The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

Writing The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

Chris Adrian, “The Black Square”

This story was written for an issue of McSweeney’s that endeavored to imagine what the world will be like in fifteen years. Each story was to be set in a different location all around the world. This meant that the magazine would have sent me more or less wherever I would have liked to go to research the setting for the story-Paris, Berlin, Ho Chi Minh City, Bali-by means of funding provided by mysterious South American filmmakers. For a reason that had a lot to do with stalking my ex-boyfriend, I chose to go to Nantucket and took his dog with me (with the ex’s permission). I spent two days poking around the beaches and moors with the dog, but didn’t start writing until many months after I returned. I threw out five or six drafts about Nantucket sinking into the ocean or being overwhelmed by intelligent shoes before I finally discovered what the story was about-me, the ex, and the dog. Which is often how it works for me: I put in a bunch of work on a decoy story while waiting for the real story to sneak up and announce itself.

Chris Adrian was born in Washington, D.C., in 1970. He is the author of three novels, Gob’s Grief, The Children’s Hospital, and The Great Night, and a collection of stories, A Better Angel. He lives in San Francisco.

Kenneth Calhoun, “Nightblooming”

“Nightblooming” was one of my many attempts to write about music. Throughout my high school and college years, music was my life. I worked in a music store and played drums for a variety of projects-punk and funk bands, theatrical productions, even a wedding band. As a drummer, I was especially interested in patterns and beats. At some point, I got it in my head that everything that was seemingly random could in fact be the articulation of a grand, overarching rhythm, but that the count hadn’t yet been revealed because we hadn’t reached the end of a measure. I realized while writing “Nightblooming” that this could be a comforting, religious sort of idea, not just a whimsical speculation.

Kenneth Calhoun was born in Upland, California, in 1966. He has published stories in journals such as The Paris Review, Fence Magazine, Fiction International, St. Petersburg Review, Quick Fiction, and others. He is a recipient of the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction and a winner of the Summer Literary Seminars/Fence Magazine Fiction Contest. He lives in Boston.

Jennine Capó Crucet, “How to Leave Hialeah”

Somewhere in the beginning of my thinking of this story, I made a list of all the people I hated. Then I strung together versions of a few of these people-along with versions of people I loved and who loved me-and unleashed this narrator on them. A lot of my stories come from a place of anger, which is probably not the healthiest place, but it’s where I tend to start. Thankfully, because things so quickly become straight-up fiction once I’m actually writing, that’s never, ever where I finish. In writing “How to Leave Hialeah,” it wasn’t until the cousin showed up in my imagination and on the page that I knew this was a story I needed to hear.

Jennine Capó Crucet was born to Cuban parents in 1981 and raised in Miami, Florida. Her debut story collection, How to Leave Hialeah, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the John Gardner Memorial Prize, and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose, and was named a Best Book of the Year by The Miami Herald and the Miami New Times. Her stories have been published in Ploughshares, Epoch, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, The Los Angeles Review, and other magazines. A graduate of Cornell University and a former sketch comedian, she currently divides her time between Miami and Los Angeles.

Jane Delury, “Nothing of Consequence”

This story emerged from a description of sexual dynamics that I heard years ago from a French teacher who had volunteered in Senegal. But I recognize other elements from my lived experience as well: a snake that gave me a fright, an unfortunate episode with a bathing suit and a Pacific wave, and my recognition that for many, like Rado, writing is a long process of learning and refinement rather than a blazing ascension. Though each of the women making up the group of teachers has her own complexity, I was interested in the way that groups of people-especially those who find themselves outside of their familiar environment-can create a larger personality.

Jane Delury was born in 1972 in Sacramento, California. Her stories have appeared in journals including The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, and Prairie Schooner. She has received an award from the Maryland State Arts Council and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She teaches in the University of Baltimore’s MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts program, and lives in Baltimore.

Tamas Dobozy, “The Restoration of the Villa Where Tíbor Kálmán Once Lived”

The impulse to write is usually exactly that: an impulse. It starts for me in that need, experienced daily, a kind of negative drive, fueled by absence, that moves after something in the positive sense-a title, an image, an idea. For many, many years I’ve been mining material on the siege of Budapest, a particularly dark period in what is the general darkness of Hungarian history, in the hope of putting together a collection. This story comes out of that endless seam.

I have some relatives who own an old villa in a suburb east of Budapest, called Mátyásföld, that I have always loved. It seems to me a place that still somehow retains its Austro-Hungarian character despite the ravages of two world wars, revolution, Soviet takeover, land reapportioning, and the sudden and in many ways catastrophic shift into wild capitalism.

When I started writing this story the image of the villa came up for me, almost as it does for László, as a kind of golden lure, a place of security, a final goal. Of course, for me it was a way to tell the story, while for László it was salvation, though maybe in some way this is the same thing-the desire to engage with something that will save what we do from futility, that promises everything will come out all right in the end, that the sacrifices will be worth it, only to realize that it was only really important for what we did-good and bad-along the way.

I do wonder sometimes about this use-misuse some might say-of history in fiction, the way there’s something both moral and amoral in it at the same time: a desire to write in a way that responsibly engages the world, and a desire to write about something simply because it makes for a marvelous story. Maybe this tension is productive and shouldn’t be reconciled. It is, at any rate, a question that haunts the writing of this story, and leaks out in László’s own uncertainties about what he’s doing.

Tamas Dobozy was born in Nanaimo, British Columbia, in 1969. He has published two books of stories, When X Equals Marylou and Last Notes and Other Stories, whose French translation won the 2007 Governor General’s Award. He is an associate professor of American literature in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He lives in Kitchener, Canada.

Judy Doenges, “Melinda”

Soon after I moved to Colorado, my neighbor, who sells bail bonds, told me the story of methamphetamine use in the West. She knew all too well, she said, how the drug had damaged the infrastructure of towns and destroyed thousands of lives. Living with my neighbor at the time was the charismatic Mark, a recently paroled former meth chef and dealer. Mark introduced me, via interviews, to the practice of hijacking foreclosed farms for meth labs, the identity theft business that often accompanies a methamphetamine enterprise, and the particulars of meth production. A clerk in a local drugstore explained how the state polices sales of medicine containing ephedrine, which is a necessary ingredient in meth cooking. Now the name and address of anyone buying Sudafed, for example, enters a database of other cold sufferers-or meth users.

As is the case in many stories about drug or alcohol abuse, the addiction itself is a character, unavoidably yoked to the protagonist. In that way, Melinda not only humanized a social ill but also animated it. It was impossible for me to write about Melinda without meth and impossible to write about meth without Melinda.

“Melinda” is set several years in the past. Methamphetamine cooking is like any other kind of manufacturing: technological advances improve production. Now people can make meth in the back of a van or on a stove. It’s a true American cottage industry.

Judy Doenges was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 1959. She is the author of a novel, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, and a short-fiction collection, What She Left Me. Her stories and essays have appeared in many journals, among them The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, and Western Humanities Review. She has received fellowships and awards from many sources, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and Artist Trust. She teaches at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Brian Evenson, “Windeye”

I owe a debt to Dan Machlin, since his poetry introduced me to the Old Norse word vindauga (vindauge in contemporary Norwegian), which translated literally means “wind-eye.” That word worked on me, haunted me, and slowly took on for me a life of its own. Over a month or two it somehow subconsciously cross-pollinated with games my younger siblings and I used to play when we were little, with my own fascination with the difference between childrens’ and adults’ perceptions, with problems I was having with shingles warping and cracking on my house, and with my own basic distrust about the nature of reality. All of that secretly gestated for a long time, but when I finally sat down to write it, it came out all in a rush, something that rarely happens for me.

Brian Evenson was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1966. He is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the limited-edition novella Baby Leg, and his work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Slovenian. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. Other books include the story collection Fugue State and a new collection of stories, Windeye, that will be published in 2011. His work has been included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories three times, and he has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Evenson lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.

Adam Foulds, “The Rules Are the Rules”

The story began with a single image: a priest who longs to be a father holds an infant for baptism. It was this predicament, this public moment crowded with private feeling and detailed physical experience, that compelled my attention, and I wrote a few pages to try and get hold of it. This then was set aside, and it wasn’t until Granta commissioned me to produce something for their “Sex” issue that I returned to it and the story became more than this fraught tableau. I thought about sex as an urgent, risky, and difficult kind of intimacy, as procreation, and as something that structures an individual’s personality, determining what they notice and react to in the world. Peter’s character and wider situation unfolded with these thoughts.

Adam Foulds was born in London in 1974. He is the author of two novels, The Truth About These Strange Times and The Quickening Maze, as well as a narrative poem set during the Mau Mau uprising in colonial Kenya in the 1950s, The Broken Word. In 2008 he was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and he has won the Costa Poetry Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and was a finalist for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. In 2010 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London.

Lynn Freed, “Sunshine”

Perhaps it is the wildness itself of feral children that has always intrigued me. Or perhaps it is the very idea of life in a state of nature, beyond or before civilization. I don’t know. What I do know is that the girl in this story, which was originally a failed attempt to begin a novel-several stories I have written have begun this way-has been with me always.

Lynn Freed was born in 1945 in Durban, South Africa. She came to New York as a graduate student, receiving her MA and PhD in English literature from Columbia University. She has published six novels (Friends of the Family, Home Ground, The Bungalow, The Mirror, House of Women, The Servants’ Quarters); a collection of essays, Reading, Writing & Leaving Home: Life on the Page; and a collection of stories, The Curse of the Appropriate Man. Her short fiction, memoirs, and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, and Southwest Review, among others. In 2002 she received the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Northern California.

David Means, “The Junction”

In order to write “The Junction” I had to write another story first. That story-still in a rough draft-was about a kindly Pittsburgh doctor, during the Depression, tending to a patient in a flophouse who mysteriously disappeared-against all medical odds-and took to the rails, ending up at State Line Junction, where he saves the day by falling across a switch mechanism. I put the Pittsburgh story aside and began to write a new story, using a little bit of the background material-i.e., when he tells the story at the dinner table-and some of the same energy of the other version. I didn’t see the men in my story as drifters. They’re looking for something, on a quest of sorts, trying to pin down exactly where they need to be to find solace and hope. Part of what inspired me to write this story was the image of a fresh-cut piece of pie on a windowsill waiting for someone. The ideal sense of home is something we’ll never really find, but we keep wandering and changing our own stories in the hope that, at last, we’ll find ourselves in the perfect place. Perhaps it’s hard to write about the search for home right now, in this culture, because the Internet has provided all of us a hyperlink into what might or might not feel like safety: the safety of drifting from site to site, following one link to the next as if we’re free. Setting the story back in the day before cell phones, before high-speed hookups, before Facebook and satellite hookups, back when all you had to do was take a few steps away from the campfire and find a complete solitude, allowed, I like to think, an access to a certain kind of situation, purified down, that allowed a certain pattern to be exposed. (The gibberish above is exactly why writers should, in most cases, avoid talking about their work. The truth is I just wanted to tell a good story and respect my characters and get the words right.) In any case, one other thing that informed this story was the fact that, when I was growing up in Michigan, my grandfather-a lovely man, a true self-made gentleman, who in many ways saved my life-often told me stories about surviving the Great Depression. He had a big cupboard in which he still stored canned goods in case the world crashed again and the food supply became short. Some of the cans actually dated back to the Depression, with labels that were so simple and beautiful and clear they seemed to be hand-painted. He vividly described the way men would come to the back door, knock, be invited in for dinner, and sit at the table with the entire family. There was an old coal yard up the road from his house, and it still had black mounds of coal left over from the days of steam. I paid careful attention to those old piles of coal-half-buried in the weeds, just glints of shiny dark coming through the green. Coal and steam engines weren’t that far in the past in the late sixties.

David Means was born and raised in Michigan. He is the author of four story collections, including Assorted Fire Events, The Secret Goldfish, and, most recently, The Spot. Means lives in Nyack, New York.

Susan Minot, “ Pole, Pole ”

I began this story initially as a challenge to myself-to complete something. I’d not published a book-or a story for that matter-in a long time, and in the long years of working on what looked as if it was now turning out to be two novels, I wanted simply to finish something. So one winter I took a break from the book to write this story. I had spent some time in Kenya in the late ’90s, and imagining a tryst there was a way of revisiting a place I’d been intrigued by. In the writing of the story I also began to envision a collection of intertwined stories set in east Africa of which “Pole, Pole” would be a part. So that’s another book that now needs to be written, though I have its title already: Fatina.

Susan Minot was born in 1956 in Boston. She is the author of Monkeys, Lust & Other Stories, Folly, Evening, Rapture, and a poetry collection, Poems 4 A.M. Her nonfiction has appeared in McSweeney’s and The Paris Review, among other publications. She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. The film Evening was the first adaptation of her fiction. Minot divides her time between New York City and an island in Maine.

Matthew Neill Null, “Something You Can’t Live Without”

The drummer tale is a staple of storytelling. To be kind, you’d call it well-worn; to be cruel, cliché. So many have done it so well: Faulkner, Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Malamud. Breathing life into the form seemed an impossible task, so I had to try. Sitting down to the desk, I wanted to see if I could outdo the established demigods of fiction. An act of hubris for sure, but what isn’t? I hope the reader judges me kindly.

The story, for me, always begins with an image. In college, my first love was geology. A group of us went down into a cave, and after what seemed like miles of dodging bats and slogging through mud, a professor showed us where the remains of an extinct bear-Arctodus simus, I think-had been discovered. I began with the vision of a skull, and then I had to dream the characters to find it. The story unspooled from there. Other stray images found a home: twin boys working fence posts by the roadside; a high meadow drowning in beaver dams; a pair of dead foxes, one red, one gray. Also, the story gave me an opportunity to write one of my favorite landscapes in West Virginia, where the karst lands meet the mountains.

Most of my work is a variation on one theme: the crisis of people who love the land, but are faced with the prospect of selling or destroying some aspect of it to translate the landscape into dollars. This is West Virginia’s story. From timbering to coal mining to Marcellus shale fracturing, the ground has been sold again and again. Despite our common myths and party rhetoric, extractive industry has failed to improve the lot of West Virginians. For me, “Something You Can’t Live Without” is a middle chapter in a long, fraught history.

Matthew Neill Null was born in Summersville, West Virginia, in 1984. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his stories have appeared in Oxford American and Gray’s Sporting Journal. He was the 2010-2011 Provost’s Postgraduate Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa. Null lives in Iowa City.

Lori Ostlund, “Bed Death”

In 1996 my partner and I moved to Malaysia, where we taught business communications at a college very much like the one in the story. There was a bed, for example, behind glass in the lobby, and we looked at an apartment in Nine-Story Building, which, at least then, was the tallest building in our town and was thus, sadly, attractive to jumpers. We found an apartment elsewhere, but during our stay, several people committed suicide by jumping from the building’s roof, and so we became familiar with the building through newspaper accounts and public lore as well as through a friend who lived there. What intrigued me was the way that people sometimes spoke of the jumpers, with a detachment that allowed them to view the suicides as an irritation, an occurrence whose salient feature was its ability to make less pleasant the lives of those who lived in the complex. Yet, on another level, I understood how and why the tenants came to feel this way, and this understanding-of the way that others’ pain or suffering can become a minor and curious backdrop for the drama of our own lives-became the framework of my story.

Like the couple in the story, we stayed at a seedy hotel where the smoke alarms beeped every few minutes. After trying to explain that the batteries needed to be changed, to no avail, we spent an afternoon trying to buy replacement batteries-also to no avail. Finally, we were moved to the only beep-free room-outside of which lay a wounded, moaning man on a chaise longue. We never learned what had happened to him, which is ultimately for the best when it comes to writing fiction.

This story evolved slowly, over the course of ten years, beginning with images and scenes that I wrote down but did not necessarily regard as parts of the same story. Usually, especially with my first-person narrators, the narrator “arrives” first and starts telling the story, but this time the narrator came along later, a narrator who is nothing like me except for a shared navel phobia. As I recall, that narrator appeared one morning as I was reading through all these bits and pieces, wondering whether they would ever amount to anything; she began commenting on them, weaving these disparate parts together, and through her seemingly insightful and often cynical analysis, I began to see how ill-equipped she was for the world, how fragile her relationship was, and how incapable she was of extending compassion to another lost soul.

Lori Ostlund was born in 1965 in a town of 411 people in Minnesota. Her first collection of stories, The Bigness of the World, received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and named a 2009 Notable Book by The Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Georgia Review, among other publications. She was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in San Francisco.

Leslie Parry, “The Vanishing American”

When I was a nerdy, Zoobooks-reading kid, my parents, tired of seeing me use their fancy ice tongs and expensive olive pitter to dissect my stuffed animals, sent me to a marine biology summer camp on Catalina Island. I learned many things there-how to breathe through a snorkel tube, the life cycle of a garibaldi-but what I remember most is shivering in my pup tent at night, listening to stories about the wild bison who’d been roaming the island since 1924. They’d been shipped out as “scenery” for a western movie, our counselor said, and afterward, when filming was done, they were-“Wait, what?” I sat up in my sleeping bag and blinked against the orange light of the mosquito lamp. “Just left there? Like … abandoned?” I wasn’t sure what was more astonishing-that the movie people could be so extravagant and indifferent, or that the herd had managed, despite its new environment, to adapt, flourish, and survive. As an adult, I had tried a few times to write about a soldier who’d lost his voice in World War I. However, I just couldn’t get any purchase on the character, so I put my notes away, frustrated and disappointed. A few days later I saw that The Vanishing American (hey, that buffalo movie!) was screening at the Silent Movie Theatre here in Los Angeles. I had a free night and so, perhaps nostalgic for the bygone days of peeing in my wet suit, I went. Afterward, as I emerged from the theater and crossed Fairfax Avenue, these two ideas-the bison and the soldier-joined serendipitously in my mind. I went home and began to write.

Leslie Parry was born in Los Angeles in 1979. She is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. “The Vanishing American” is her first published story. She lives in Los Angeles.

Jim Shepard, “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You”

“Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” began as many of my stories begin lately-with my browsing around endlessly in an utterly nerdy and bizarre subject and then finding my imagination caught by a particular moment that resonates with me emotionally in unexpected ways. In this case I was reading about the history of the science of avalanches-I know, I know; imagine how my wife feels-and I was struck by the notion that a skier or hiker might cross a given area with no effect and then the next skier or hiker might, when doing the same thing, start an avalanche that carried away any number of those in his group. That desire that must follow to penetrate the capriciousness of such an event-as in, I must have done something different, something to cause such a catastrophe-seemed to me to have all sorts of crucially useful analogues, in emotional terms. I imagined someone at the very dawn of avalanche science who found himself wondering about his responsibility for the fate of someone he loved. And the story proceeded from there.

Jim Shepard was born in 1956 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including You Think That’s Bad. His third collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, as well as the Alex Award from the American Library Association. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, DoubleTake, The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. Four of his stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories and one has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. He’s won an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Williams College and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Helen Simpson, “Diary of an Interesting Year”

It’s always fun when you’re writing to zoom in on what’s uncomfortable-on what causes a silence to fall-and one such touchy subject now is whether we ought to cut back on our rate of consumption for the sake of the future. This suggestion never fails to annoy. Anyway, I wanted to see if I could make interesting fiction from climate change. It’s an undeniably important subject-it’s the elephant on the horizon-but it’s also undeniably difficult, boring (for the nonscientists among us), and horrifying to contemplate. Yes, I thought, that would be really difficult to do, make climate change interesting. Still, I like a challenge, and I went at it from different angles for my fifth story collection, In-Flight Entertainment, treating it as a love story, a dramatic monologue, a satirical comedy, a sales pitch and-the story included here-a dystopian diary. Having said this, I ought to add that I’m not interested in writing polemic. As a reader, I resent fiction that has designs on me. I think the only duty of a writer is to resist writing about what they think they ought to write about-and to write about what stimulates their imagination. Oddly, the subject of climate change did this for me. I sensed dark rich comic pickings, and I wasn’t wrong.

Helen Simpson was born in Bristol, England, in 1956 and grew up near Croydon. The first in her family to go to college, she graduated from Oxford with two degrees. She is the author of five collections of stories and a recipient of the Hawthornden Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award. Her collection In-Flight Entertainment will be published in the United States in 2012. She lives in London.

Mark Slouka, “Crossing”

“Crossing” emerged, after a fifteen-year dormancy period, from an act of near-biblical stupidity on my part: in 1994, while crossing a river in the Pacific Northwest with my five-year-old son on my back, I found myself, very quickly, in serious trouble. It didn’t matter that I’d forded the same river many times before without incident; this time, for whatever reason, was different. Even now I don’t like to think about it. There are few things more excruciating than realizing you’ve put your child’s life in danger.

Over the years that followed, I thought about the incident more than once; I knew I wanted to write about it, but I couldn’t find the release, the spring, the image or phrase or note-often dissonant, almost always unexpected-that brings a story to life. Though the organic symbolism of the thing appealed to me, it felt too easy, too finished, inert. So I let it be.

It wasn’t until I came across the anecdote about the medieval priest that flashes through the father’s mind on the story’s last page that I felt the tumblers fall. Of course! I had to leave him midstream, tricked by life, prey once again to his old fears and insecurities. A man poised between his past and his future, between the impossibility of going on and the necessity of it.

On some level, it feels almost ungrateful; I made it out, after all, and today my son could carry me across that river a good deal more easily than I could him. But fiction, I remind myself, is an act of trespass on the territory of the past, and those who have no stomach for it, whose reverence for apparent truths, as opposed to created ones, is too great, probably shouldn’t play.

Both are equally true: We made it. And we’re still, all of us, hip-deep in the current.

Mark Slouka was born in New York City in 1958. He is the author of a collection of stories, Lost Lake; two novels, God’s Fool and The Visible World, which have been translated into sixteen languages; and Essays from the Nick of Time. He is a recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships and is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. His short fiction has appeared there as well as in The Paris Review and Granta, among other publications, and his essays and stories have been anthologized in The Best American Essays and The Best American Short Stories. He has taught at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, and lives outside New York City.

Elizabeth Tallent, “Never Come Back”

The deep background of this story-which may not make itself felt very much in this final draft-are the changes confronting my hometown on the Mendocino coast: old ways of making a living have vanished, and with them the certainties they fostered, so there’s a sense in which people are free to start from scratch but also bewildered by the prevailing scriptlessness. In “Never Come Back” I wanted to write about a young mother who leaves her child and how the grandparents left to care for the child handle an absence they can’t understand but which they inevitably judge. My secret ambition in this story was to kindle empathy for characters whose actions are, on the face of it, indefensible, but which make the deepest kind of sense to them.

Elizabeth Tallent was born in Washington, D.C., in 1954. Her work includes the story collections Honey and Time with Children and the novel Museum Pieces. She teaches in Stanford’s Creative Writing Program and lives in California.

Lily Tuck, “Ice”

My husband and I did take a cruise to Antarctica, and since I am both a pessimist and a contrarian, I imagined the worst: the boat hitting an iceberg, sinking, my husband falling overboard, drowning. As it turned out we had a very happy time and, except for the books, the clock, the bottle of sleeping pills, everything that was neatly stacked on our nightstand falling pell-mell to the cabin floor and the obnoxious fellow passenger whose goal it was to drive a golf ball in every country of the world, nothing bad happened. Antarctica is stark and desolate, and despite the presence of birds, penguins, and seals as well as the unexpected beautiful blues of the icebergs, one cannot help but be struck by how insignificant and intrusive the appearance of human beings is in that predominantly white landscape, and I wanted to try to describe how this strange and vaguely hostile environment might affect a long-married couple.

Lily Tuck was born in France in 1939 and lived in South America as a child. She is the author of four novels-Interviewing Matisse or The Woman Who Died Standing Up, The Woman Who Walked on Water, Siam (a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), and The News from Paraguay (winner of the 2004 National Book Award)-a collection of stories, Limbo and Other Places I Have Lived, and a biography, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. Her essay “Group Grief” was included in The Best American Essays 2006. Her novel Probability or I Married You for Happiness will be published in fall 2011. She lives in New York City.

Brad Watson, “Alamo Plaza”

During my family’s leanest years, when I was growing up, we spent our summer vacations (if we got one; sometimes we didn’t, and sometimes they were as brief as three days) on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was always a boy’s disappointment, compared to the Alabama and north Florida coasts, with their natural white sand beaches and comparatively huge waves rolling in. And their much clearer water, very clear and green in north Florida. The real beaches in Mississippi are offshore, on the barrier islands, accessible by private boat or ferry, but we never went out there. We got the Mississippi Sound, which in those days was polluted by bad stuff from plants upriver, by waste from the fishing industry, and I don’t know what-all else. But it did have a charm about it. The whole place seemed calmer, more still, less corrupted by the glitzier and cheaper elements of upscale tourism. The smell-at first alarming and repulsive, then kind of wonderfully rich, a smell you realized was the rank richness of marine life and death-was one I experienced nowhere else, on no other coast, and not in New Orleans or any other coastal city. Except for a grand old hotel or two, most of the lodging was either run-down or modest. And the clientele was pretty much entirely local, Mississippi, with some Louisiana tourists mixed in. So I have fond memories of the place, even though I despised it at the time. These memories, mixed with memories of an imaginatively reclusive childhood, of often feeling like the odd boy out in my own family, were things I tried for a long time to combine in this story. It went into and back out of the desk drawer for many years, as I’d write a draft and fail, put it away, write it again a year or a few later, until it finally felt right. It feels highly personal, anyway, a story that comes from pretty deep inside. Putting it together, finally, felt like a great and pleasant relief. There was a kind of joyous sadness about it, which I guess is what I often experience when I recall that childhood, that family, mostly gone now.

Brad Watson was born in 1955 in Meridian, Mississippi. His stories have been published in Ecotone, The New Yorker, Granta, The Idaho Review, Oxford American, Narrative Magazine, The Greensboro Review, and The Yalobusha Review, as well as anthologies including The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Story and Its Writer. His story collection Last Days of the Dog-Men received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His novel, The Heaven of Mercury, received the Southern Book Critics Circle Fiction Award (shared with Lee Smith), and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent collection is Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Wyoming and lives in Laramie, Wyoming.