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That led to books on nineteenth-century farming, the sort of texts that almost no one in their right mind would check out of a library: things like Jared Van Wagenen Jr.’s The Golden Age of Homespun or T. B. Terry’s Our Farming. And it was in one of those texts that I came across a forlorn little emotional moment that spawned “The World to Come” in its entirety: a notation in a farm wife’s daily journal that the one friend that she had had in the entire valley, to whom she had been utterly devoted, had been forced to move away. And suddenly a whole vista of desolation and loneliness and foreclosed options seemed to peep forth.

ELIZABETH TALLENT teaches in Stanford University’s creative writing program.

• While I was working on this little essay I called the Word document Wilderness_Explanation, and that was a mistake—I kept opening it, thinking I can’t explain, and closing it. My mistake, but one of those mistakes that reflect flatteringly on the mistaker, since each time the doc winked shut, I felt I had honored some essential obscurity in my relation to the story. I don’t want to take an authoritative stance toward something inexplicable, partly out of fear that if I do, nothing inexplicable will happen to me again as a writer.

So, my none-too-sure guess is that this story began with bewilderment, and that the source of the bewilderment was one of those ordinary, small-scale, recurrent rifts between what you know you feel and what you are willing for others to see. It was this: even with teaching colleagues I know and trust, I’d rather keep my mouth shut than confess to the absorption, connection, and intimacy it’s possible to feel while teaching. Delight regularly figures in my dealings with students, but that delight couldn’t be declared, or it would reflect badly on me. Only, where did that notion come from? I picked it up somewhere. I picked it up everywhere. Teaching is not supposed to be about delight any more than the books on the syllabus are there for delight. I was dissembling about pleasure and whenever there’s dissembling about pleasure, there’s the hint of a story.

Once there was that hint, I began watching for any bits or pieces belonging to the story, for details or phrases or any experience of incongruity that would belong with the other pieces. I liked this because it was a collagelike, collecting way of working whose progression was less like carpentry than like browsing, with browsing’s readiness to like. I might as well have been on a beach looking around for stones that struck me as individuals. That sounds—simple! When I teach, what I want to encourage in young writers is some internalizable Winnicottian/Keatsian willingness to tolerate uncertainties, errors, etc., while they’re working, but my own unwillingness is a problem for me. With this story, for whatever reason, a door opened in perfectionism’s wall. There was also the weird, refracted pleasure of being in the process of writing this story when I’d run into some fresh bewilderment in teaching because I could think, Ah, this is my real life giving me a piece of my fictional life. Which it (my real life) suddenly seemed very happy to do.

Maybe it mattered less, but there was also the grain-of-sand/oyster vexation of fictional professors’ almost always being assholes, with Pnin as the fantastically lovable exception to the rule. In fiction, professor is predatory, student is prey. This ironclad dyad goes to bed without caring much about the intricacy, anxiety, and comedy of teaching. So there’s room.

JOAN WICKERSHAM’s most recent book of fiction is The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story. Her memoir The Suicide Index was a National Book Award finalist. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines as well as in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She also writes a regular op-ed column for the Boston Globe, and her pieces often run in the International Herald Tribune. She lives with her husband and their two sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• A few years ago I got an idea for a story called “The News from Spain.” I never got a chance to write it, and the next time I thought of it, I realized I’d forgotten everything except the title. The loss was maddening but also somehow evocative. And suddenly I imagined a book: a suite of asymmetrical, thwarted love stories, each of which would be called “The News from Spain.” I wanted the title to feel central to each story and to mean something different in each, but to acquire more resonance—an accrued sense of something deeply felt and elusive, impossible to put into words—as the book went along.

So this is one of those stories. (In the book it, like all the others, is called simply “The News from Spain,” but in order to publish different stories in different magazines I had to differentiate them somehow—hence “The Tunnel.”) I wrote it soon after my mother had gone to live in a nursing home; her physical condition was dire but her mind was still sharp. And our relationship was prickly but close.

Rebecca’s romantic history has nothing to do with mine. But the central love story here, between the mother and the daughter, was pretty much a straightforward example of “Write what you know,” which I always amend to read, “Write what matters to you.”

CALLAN WINK’s stories have appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, Ecotone, and others. He lives in Livingston, Montana.

• This story, especially the setting, stems largely from the farm of one of my childhood friends. I would go there on the weekends and we would just run wild around the place—play in the barns, climb the hay, etc.

Once, I saw a cat, a small calico, dead on a pile of manure that was going to be spread on the fields. I think, in large part, this story developed as some sort of justification for this image, one that twenty years later I still can picture very clearly.