MICHAEL BYERS is the author of a book of stories, The Coast of Good Intentions, and two novels, Long for This World and Percival’s Planet. He directs the MFA program at the University of Michigan.
• As tends to be the way with my stories, I set out to write one thing and ended up with something seriously unrelated, which may be why “Malaria” didn’t quite come together for a long time. I had most of it in hand, including the ending, but was stymied by what should happen after George went crazy and before Orlando and Nora went back to visit him again. I tried a dozen avenues, none that went anywhere.
Sometimes when I’m late in a story that’s dead-ended like this, I’ll poke around in the story’s bag of emotions to see what I’ve got along with me—joy, envy, sorrow? Sometimes I can actually burrow under to the originating impulse of the material—the Platonic thing the story was before it got linted-up with particulars of character, setting, and so on—and tug something useful out into the light. In this case, I finally flashed that the story wasn’t about Orlando and Nora as a couple but about Orlando himself. Once I got him alone, then put him on the tennis court with a bunch of strangers, I knew I had it right. Like most simple things the fix seems stupidly obvious in retrospect, but it took forever to discover.
JUNOT DÍAZ was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize—and This Is How You Lose Her, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Díaz is a recipient of the Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, the 2003 U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, and the Sunday Times Short Story Prize. A Rutgers University graduate, he is the fiction editor at the Boston Review and a founding member of the Voices Writers Workshop (http://voicesatvona.org/Home.html). The Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he splits his time between Cambridge and New York City.
• I’d been trying to write “Miss Lora” for nearly seven years. As is usually the case with me, the story just wouldn’t come together. I tried it in first person and in third person, as a journal, a series of letters, a confession, but nada. Nevertheless I stayed on it, producing lame draft after lame draft. What made the difference finally was a trip that I took with some of my boys, and one night in a club in Bayahibe some of them started opening up about how their first sexual relationships were with these older women in the neighborhood and that just broke the last pinion, gave me the permission I needed to get it done.
KARL TARO GREENFELD has written six books, including the novel Triburbia. His fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Playboy, Commentary, the Southern Review, One Story, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and a previous edition of The Best American Short Stories. His nonfiction is widely published and anthologized. Follow him @karltaro or visit karltarogreenfeld.com.
• When I was a freshman in college, our dormitory was what had once been a mansion, now subdivided into doubles. My roommate was digging around in the back of our closet one day, and in a narrow alcove behind a stud he found a small devil’s head sculpted from clay. We didn’t know what to make of this and after studying it, we left it where it had been. I don’t recall being frightened by it. We assumed it was something planted by previous students. But I obviously remembered the little totem and found it noteworthy.
I wrote “Horned Men” in the fall of 2009 and submitted it to about fifty journals over the next two years. It was turned down by every single journal you’ve ever heard of—including Zyzzyva—and many that you haven’t. Finally, hearing that Zyzzyva had changed editors, I re-sent it and this time it was accepted.
GISH JEN’s new book, based on a series of lectures she gave about writing and culture, is titled Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. She is also the author of four novels—World and Town, Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, and The Love Wife—as well as a collection of stories, Who’s Irish? Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Paris Review, Granta, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike; she has also written nonfiction for the New Republic, the New York Times op-ed page, and other publications. Grant support has come from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among other sources. She received a Lannan Award for Fiction in 1999 and a Harold and Mildred Strauss Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. In 2009, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• The origins of stories are always murky for me. No doubt my own parents were on my mind when I wrote “The Third Dumpster.” They never viewed assisted living as an option for a million reasons, starting with the food; and it’s true that I felt that the older they got, the more clearly you could see how difficult it was to have come to America—what an opportunity it was, but what a price they had paid in terms of connection and community. How, though, did this feeling—a feeling that I’d had for at least a decade—suddenly become story material? How did it suddenly become funny? Painfully funny, of course, but nonetheless funny. Liberatingly funny.
I don’t know for sure. As it happens, though, I wrote a little about the writing of this story in my recent book, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, speculating that one day at my computer, I simply found myself in a more Asian frame of mind. There is evidence to support this idea. For example, the Chinese author Lin Yutang observed in his 1935 classic, My Country and My People, how the Chinese are given to a farcical view of life, with “Chinese humor… consist[ing] in compliance with outward form… and the total disregard of the substance in actuality,” and certainly this describes Morehouse’s approach to the problems he and his brother face. It is an approach Goodwin adopts too, from time to time, cloaking his desire for independence so transparently—“And the elevators! Didn’t they just make you want go up?”—that he, and we, find it funny. But probably the story behind the story was that I myself had hit some tipping point in dealing with my own real aging parents, where I needed to “throw off the too heavy burden imposed… by life,” as Freud puts it, “and win the high yield of pleasure afforded by humour.” That’s to say that I wrote this story because I myself needed to laugh and had somehow found a way to do that.
BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, the Paris Review, Glimmer Train, and anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Sports Writing, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. He wrote the documentary film Waiting for Lightning, and his novel, Remember Me Like This, is forthcoming in 2014. He teaches in the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Harvard University, where he is director of creative writing. His website is www.bretanthonyjohnston.com.