Steve Almond is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the New York Times bestseller Against Football. His short stories have appeared in the Best American and Pushcart anthologies. His most recent story collection, God Bless America, won the Paterson Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Story Prize. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. Almond cohosts the podcast Dear Sugar Radio with Cheryl Strayed. He lives outside Boston with his wife and three children.
• “Okay, Now Do You Surrender?” emerged from one of those thought experiments endemic to the domesticated suburban husband: what would happen if one’s spousal missteps were monitored by mafiosi rather than marriage counselors? It would be idiocy to deny that personal authorial guilt played a formative role. I had no intentions of writing a whodunit, but the moment the mobsters waylaid our hero outside his workplace, the die was cast. We’re all living under surveillance at this point — and always have been. Our conscience does the legwork. It’s what sets us apart from the serpents and the badgers and the whatnots. I’m just happy to have found an unorthodox way to write about marital anguish. It remains one of the essential human mysteries.
Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Scrapper, a Michigan Notable Book for 2016. His previous novel, In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. He is also the author of two collections of fiction and a nonfiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II. His next story collection, A Tree or a Person or a Wall, is a fall 2016 publication. A native of Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
• The finding of the boy in “Toward the Company of Others” came to me after a couple months of writing about Kelly scrapping metal in the abandoned buildings of Detroit. I’d wanted to write about metal scrapping and about the urban abandonment in my home state for a while, but I knew very little else when I started. For most of those early weeks, Kelly didn’t even have a name: he was simply “the scrapper,” and I knew very little about him other than his occupation, his deep isolation and loneliness. I went forward with two rules: I would keep him acting, describing the work he did, and I would try to learn who he was by the way he saw the empty schools and churches and houses he gutted for steel and copper. (Most revealing in those days was the habit he had of seeing the abandoned parts of the city as the zone.) I wrote this episode much the way the reader experiences it: I wrote Kelly scrapping the house, unaware there was a boy held in the basement; I then wrote a few sentences where it seemed that Kelly had already found the boy, splitting him into a person who had and had not yet done so, an awareness the reader (and the writer) would share for a moment; and then I wrote the saving of the boy. It was a surprise, but it changed everything else I wrote about Kelly: How would this loner be transformed by saving another person? What new responsibilities would he take on, and how would he discharge the duties they suggested? And if he came to love the boy in the days to come, might he learn that the boy was still in peril, and then how far would he be willing to go to keep the boy safe?
Bruce Robert Coffin began writing seriously in 2012, several months before retiring from the Portland, Maine, police department. As a detective sergeant with twenty-eight years of service, he supervised all homicide and violent crime investigations for Maine’s largest city. Following the terror attacks of 9/11 he worked for four years with the FBI, earning the Director’s Award (the highest honor a nonagent can receive) for his work in counterterrorism. Coffin’s short fiction has been shortlisted twice for the Al Blanchard Award. He is the author of the John Byron mystery series. He lives and writes in Maine.
• I wrote this story several years ago while trying to finish my first novel. As so often happens, ideas creep in and take hold of the creative reins. I’ve learned not to fight it when this happens. Setting the novel aside, I began to write the tale of an ill-contrived escape attempt from the former Maine State Prison in Thomaston. The story was written in only two sittings, followed by untold hours of rewrites and edits, until eventually it became “Fool Proof.”
Lydia Fitzpatrick was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2012 to 2014. She received an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a Hopwood Award winner, and she was a 2010–2011 fiction fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is also a recipient of an O. Henry Award and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her work has appeared in One Story, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, and Opium. Lydia lives with her husband and daughter in Los Angeles. She is working on her first novel.
• “Safety” came from a mix of memory and fear. The first line came from a memory: the gym in my elementary school had skylights and high ceilings, and all this dust floating up there in the light, and I remember being little, lying on my back during the wind-down, staring up into space, and feeling completely relaxed and safe. I wrote the first couple of lines hoping to tap into that emotion and transfer it to the reader before it’s broken by the sound of the gunshot.
There’s that Donald Barthelme quote about writing what you’re afraid of, which is, I think, usually an organic process. As the story evolves, the writer’s fears surface, and her job is not to shy away from them. With “Safety” that relationship was reversed: it began as a fear that I felt compelled to write about. I began writing it just after the one-year anniversary of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when that tragedy was very much in the public eye. I’d just had a baby, and all of a sudden my fears all involved this new person and the safety of her current self, over which I had some control, and her future self, over which I have no control. I didn’t have any connection to the victims at Sandy Hook, but I couldn’t stop thinking about them, and this story was the best way I could find to express those fears.
Tom Franklin, from Dickinson, Alabama, published his first book, Poachers: Stories, in 1999. Its title novella won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story and has been included in The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century and The Best American Noir of the Century. It is currently optioned for film by James Franco. Franklin’s novels include Hell at the Breech, Smonk, and Crooked Letter, which was nominated for nine awards and won five, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller, the UK’s Golden Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel, and the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. Franklin’s latest novel, The Tilted World, was cowritten with his wife, Beth Ann Fennelly. Winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and, most recently, a fellowship to the American Academy in Berlin, Franklin lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where he teaches in the MFA program.