Tessa Hadley was born in Bristol, England. She has published two novels, Accidents in the Home and Everything Will Be All Right, and her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Big Issue, among others. She is the author of Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, and teaches English and creative writing at Bath Spa University College. Hadley has lived in Cardiff, Wales, for more than twenty years.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, “Refuge in London”
In earlier years I wrote mostly about India-or rather, my experience of India-but later I more often turned back to my European background. Although of course the characters and setting of “Refuge in London” are the usual lies and fusions that the fictional memory performs, I did grow up as a refugee in London during the war years. And I did sit for a once-famous artist, who was also a refugee and couldn’t afford another model; and he did read Beaudelaire to me from a little book he must have acquired in Paris during his youthful years there. Later, when he returned to Germany (where he again became successful), he gave me that book and I took it with me to India. I still have it there. He had drawn a bookplate for me and pasted it inside, and that is the only drawing of his I possess.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany in 1927 and escaped to England with her parents in 1939. She went to school and college in London, where she met and married the Indian architect C. S. H. Jhabvala. They lived in India from 1951 to 1975. She published her first novel in 1955, and since then has published twelve novels, including Heat and Dust and A Backward Place, and six collections of short stories. She has written most of the screenplays for the films of Merchant Ivory, with whom she has been associated since 1962. Jhabvala lives in New York, with frequent return visits to India.
Edward P. Jones, “A Rich Man”
In Lost in the City, there is a story, “A New Man,” which has a teenager, Elaine Cunningham, who runs away from home and is never found. “A Rich Man” takes place several years later. I may well have had a need to say something about what happened to Elaine. So I created “A Rich Man.” Elaine is not the primary focus of the new story, but we have some idea of where she is headed.
Edward P. Jones is the author of The Known World, a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and Lost in the City, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1992. He is the recipient of a fellowship and award from the Lannan Foundation. Jones lives in Washington, D.C.
Gail Jones, “Desolation”
This is a deliberately wordy story about unspeakable shame and the silent metaphysics of dislocated experience. In every large city there are diasporic lost souls, and in cities, too, there are pleasure seekers and wanderers. I wanted-with as much concision as possible-to forge a meeting that tips from community, even possible romance, into sudden desolation. The Death in Vegas concert supplies a kind of aesthetic analogy to the struc- ture of the story in its alienated form, its repetitions, and its decontextual-ized images. For all this, “Desolation” is a kind of love story.
Gail Jones is the author of two collections of short stories, The House of Breathing and Fetish Lives, and two novels, Black Mirror and Sixty Lights. She teaches in the Department of English, Communication, and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia and lives “in the most remote city in the world,” Perth.
Caitlin Macy, “Christie”
In his introduction to the red book-his Collected Stories -John Cheever wrote, “My favorite stories are those that were written in less than a week and were often composed aloud.” After I finished my novel it took me a long time to get my short-story legs back. Then one day when I was toiling and sweating to get out some other story, “Christie” came to me almost whole. “Christie came from Greenwich, Connecticut,” I thought, “and that was all anyone knew of her background.” This original first line of the story was later edited for clarity but much of the opening passage remains intact, exactly the same as when I first heard it-“heard” because this was a rare instance for me of the composing aloud that Cheever describes. Because I had a lot of fun writing the story, it amused me that readers’ reactions were largely of the “chilling,” “incredibly depressing,” “disturbing,” “sad,” “scary” ilk-a clear instance of one's story having a life of its own, and one that its author could not have predicted. As for the subject matter, I have always been fascinated by girls like Christie Brue-wald née Thorn who move to New York, dye their hair blond, eat frozen yogurt for dinner, snag a man. I hope my soft spot for the Christie type comes through even the angst-y, bitter, teeth-gnashing voice of the narrator.
I am fond of the story for another reason: it proved to me that the daily forced march over the blank page is not necessarily in vain because inspiration may be more likely to come out of it-out of one's daily work- rather than out of a passive, here-I-am-waiting-to-be-inspired stance, something that I had never clarified for myself.
Caitlin Macy is the author of the novel The Fundamentals of Play. She is at work on a collection of short stories, tentatively titled Spoiled. Macy lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
Michael Parker, “The Golden Era of Heartbreak”
This story arose out of the usual straddle: one leg in experience and the other, more weight-bearing leg in a calculated exploitation and exaggeration of same. As always I started with music-the rhythm of the narrator's desire-and landscape-the flat, bleakly beautiful Sound country of northeastern North Carolina. Two other things helped this story along: a Whis-keytown song called “Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight,” and the fact that, while writing it, I was training for an Ironman triathlon, and had self-inflicted suffering on the brain.
Michael Parker is the author of four books of fiction, including the novel Virginia Lovers. His short fiction has appeared in Five Points, Shenandoah, The Oxford American, The Black Warrior Review, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 2002, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. He teaches in the MFA writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Parker lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Dale Peck, “Dues”
This is a funny story. I wrote a preliminary version while housesitting in upstate New York for a friend of a friend. I was in the middle of the country with no one around, and I fell into a pattern of sleeping for two or three hours and being awake for four or five hours, so that I’d find myself waking up at three in the morning and reading and writing until eight and then going back to bed-a staccato rhythm echoed in all the starts and stops in the story. I was also reading a lot of Coetzee at the time (Boyhood, Life & Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians) and so much of his terseness crept into the story that it ended up stymieing me. I put the manuscript away until July 2002, when, through a tangential impulse, I was inspired to pull it out and rewrite it as a September 11 story. My inspiration was the mining accident in Quecreek, Pennsylvania. Nine miners were trapped for three days after an underground stream flooded the shaft they were working in; by the time rescue workers managed to drill into the shaft it was assumed the miners would all be dead, but they all made it. I think the experience reawakened the sense of helplessness many Americans had felt about not being able to rescue anyone from the World Trade Center, and rechanneled it into the herculean efforts that led to the miners’ rescue, and it's this idea-of looking for someone who's dead but finding someone who's alive-that became central to “Dues.” There's actually a second half of the story planned (or a second story with the same character) which takes place at the site of the mining accident, but that's still in note form, and will probably decide to get written, like “Dues,” when I least expect it.