Charles D’Ambrosio, “The High Divide”
I just checked the folder in my computer where I’ve kept the various versions of “The High Divide” and there are, no kidding, 116-plus there's a sheaf of papers in my old Steelcase file cabinet that includes typewritten scenes and scribbled notes and a handful of rejections from people who, I would love to imagine, had some ideas that this story was destined to knock around, alone and unloved, stupid and blind, until it found its present shape and home. Of course, going forward the floundering hardly felt that way. Despite writing lots of versions over the course of twelve years, there was very little agony involved in making the story-it just seemed that every two or three years I’d haul it out and write a bunch of drafts and forget about it until the next time. It was like owning a pet that didn’t need to be fed very frequently. Big and little things changed along the way. At one point the crazy father was on the loose and the narrator lost the tip of his tongue when a basketball fell on his head. The dead mother was alive and the whole family lived in a bungalow in West Seattle with blackberry vines scrabbling up through the floor. Somewhere in all this the story ballooned to about twelve thousand words. In order to reduce the word count, I had to lock the nutty father away in a mental institution. Committing the father also softened the narrator's anger, which in turn cut down the number of personal cruelties in the story. The pain spread out beyond the petty question of personal fairness, widening into sympathy. All the quotes were removed from the dialogue-which is how I’d had it originally-and that fixed a tonal problem, since all the dialogue was written to sound reported rather than realistic. Thus my first vague impulse was integrated back into the narrator's voice. The sentences felt healthy and true again. The engine driving the story had always been anger, but in the last stages of rewriting a new note of love crept in. If anger is endless and the deepest urge of love is toward completion, then love, I’d have to say, did the trick-however unliterary that insight may seem.
Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of The Point and Other Stories and The Dead Fish Museum. His fiction appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and various anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories. His nonfiction appears regularly in Nest Magazine and The Organ Review of Arts. D’Ambrosio lives in Portland, Oregon.
Ben Fountain, “Fantasy for Eleven Fingers”
I was sitting at my daughters piano recital watching all those kids ripping the keyboard in that extraordinary way which we tend to take for granted, the fingers hitting the keys bam-bam-bam-bam as if each separate finger had its own brain, and two things occurred to me more or less simultaneously. One, that artistic skill and achievement of this sort are an everyday miracle that ought to blow our minds, and, two, how would throwing an extra finger into the mix change things? I walked around with those notions for a couple of days, pretty sure that I wanted to write a story about a piano prodigy, a young girl, with eleven fingers, and after a few more days I realized that I’d begun thinking about her in the context of that lost, hyperattenuated world of the Jewish intelligentsia of fin de siècle Vienna. Which felt right to me; after that it was just a question of doing the work.
Ben Fountain grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina, graduated from the University of North Carolina and Duke University Law School, and practiced law in Dallas before quitting to write fiction. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Threepenny Review, Zoetrope, and The Pushcart Prize, and in 2002 he won the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award. He is working on a novel set in Dallas, where he lives with his wife and their two children.
Paula Fox, “Grace”
My family and I took in a small stray dog many years ago. She was rather like Grace, both timid and stubborn. The title refers not only to the dog in the story, but also to John Hillman's implied evolution to a state of grace.
Paula Fox was born in 1923, and in the 1960s began to publish both novels and books for young people. Since her first novel, Poor George, and first book for children, Maurice's Room, she's published another twenty-eight books, the most recent a memoir, Borrowed Finery. Fox lives in New York City.
Nell Freudenberger, “The Tutor”
I started writing this story during a two-month stay in Bombay. I knew I was writing a book that would take place mostly in India, but I didn’t like the idea of “looking for” stories. At the same time I made choices that seem, in retrospect, suspiciously scavengerish: I rented a room in a family-owned boardinghouse that doubled as a maternity hospital; I pestered a Parsi friend to take me walking around the Towers of Silence, the sacred compound where Zoroastrians expose their dead; I spent an inordinate amount of time convincing the staff of the historic David Sassoon library to give me reading privileges. Some of my happiest (but least “exotic”) days in Bombay were spent with a friend of a friend from home, who had set up a business tutoring high school students for college entrance exams. One afternoon he mentioned that the teenage girls he taught were bored by poetry, with the exception of Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress.” The idea that sixteen-year-old girls in Bombay were responding to Marvell fascinated me; according to my friend, they immediately understood the poem as a seduction strategy. That got me started, and I finished the story after I came home to New York. I hope that my feeling for Bombay is in “The Tutor,” but I also know that the core of the story is something native to me: my own response to certain poems as a teenager. I worried that being away from home would either keep me from writing stories, or help so much that I would depend on it; I like the idea that my friend's anecdote, for which I’m grateful, is one I could have heard at home. Maybe stories aren’t such delicate things that a trip over the ocean can make or break them.
Nell Freudenberger's stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta. Lucky Girls, her first book, won the PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award for Fiction. She has taught English in Bangkok and New Delhi. Freudenberger lives in New York City.
Tessa Hadley, “The Card Trick”
For me, the oddest thing about this story, “The Card Trick,” is that inside it I have made up the whole career of an imaginary celebrated novelist, John Morrison; and even some of his work. This is not something I’ve ever done elsewhere. It was surprisingly easy to supply the biography, and an impression of the novels; much easier than making up one's own work. I just imagined a whole oeuvre, absolutely of its period, intense and melancholy, austere. I thought of a writer I’d love to discover, and read. Well, of course, I didn’t actually have to write John Morrison's novel, only imagine how it ought to be, if it was really good: which is the easy bit. In retro- spect, I’m struck by my cheek in inventing him. He's almost too much- too big-to be used only in one story; I am playing with the idea of bringing him into something else, to do him justice, make his influence on the history of the novel more strongly felt and pervasive. The idea of bringing Literature into literature, so to speak, really interests me. All my own living has been so saturated with my reading, it seems a kind of lie to leave books out of books.
But the germ of the story began with the card trick itself: the only even moderately good one I know. I did try to write enough into the story so that anyone who cared to follow it could see how it was done. I remember learning this trick as a child, from a boy, in fact (reversing what happens in the story), son of a family friend. I had been too shy to talk to him, until we came together over this trick. I remember the wonderful sense of power it gave me, dissolving awkwardness and incapacity, giving me a way of performing with a mastery that otherwise I didn’t seem to have. The twist, that the trick seems to hand over mastery from the performer to the subject who unknowingly deals out, is an adult irony overlaid onto the child's excitement. I have made it have something to do with sex, with the way women have sometimes made themselves abject in order to keep control. Gina-unknowingly, of course-may be up to something like this, in her teenage helplessness.