Alice Munro’s stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, as well as in The Atlantic and the Paris Review. She and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.
• “Train” examines a man’s desire to avoid his past mistakes by essentially becoming someone new, someone in whom others can place trust and belief and even memories of loved ones now gone. To atone is so often to assume a new, cleaner identity. To attempt, of course, to begin again. I don’t know whether this is an effective strategy, but the desire to escape and rebuild is something I find interesting.
ANTONYA NELSON is the author, most recently, of Bound (a novel) and Nothing Right (stories). She teaches in the creative writing programs at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College. Her favorite color is green, and she loves babies and corgi dogs and earrings and standup comedy and cocktail hour.
• “Chapter Two” was in my head for years before it was on the page. Based loosely on an actual person, the proximity of high-hilarity hijinks and sudden sobering utter mortal demise was a story I couldn’t seem to tell, although I knew I wanted to somehow capture that exact sensation. How to frame a story? It’s my main question, right after Is it happy hour yet?
KIRSTIN VALDEZ QUADE was a Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where she is now a Jones Lecturer. She holds degrees from Stanford and the University of Oregon and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, The Best of the West 2010, and elsewhere.
• The violent backstory of “Nemecia” is based loosely on true events. As a small child, my godmother watched as her father brutally beat her mother and murdered her grandfather. Her father fled to the mountains but was eventually caught by a posse of neighbors. When he was released from prison, my great-grandmother said, he wasn’t the same man. “He was innocent, like a child.” Her phrasing struck me, and suddenly I saw him vividly: reduced, broken, vacant.
I peopled the incident with invented characters and gave them needs and motivations entirely their own. Nemecia is not my godmother, who was generous and deeply loyal to her family and friends. As I wrote I discovered that I was less interested in the murder itself than in its reverberations and in the way trauma can become a kind of treasure, a currency to be hoarded or envied or spent.
SUZANNE RIVECCA is the author of Death Is Not an Option (2010), a finalist for the Story Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. The recipient of a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in San Francisco and works at an organization that serves the homeless.
• I work as a grant writer for a nonprofit that serves homeless runaways in San Francisco. “Philanthropy” had its genesis in my frustration with the sometimes sanitized and simplified way in which I have to portray our clients’ lives, circumstances, and trajectories for the benefit of potential funders. When you’re scrounging for money from rich faceless entities, a penitential quality infuses the prose by default; it’s like you revert back to some hard-wired feudal mindset, hat in hand. There’s no bigger sin in America than having the temerity to make others bear witness to destitution, and I atone for that sin by grafting an implicitly flattering aspirational arc onto each request: if you give us money, rich people, you’ll be helping these poor boys and girls become more like you. Normal. Relatable. Sympathetic.
There’s an expectation that once “recovery” happens, all past hedonism and experimentation must be renounced and rendered an utter waste. Whenever I interview a former client for a newsletter article or grant proposal, she’ll invariably say something like, “I don’t regret all the drugs I did and all the insane experiences I had, because I wouldn’t be the person I am without them, and that’s what I needed to be doing at the time.” And I think to myself, “Well, shit, I can’t put that in there.” But I should be able to. You shouldn’t have to disown and amputate your past in order to forge a future.
When I wrote a first draft of this story, I showed it to a few people at an artists’ residency. One woman, who may or may not have been the female incarnation of Mitt Romney, approached me to give me a lecture about my unfair portrayal of the downtrodden rich. She said, “Look, my family has a lot of money, and I have a LOT of rich friends. And they’re good people from Brookline, Massachusetts! Just because someone’s rich doesn’t mean they’re bad and foolish. After all, they’re the ones who are putting up the money! They put up all the money but they still have to take all the ridicule. It’s just not fair!”
Well, lady, this is for you. If any residents of Brookline want to redeem their town’s image, I invite them to go to homelessyouthalliance.org and chip in a dollar.
Above all, this story is essentially a love letter to my boss, who does an impossible job every day with tenacity, ingenuity, and humor.
GEORGE SAUNDERS is the author of four story collections, the most recent being Tenth of December. In 2006 he was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. He was awarded the 2013 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of short fiction. He teaches at Syracuse University.
• “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” came directly out of a dream: in the dream, I got out of bed, went to a (nonexistent) window in our house, looked out, and saw four women suspended between two A-shaped frames on a tiny wire that ran in one side of the head and out the other. The women—who, in my dream-logic, I understood to be poor women from Third World countries—wore matching white smocks, had beautiful long black hair, were alive, and were not in any pain—they were talking happily in the moonlight. And—the kicker—my reaction (that is, the reaction of the guy I was in the dream) was not “Holy shit, what’s going on here?” but “Oh wow, we are so lucky to finally be able to get these for our kids.” That is: pure gratitude. The story then took twelve years to finish.
JIM SHEPARD is the author of six novels, including, most recently, Project X, and four story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Story Prize, and You Think That’s Bad, released in 2011. He teaches at Williams College.
• My mother, who lived through the Great Depression, and my brother are two of the more frugal people you could ever meet, so frugal, in fact, that they enjoy browsing at their local Goodwill, and sometimes I’ll go along, both to spend some time with them and because I occasionally nurse the fantasy that I’ll stumble across some unexpected find when sorting through the dollar books. Ninety-five percent of those book piles are exactly the sort of battered and dispiriting bestsellers and self-help books you’d expect, but the other 5 percent can feature the truly arcane and strange. Out of one such pile, for example, I pulled Sidney Perley’s fantastically bizarre Historic Storms of New England, a chronological compendium of eyewitness accounts of the most destructive storms to hit the region, from the first settlements to the late nineteenth century. Nearly all of those accounts, unsurprisingly, were from the point of view of farmers whose entire livelihoods had been threatened by what they’d experienced. The inability to predict such catastrophes—and the sense that you might work hard yet never know what was rolling toward you over the next set of hills—stuck in my imagination for years. I started thinking about writing a story about such a life.