Dale Peck is the author of three novels, Martin and John, The Law of Enclosures, and Now It's Time to Say Goodbye; a memoir, What We Lost; and a collection of essays, Hatchet Jobs. He teaches in the Graduate Writing Program of New School University. Peck lives in New York City.
Frances de Pontes Peebles, “The Drowned Woman”
The idea for “The Drowned Woman” came to me during a plane ride with my mother four years ago. It was a nine-hour flight from Recife to the United States, and neither of us could sleep. The cabin was dark. A movie played. A few restless people padded up and down the aisle in their socks. I don’t know what triggered her memory, but my mother turned to me and said that once, as a little girl, she and her friends saw an unknown woman washed up on the beach with her arm petrified from rigor mortis. I asked questions, and all my mother said was, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Then she fell asleep.
Sitting in that dark plane, I was amazed by the drowned woman, by the stiff arm. But later, I was more amazed by my mother, by the fact that, as a child, she had seen a corpse, washed up and rigid, and had never mentioned it. I started writing about the drowned woman, creating a name and a story for her. After several drafts, the story became less about the woman and more about the little girl.
Frances de Pontes Peebles is a recipient of a Sacatar Artist's Fellowship and a J. William Fulbright Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in Indiana Review and Missouri Review. Peebles lives in Pernambuco, Brazil, with her dogs Oscar, Lorenço, Negão, and Xuxa.
Ron Rash, “Speckle Trout”
When I was a child, I loved to fish the small creek on my grandparents’ farm. Brook trout was the technical name for the fish I caught, but in the North Carolina mountains they were called speckle trout. My grandparents loved to eat them, and I was expected to bring back what I caught for supper. They were beautiful creatures-red and olive spots on their flanks, orange fins-and I always felt some sadness as I slipped them onto my stringer. I was especially haunted by how quickly their bright colors faded. These trout were also rare, found only in small, isolated creeks. As I got older I searched for them in places sometimes a mile or two away from any road, places where a rattlesnake bite or broken leg could have life-threatening consequences. I also ignored a few No Trespassing signs. Unlike the young man in my story, I was never caught, but that fear was always present.
Ron Rash's family has lived in the southern Appalachian mountains since the mid-1700s. He grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University. His poetry and fiction have appeared in many magazines, including Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Georgia Review, New England Review, and Poetry. He is the author of two story collections, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Casualties; three volumes of poetry, Eureka Mill and Among the Believers Raising the Dead; and two novels, One Foot in Eden and Saints at the River. Rash lives in Clemson, South Carolina.
Nancy Reisman, “Tea”
I’m interested in the way that longing can shape one's perceptions of reality and in the delicate balance between hope and self-delusion. One reason I’m drawn to Lillian's character is that I think of her as a realist, a highly pragmatic woman, yet her relationship with Abe moves her into wishful, unsteady territory. It's an emotionally fraught mix, but I think this combination of pragmatism and wild hope is what has enabled her to survive and to sustain an unconventional life in a tradition-bound community.
Nancy Reisman is the author of a novel, The First Desire, and House Fires, which won an Iowa Short Fiction Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader, and has also appeared in Five Points, Tin House, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Glimmer Train, among others. Reisman lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Elizabeth Stuckey-French, “Mudlavia”
I began “Mudlavia” years ago. It started with a conversation I had with Harold Watts, a family friend and colleague of my father's in the Purdue University English Department. Harolds mother took him to the Mudlavia Hotel and Resort in 1916, when he was ten years old, hoping to heal his aching knee with mud baths. Harold generously told me all about his visit there, giving me many intriguing details, including a description of the character I call Harry Jones, the cushion man, whom Harold and his mother thought was a gangster.
I wrote an early draft of this story in which I didn’t stray much from the facts Harold told me, but it wasn’t very dramatic and I had to put it aside. From the start, however, I tapped into a voice that I found mesmerizing, and it was the voice that drew me back into the story when I picked it up again over a decade later. When I reread it a plot suggested itself right away, but it took me a number of rewrites until I allowed the inevitable to happen at the end. After finishing this story I didn’t want to leave Mudlavia, so I am in the midst of writing a novel set there.
The real Mudlavia Hotel burned down in 1920. I often wish I could go there. If I could, I know I’d be a much better person.
Elizabeth Stuckey-French is the author of a novel, Mermaids on the Moon, and a collection of short stories, The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa. She teaches at Florida State University. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, and Five Points, among others. Stuckey-French lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
Liza Ward, “Snowbound”
I wrote this story during a bout of loneliness at the end of one very hot summer in Missoula, Montana. The hills had turned brown. Fish struggled in the shallow water of the Clark Fork River, and dark plumes of smoke crowded the horizon. It felt like the end of something. There seemed to be no one anywhere to verify my existence, and I slipped into a strange internal world, dragging this character, Susan, along with me. After a while it was hard to tell who was leading whom. I fantasized about winter, a frozen place white as the moon where new truths emerged, where everything was subjective. I remembered how our garden in Brooklyn looked to me as a girl, buried in snow, our pint-sized terrier hopping through the magic blue light as a confused rabbit might, and the way it felt like the city was yawning. Anything could happen on a snowy day, and I had the feeling that anything could happen in this story. I had no idea where it was going, only that my character was writing her own version of history, assuaging her fear of abandonment with a fictional world where people found each other. She knew she didn’t want to spend her life alone the way her father was going to now that her mother had left. I guess her dream, her invented story, gave her hope.