the recipient of a fellowship and award from the Lannan Foundation. Jones lives in Washington, D.C.

Gail Jones, “Desolation”

This is a deliberately wordy story about unspeakable shame and the silent metaphysics of dislocated experience. In every large city there are diasporic lost souls, and in cities, too, there are pleasure seekers and wanderers. I wanted-with as much concision as possible-to forge a meeting that tips from community, even possible romance, into sudden desolation. The Death in Vegas concert supplies a kind of aesthetic analogy to the struc- ture of the story in its alienated form, its repetitions, and its decontextual-ized images. For all this, “Desolation” is a kind of love story.

Gail Jones is the author of two collections of short stories, The House of Breathing and Fetish Lives, and two novels, Black Mirror and Sixty Lights. She teaches in the Department of English, Communication, and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia and lives “in the most remote city in the world,” Perth.

Caitlin Macy, “Christie”

In his introduction to the red book-his Collected Stories -John Cheever wrote, “My favorite stories are those that were written in less than a week and were often composed aloud.” After I finished my novel it took me a long time to get my short-story legs back. Then one day when I was toiling and sweating to get out some other story, “Christie” came to me almost whole. “Christie came from Greenwich, Connecticut,” I thought, “and that was all anyone knew of her background.” This original first line of the story was later edited for clarity but much of the opening passage remains intact, exactly the same as when I first heard it-“heard” because this was a rare instance for me of the composing aloud that Cheever describes. Because I had a lot of fun writing the story, it amused me that readers’ reactions were largely of the “chilling,” “incredibly depressing,” “disturbing,” “sad,” “scary” ilk-a clear instance of one's story having a life of its own, and one that its author could not have predicted. As for the subject matter, I have always been fascinated by girls like Christie Brue-wald née Thorn who move to New York, dye their hair blond, eat frozen yogurt for dinner, snag a man. I hope my soft spot for the Christie type comes through even the angst-y, bitter, teeth-gnashing voice of the narrator.

I am fond of the story for another reason: it proved to me that the daily forced march over the blank page is not necessarily in vain because inspiration may be more likely to come out of it-out of one's daily work- rather than out of a passive, here-I-am-waiting-to-be-inspired stance, something that I had never clarified for myself.

Caitlin Macy is the author of the novel The Fundamentals of Play. She is at work on a collection of short stories, tentatively titled Spoiled. Macy lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Michael Parker, “The Golden Era of Heartbreak”

This story arose out of the usual straddle: one leg in experience and the other, more weight-bearing leg in a calculated exploitation and exaggeration of same. As always I started with music-the rhythm of the narrator's desire-and landscape-the flat, bleakly beautiful Sound country of northeastern North Carolina. Two other things helped this story along: a Whis-keytown song called “Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight,” and the fact that, while writing it, I was training for an Ironman triathlon, and had self-inflicted suffering on the brain.

Michael Parker is the author of four books of fiction, including the novel Virginia Lovers. His short fiction has appeared in Five Points, Shenandoah, The Oxford American, The Black Warrior Review, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 2002, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. He teaches in the MFA writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Parker lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Dale Peck, “Dues”

This is a funny story. I wrote a preliminary version while housesitting in upstate New York for a friend of a friend. I was in the middle of the country with no one around, and I fell into a pattern of sleeping for two or three hours and being awake for four or five hours, so that I’d find myself waking up at three in the morning and reading and writing until eight and then going back to bed-a staccato rhythm echoed in all the starts and stops in the story. I was also reading a lot of Coetzee at the time (Boyhood, Life & Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians) and so much of his terseness crept into the story that it ended up stymieing me. I put the manuscript away until July 2002, when, through a tangential impulse, I was inspired to pull it out and rewrite it as a September 11 story. My inspiration was the mining accident in Quecreek, Pennsylvania. Nine miners were trapped for three days after an underground stream flooded the shaft they were working in; by the time rescue workers managed to drill into the shaft it was assumed the miners would all be dead, but they all made it. I think the experience reawakened the sense of helplessness many Americans had felt about not being able to rescue anyone from the World Trade Center, and rechanneled it into the herculean efforts that led to the miners’ rescue, and it's this idea-of looking for someone who's dead but finding someone who's alive-that became central to “Dues.” There's actually a second half of the story planned (or a second story with the same character) which takes place at the site of the mining accident, but that's still in note form, and will probably decide to get written, like “Dues,” when I least expect it.

Dale Peck is the author of three novels, Martin and John, The Law of Enclosures, and Now It's Time to Say Goodbye; a memoir, What We Lost; and a collection of essays, Hatchet Jobs. He teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of New School University. Peck lives in New York City.

Frances de Pontes Peebles, “The Drowned Woman”

The idea for “The Drowned Woman” came to me during a plane ride with my mother four years ago. It was a nine-hour flight from Recife to the United States, and neither of us could sleep. The cabin was dark. A movie played. A few restless people padded up and down the aisle in their socks. I don’t know what triggered her memory, but my mother turned to me and said that once, as a little girl, she and her friends saw an unknown woman washed up on the beach with her arm petrified from rigor mortis. I asked questions, and all my mother said was, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Then she fell asleep.

Sitting in that dark plane, I was amazed by the drowned woman, by the stiff arm. But later, I was more amazed by my mother, by the fact that, as a child, she had seen a corpse, washed up and rigid, and had never mentioned it. I started writing about the drowned woman, creating a name and a story for her. After several drafts, the story became less about the woman and more about the little girl.

Frances de Pontes Peebles is a recipient of a Sacatar Artist's Fellowship and a J. William Fulbright Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in Indiana Review and Missouri Review. Peebles lives in Pernambuco, Brazil, with her dogs Oscar, Lorenço, Negão, and Xuxa.

Ron Rash, “Speckle Trout”

When I was a child, I loved to fish the small creek on my grandparents’ farm. Brook trout was the technical name for the fish I caught, but in the North Carolina mountains they were called speckle trout. My grandparents loved to eat them, and I was expected to bring back what I caught for supper. They were beautiful creatures-red and olive spots on their flanks, orange fins-and I always felt some sadness as I slipped them onto my stringer. I was especially haunted by how quickly their bright colors faded. These trout were also rare, found only in small, isolated creeks. As I got older I searched for them in places sometimes a mile or two away from any road, places where a rattlesnake bite or broken leg could have life-threatening consequences. I also ignored a few No Trespassing signs. Unlike the young man in my story, I was never caught, but that fear was always present.

Ron Rash's family has lived in the southern Appalachian mountains since the mid-1700s. He grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University. His poetry and fiction have appeared in many magazines, including Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Georgia Review, New England Review, and Poetry. He is the author of two story collections, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Casualties; three volumes of poetry, Eureka Mill and Among the Believers Raising the Dead; and two novels, One Foot in Eden and Saints at the River. Rash lives in Clemson, South Carolina.

Nancy Reisman, “Tea”

I’m interested in the way that longing can shape one's perceptions of reality and in the delicate balance between hope and self-delusion. One reason I’m drawn to Lillian's character is that I think of her as a realist, a highly pragmatic woman, yet her relationship with Abe moves her into wishful, unsteady territory. It's an emotionally fraught mix, but I think this combination of pragmatism and wild hope is what has enabled her to survive and to sustain an unconventional life in a tradition-bound community.

Nancy Reisman is the author of a novel, The First Desire, and House Fires, which won an Iowa Short Fiction Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader, and has also appeared in Five Points, Tin House, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Glimmer Train, among others. Reisman lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Elizabeth Stuckey-French, “Mudlavia”

I began “Mudlavia” years ago. It started with a conversation I had with Harold Watts, a family friend and colleague of my father's in the Purdue University English Department. Harolds mother took him to the Mudlavia Hotel and Resort in 1916, when he was ten years old, hoping to heal his aching knee with mud baths. Harold generously told me all about his visit there, giving me many intriguing details, including a description of the character I call Harry Jones, the cushion man, whom Harold and his mother thought was a gangster.

I wrote an early draft of this story in which I didn’t stray much from the facts Harold told me, but it wasn’t very dramatic and I had to put it aside. From the start, however, I tapped into a voice that I found mesmerizing, and it was the voice that drew me back into the story when I picked it up again over a decade later. When I reread it a plot suggested itself right away, but it took me a number of rewrites until I allowed the inevitable to happen at the end. After finishing this story I didn’t want to leave Mudlavia, so I am in the midst of writing a novel set there.

The real Mudlavia Hotel burned down in 1920. I often wish I could go there. If I could, I know I’d be a much better person.

Elizabeth Stuckey-French is the author of a novel, Mermaids on the Moon, and a collection of short stories, The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa. She teaches at Florida State University. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, and Five Points, among others. Stuckey-French lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Liza Ward, “Snowbound”

I wrote this story during a bout of loneliness at the end of one very hot summer in Missoula, Montana. The hills had turned brown. Fish struggled in the shallow water of the Clark Fork River, and dark plumes of smoke crowded the horizon. It felt like the end of something. There seemed to be no one anywhere to verify my existence, and I slipped into a strange internal world, dragging this character, Susan, along with me. After a while it was hard to tell who was leading whom. I fantasized about winter, a frozen place white as the moon where new truths emerged, where everything was subjective. I remembered how our garden in Brooklyn looked to me as a girl, buried in snow, our pint-sized terrier hopping through the magic blue light as a confused rabbit might, and the way it felt like the city was yawning. Anything could happen on a snowy day, and I had the feeling that anything could happen in this story. I had no idea where it was going, only that my character was writing her own version of history, assuaging her fear of abandonment with a fictional world where people found each other. She knew she didn’t want to spend her life alone the way her father was going to now that her mother had left. I guess her dream, her invented story, gave her hope.

Liza Ward was born in 1975, and grew up in New York City. Her first novel is Outside Valentine, and her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Antioch Review, Agni Review, Georgia Review, and Best New American Voices. Ward lives in Massachusetts.