• This story was born from the image of teenagers playing on an abandoned golf course, and although there’s only a passing mention of that here, I think of it as indispensible. The tattoo and animal stuff has been batting around in my head for years, and I’ve tried to get the phrase “a trickle of water tracking through pebbles” into just about everything I’ve ever written. I should also say that I thought the father’s plan would work. I thought he was trying to do right by his boy, and until things went wrong, I thought he’d say his piece, deliver the girl home, and the night would end quietly. I’m grateful it didn’t.
And I’m grateful, immeasurably so, to Heidi Pitlor for the kindness she’s shown my work. That Elizabeth Strout, a writer whom you read again and again to greater reward, would like this story is beyond humbling. I’m also indebted to Tyler Cabot at Esquire for his keen edits and the home he gave the story, and to Amy Hempel for her generous and unsurprisingly spot-on suggestions on how to make the story its best self.
Finally, this story is dedicated to the memory of Mike Anzaldúa. Without him, the story wouldn’t exist. None of mine would.
SHEILA KOHLER is the author of three volumes of short stories and ten novels, including Cracks, Becoming Jane Eyre, and most recently, The Bay of Foxes (2012). Dreaming for Freud will be published in 2014. Her short stories have appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories and the Best American series. Her work has been published in twelve countries. Cracks has been filmed with Jordan Scott as director and Ridley Scott as executive producer and Eva Green playing Miss G.
• There are elements of my life in the story. I do come from South Africa and I did lose a beloved sister in violent domestic circumstances. However, the story also has echoes from literature. I was thinking of the German myth in which a child is led to death by a supernatural being, which Goethe uses in his great poem “Erlkönig.”
DAVID MEANS was born and raised in Michigan. His second collection of short stories, Assorted Fire Events, earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and has recently been reissued by Faber. His third collection, The Secret Goldfish, was a finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. His most recent book, The Spot, was a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in Nyack, New York.
• “The Chair” came out of my experiences as a father and drew on a particular feeling of isolation that comes from being alone at home with your kids, trying to instruct, to guide, to find a way to persuade and protect. There’s an aspect of crime and punishment in so much parental interaction—along with a strange, dangerous dynamic that involves living vicariously through your kids (sometimes for just a few seconds) even as you’re paradoxically aware that you really can’t. This dynamic is hugely problematic, and I’ve thought about it a lot over the years until, finally, I started writing “The Chair,” which began as a much longer story—a man and a woman in bed discussing their son, analyzing his recent behavior, asking themselves how they might better parent him—and then, in revisions, began to zero in on the incident in the yard. A breakthrough came when the father said to the son, “You’ll get the chair.” Then I understood that the story wanted to be about potential punishment, and it was being fueled by the fact that I’ve always detested the term “time out.” You’re going to get a “time out” sounded, and still sounds, linguistically crazy. If you don’t do what I say you should do, I’m going to remove you from time? As a parenting technique, it was popular a few years ago—maybe it still is.
STEVEN MILLHAUSER’s most recent book is We Others: New and Selected Stories. Other works include Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer and Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, and Tin House. He was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Connecticut, and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
• I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Saul. Last year I reread the two books of Samuel, with the vague idea of writing about Saul and David. I quickly abandoned the idea, but my reading awoke a childhood memory of first hearing the story of Samuel, the boy whose name was called in the night. That memory gave rise to my story.
LORRIE MOORE is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English in the creative writing program at Vanderbilt University.
• Nabokov’s famous story “Signs and Symbols” is one of those perfect narrative objects that reveals different things when read at different times, even as it itself remains unchanging. A rereading of this story last year left me in a somewhat new referential condition (though shattered; one is always shattered), and whether it was good inspiration or misbegotten, I was led to try to compose a kind of narrative dance with the story—though I am the hat rack and Nabokov is Fred Astaire. Good idea or bad?—I felt possessed and did not decide nor resist. It was less a “revisioning” and more of a “wandering toward then away then back again.” But it was an honoring exercise, perhaps also an exorcism. “Amateurs imitate, artists steal”: a variation on an old saw I was reminded of recently in a nifty book called Steal Like an Artist, which is full of things said by other people—natch. But “Referential” is not an actual theft nor trying to slink about as if committing one but is intended as—what? A tribute—and like most tributes it contains both debts and detours, shadowings and separatenesses, the collaging of other narratives, and even a joke or two.
ALICE MUNRO grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published many books, including Dance of the Happy Shades; Lives of Girls and Women; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; Who Do You Think You Are?; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; The View from Castle Rock; Too Much Happiness; and Dear Life.
During her distinguished career, Munro has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W. H. Smith Award in the United Kingdom and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Rea Award for the Short Story in the United States. Away from Her, the film version of Munro’s “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” won seven Genie Awards and was nominated for two Academy Awards.
In Canada, her prize-winning record is extraordinary: three Governor General’s Awards, two Giller Prizes, the Trillium Book Award, the Jubilee Prize, and the Libris Award. Abroad, acclaim continues to pour in. Runaway and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best Book Award, Caribbean and Canada region, and were chosen as Books of the Year by the New York Times. In 2005, Munro was included in Time magazine’s list of the world’s one hundred most influential people. In 2009, she was awarded the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for “a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.”