A Portrait of the Adam Levin as a Young Man

In the 30th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Adam Levin, author of Hot Pink (McSweeney's Books), discusses how his teenage desire to have a girlfriend fostered a career.

What made you want to become a writer?
In fourth grade, I wanted to become a guy with a girlfriend, which I thought you became by getting in fistfights, having long hair in back with short hair on top, making lewd gestures at teachers whose backs were turned, talking non-stop about video games, and drinking beer from the fridges in the garages of the fathers of like-minded friends while those fathers were at work. With the exception of having become a guy with a girlfriend, I had accomplished all of the above by seventh grade, during which I noticed that the girls in whom I found myself most interested liked musicians, and I determined that I wanted to become a guitarist.

For three years thereafter, I was a terrible guitarist—a power-chordist, really—who told himself he’d eventually get better, but I never got better and, upon realizing that I would continue to never get better, I discovered that, all along, the thing I’d really wanted to become was a bassist.

Almost overnight, I became a passable bassist, and by my junior year of high school, I was practicing for at least a couple hours every day, by myself or with bands. Playing in these bands impressed some of the girls in whom I found myself most interested—one girl in particular—and at last I became a guy with a girlfriend. When college started, though, the bands fell apart, my girlfriend tired of me, and though I started new bands and dated other girls, the other girls tired of me as had that first one, and the people with whom I’d started the new bands repeatedly failed to show up to practice.

By that point I’d spent a few years thinking of myself as an artist, which, to me at least, meant something along the lines of “a person whose worth as a human being is measured by what he makes,” and because bassists (let alone merely passable bassists) can’t do a whole lot on their own in terms of making songs, and because songs were the kind of art by which whose making my worth as a human being was measured (by me), and because it appeared that I couldn’t rely on others to help me make songs, I determined that I either had to learn another instrument, settle on being worthless for the rest of my life, or become a different kind of artist. I was too full of myself to settle on being worthless, too impatient to learn another instrument, too dull-eyed and lazy to learn to paint or sculpt, and was possessed of an inexplicable and completely ignorant contempt for photography and acting the both. I’d been writing fiction since I was five years old, though. I had read a lot of it, too, been moved by it, and knew you didn’t need anyone else to help you make it. Furthermore, it occurred to me that many of the girls I’d spent so much time trying to impress were also great readers, and I saw that, all along, what I’d really wanted to become was a writer.

Stefanie Freele on Disasters Evoking Inspiration

In the 29th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Stefanie Freele, author of Surrounded by Water (Press 53), talks floods and unexpected blessings.

The house is rocking, shuddering due to a barge of downed trees and debris building up along the upriver corner as the water rises. The sinister pile of flotsam wedged to the house can be seen with a flashlight. The word rain is too dainty a description for the dumping of water coming from the dark sky. The cars have already been moved to higher ground; the first an easy move, a slow walk in boots, water sloshing onto wet socks. The second car, an hour later, is evacuated while wearing hip waders. The third, moved just now, after swimming out in a wetsuit.

The downstairs neighbor soon will have water in his living room. The river is about three inches below the top of eleven steps. It is 5:30 in the morning. He answers his door blurry-eyed and annoyed; there is nothing he can do about the river. He too is surprised at how fast the water is rising.
Someone will need to get a chainsaw and cut up those tree pieces. If not, this house on stilts, on sandy riverbed, may go swirling downriver.

The flashlight on the garage reveals that the unlocked door rose and subsequently the garage contents are floating away: coolers, kickboards, pool-floaties, the Adirondack chair, all that wood stacked to build a bookshelf and, damn, there goes the almost-finished hand-carved bench.

The house trembles.

I’ve experienced three floods first-hand along the Russian River where I live in Northern California. All three informed my short story “While Surrounded by Water,” which thankfully won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open Award.

“While Surrounded by Water” is a story that takes place an enormous storm, a “tempest” as one of the characters calls it.

I’ve had 12 feet of water in the yard, garage, downstairs. I’ve kayaked along rooflines. I’ve evacuated from a shuddering house. The kindness and generosity of strangers and neighbors during a flood was astounding.

One of the unexpected beauties that happens during a catastrophe is a certain phenomena: Strangers meet; neighbors who never notice each other collide. “While Surrounded by Water” is a story of both isolation and unexpected friendship during a crisis.

Surrounded by Water, the collection, deals with floods and catastrophes in other ways: floods of emotions, explosions, environmental pollution, pain, revenge, growth, gluttony, and fixation.

I believe that an unexpected blessing occurred: Living through these storms made me a better person and, hopefully, because of my observation and witness to the enormity of detail, a bit of a better writer.

Elisabeth Doyle on the Smallest of Moments

In the 28th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Elisabeth Doyle, author of War Stories (Two Harbors Press), explains what she learned from reading Raymond Carver and her aim to combine the public and the private in her work.

What writer has most influenced your work? 

I suspect that I may not be unique in my choice of writers who have most influenced my work, but the answer for me is clear: Raymond Carver. I began writing seriously when I was in college—or at least, it was at that point that my writing began to mature. I wrote two or three stories during that period that received a good bit of attention, and one of them was awarded a university prize and published in a literary journal. Each of these stories revolved around “big” themes—my recollection is that one reflected an imagined rendering of the circumstances of my adoption as a young child—an entirely fictitious account of the circumstances of both my adopted and birth mothers. The other two stories also had larger, very defined themes and followed a more traditional story structure.

After writing those stories, I remember thinking: “What next?” Did every story have to revolve around a grand plot or event? If so, how could I possibly continue to generate or manufacture such events? I felt a great deal of pressure to continue to write a certain “kind” of story. Then I read Raymond Carver—I’m not quite sure how I stumbled upon his collections, but I read them voraciously, each one. They were a gift, and changed everything for me in terms of my understanding of what a “story” could be.  From Carver, I learned that almost anything can be the foundation for or comprise a story. A walk to the grocery store, a chance encounter with a stranger on the sidewalk… I saw that there are stories everywhere, in the smallest of moments, the subtlest of interactions. This realization liberated me from traditional story conventions and traditional notions of what “makes” a story. I continued writing, but in a more natural voice, finding stories in the smaller, more intimate moments. This freedom from convention, and the intimacy of voice, was—in my mind—Raymond Carver’s great gift to writers and to literature.

What inspires you? 

I have always been something of a duality, deeply interested in and moved by the real-life events taking place in the world around me, and also deeply committed to art and creative expression, which often reflects the internal world. In the “real” world, there are certain topics and interests that have informed my life since I was a child, and about which I continue to read voraciously: the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Holocaust, and the war in Vietnam. In my fiction, these two sides of myself meet one another and come together, in stories that are deeply personal and which also touch upon a broader set of circumstances. (In War Stories, that “broader” set of circumstances is clear.) In a nutshell, then, I am inspired equally by external events in the world around me—including historical events—and my own life experiences. These two elements intertwine in my work, such that even in those stories that are related to seemingly outward events, such as war, the personal is always a factor; I use my own experiences to help me “find” the characters’ inner lives. 

Anita Endrezze on Blurring the Edges of Reality

In the 27th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Anita Endrezze, author of Butterfly Moon (University of Arizona Press) discusses how writing and painting help her cope with chronic pain.

When I was four years old, I used to tell my little sister stories that started out, “Once upon a time in the Great Pacific Northwest…”  I’ve always told stories, whether in poems or visual art, oral tales, or the written word. It goes beyond trying to make sense of our world since I create my own worlds. My latest collection, Butterfly Moon,  contains short stories that blur the edges of reality. An ogress that lives in a world eerily like ours, but not really. Or a street hustler that finds his world view shaken after taking on an apprentice. Or a young girl who goes into the woods to find her future and meets three gods.

Perhaps my need to create other places is due to my own unhappy situation. I have MS and it has made me house-bound. I’m forced to stay home and create…no shopping trips or visits to friends to distract me. Of course, it’s very hard to be in this situation. My right hand was paralyzed twice. I was partially blind in one eye once. I’ve had a lot of physical challenges. It’s my art (writing and painting) that has kept me sane. And those arts have connected me, via the Internet, to others who create. This social network has been vital.

I love writing. I love painting and creating with mixed media. I wrote most of Butterfly Moon in about five months. The stories came to me through the characters. One story was prompted by a painting I did. I’m currently busy painting. I haven’t written much, although I did write several poems for an altered book project that I’m doing with several other artists. 

Although I live in a big house and could have a room dedicated to writing/painting, I use the dining room table since its hard to climb stairs. I also paint in the kitchen, standing up, to give my legs a workout. I must use a walker or cane to get around so its hard to carry a water jar for the brushes. I leave my brushes and paint and canvases all over, although I do try to tidy things up a bit before company! My family is understanding. The biggest problem I have is with my cat who wants to play with the brushes and tip over the water or lay on the wet canvas! I usually paint for as long as I can stand and then go sit for a while. Writing can be hard on my legs; I need to stand up because the circulation isn’t good sitting all the time. Because my body defines my limits, I love to get out of it and paint or write. Living in my head is better than noticing my pains. 

I live near Seattle, in the Great Pacific Northwest. 

Tim Horvath and the Study of Shadows

In the 26th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Tim Horvath, author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press), discusses how stories build in his mind and where he finds inspiration.

How often does an idea for a story occur to you, and what triggers those ideas?
My strongest stories seem to emerge not from a single epiphany but from years of long, quiet triangulation, so for me it’s not a matter of trusting a smashing first impression as much as its refusal to go away. “Planetarium” gathered itself together over a decade, if you include 1) my teaching in a school that had a planetarium that no one ever seemed to set foot in, 2) an occasion of drunken escort, and 3) camping and hiking in two jawdropping landscapes, Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona and Glacier National Park in Montana, where I finally decided to set it. My friend Rebecca Makkai uses the term “echo chamber” to describe the elements that a story needs in order to fully emerge, and I think I mean something similar by triangulation. If the points of the triangle are farther apart, so much the better—more tension, more twang.

But sometimes an instant does the trick. “The Discipline of Shadows” came into being as I was meeting with my writing group in the now-defunct Second Run Bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, sunken into the puke-green couch underneath these old exposed beams, surrounded by books. We decided to open up books at random and choose a sentence that would be our prompt for the next meeting, and the first thing I opened to was from an Antonya Nelson story: “How is it the squirrel did not slide?” What a line, I thought. My fellow writers had some imaginative takes, and as for me, I envisioned someone observing a squirrel whose shadow moved even while the squirrel itself didn’t budge, and this was a total crisis for him (the man, not the squirrel). Why was it a crisis? Well, clearly he was obsessed with shadows himself, and the reason the squirrel didn’t slide was because he was losing his mind because he was studying something outlandish. But what if it wasn’t crazy? And then I began to watch some Wayang Kulit Indonesian shadow theater and the work of a San Francisco company called Shadowlight Productions that brilliantly combines traditional work with a modern vibe, and I felt, “It’s crazy not to study this.” Hence, I invented a field I called umbrology, the study of shadows, and that got the story off and running, with shadow theater and optics and film noir all rubbing shoulders. The squirrel didn’t slide, but plenty of other things did.

What’s the worst idea for a story you’ve ever had?
“Circulation” began with the notion of having a library book tell its own story of its journeys. If it had stayed in that form, I think it would have run into insuperable difficulties, a gutterball that would probably have never seen the light of day. A blathering book seems like the kind of idea that might make you bolt upright in mid-sleep-cycle at 4 a.m. to scribble it down, convinced of its sheer brilliance, its Chekhovian profundity, only to find yourself shaking your head over breakfast, “That can’t have been it.” But even on the off-chance that I’d managed to pull that off and find a gregarious, charming book-as-narrator, the story would’ve been about something utterly different, simply couldn’t have foregrounded the father-son relationship that it now feels inevitably rooted in.

Where do you find inspiration?
Lots of places, but here are a handful:

Obsession is a most loyal muse. If I get obsessed with something, I know I can write about it, because it clings to me everywhere I go and grabs everything in reach. For instance, with shadows in “The Discipline of Shadows”—it’s fun to imagine the art and science of shadows, because they really are everywhere, lurking about in nearly every situation, and once I started researching them I realized that while I’d come up with this word “umbrology” (a word which a handful of other people have also used to describe various similar things), it really does exist in a certain way, just not under that name. Other obsessions that show up in the book: food, film, dying languages. Right now I’m obsessed with avant garde classical music.

Voices. I listen to a ton of audiobooks—I always loved being read to, and need to hear the grain of my narrator’s voice to have a clue who s/he is. In “Planetarium,” the main character is temperamentally an engineer but wants to shed that, yearns to leap his way right out of his skin and experience everything in its sensuous immediacy rather than through diagrams and schematics, craves the full-on night sky instead of the planetarium’s shell. But at some point long ago he had it drilled into him that he was a born engineer, and he capitulated to that, as, of course, sometimes happens. He glimpses that there’s something outside of that, and because it is frightening to acknowledge this he only allows it as an aspect of a distant past, and clings to it the way someone who has memorized a single poem in her whole life might let her tongue loll and linger silently on those words from time to time. I heard his voice above all, as if I were listening to someone reading aloud to me. And even more, I think he embodies a key aspect of why we’re reading and writing fiction, partly to get out of our skins, even while another part of us wants to be more fully inside them. This tension—or maybe these impulses dovetail perfectly—is an element that drives some of my favorite stories: they make us other in some way that makes us more fully ourselves, and voice is often where that plays out for me.

Dubious?

Landscape is another huge point of departure. “The Understory” was a sort of triangulation of time, space, and real and figurative storms—the fact that New Hampshire’s forests are similar in their composition to that of the Black Forest in Germany, the fact that there was a hurricane in New England in 1938 and tumult in Germany at the same time, that Heidegger was a nature-lover but also bought into some of the most nefarious aspects of human nature. “Planetarium” pivots on its two landscapes, the New York that it recalls and the Montana in which it takes place. The idea of Gauguin going to Greenland was a matter of taking the place that is always associated with him and stripping him of it and then posing, “Okay, Monsieur, what is your art really about?” Right now I’m working on a piece about the Desert of Maine, which has been dubbed a “dubious desert,” since it isn’t, technically speaking, a desert, but it looks and carries itself like one, albeit tiny. So I’m love with the place, right down to the fiberglass camel that stands guard, the only trace that there was once an actual camel roaming around there until someone decided it was acting too belligerent and was scaring away the tourists. I love stuff like that. Imagine, they were surprised that a camel wasn’t chummy and well-mannered when it was being paraded around a fifty-acre pile of sand in northern New England!

I’ve always found myself drawn to characters, too, not so much literary as real-life ones, those of whom you’d say, “He’s a real character.” Most people are once you get close enough to them, some more unabashed in it than others. In high school, my friend Dave and I spent a lot of time getting to know the cast of regulars at Yonkers Raceway, where Dave would bet and I would pretend to watch the horses while actually studying the men (mostly) and inhaling a lot of cigar smoke, noting the crudely-taped-together glasses they couldn’t afford to replace and hearing them spin the next race so that it fit whatever their pet theory was, which was, of course, a window into their beliefs about the world.

Until recently, I was working part time at a psychiatric hospital here in New Hampshire. I’ve never written about it at length, although I hope to at some point, and so much of what I learned there informs my understanding of behavior. Being there was a positive experience in so many ways, although I got punched, kicked, bitten, spit at, found myself on the floor numerous times, sang and skipped and danced my way out of harm’s way, and had to convince at least one person to hand over a knife. Working there could be like facing someone with a booming tennis serve for eight hours straight. Amazing people, though, my co-workers and the patients themselves. I often felt deeply what was at stake, which of course we always talk about in terms of short stories. When you’re interacting with a steady stream of people who have decided that maybe life isn’t worth living, you have to come with reasons on a dime that it is and hold fast to them with utmost conviction. I’m not necessarily as observant as I’d like to be, but when a single staple could be unbent by someone to hurt him or herself, you develop skills of observation that border on the preternatural, along with an abiding respect for how many layers every person and situation has. I hope I bring these back to my writing. Some of my favorite writers of radically different styles are outstanding observers of both the outer shapes of behavior and its inner gears. David Huddle and Javier Marias are two I’ve enjoyed recently. As far as that business of getting out of one’s skin—well, they are uncannily gifted at getting under others’.

Jeffrey Ford on Storing Away the Colorful Bits and Pieces

In the 25th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Jeffrey Ford, author of Crackpot Palace (William Morrow & Co.), tells about snatching up details of things people tell him and turning them into stories (or holding on to them for later).

Q: If you've ever written a story based on something another person told you would make a good story, what were the circumstances?

I don’t think I’ve ever written a story based on someone’s recommendation that it would be a good story, but a lot of times people tell me things just in passing conversation that I'm happy to snatch up and make use of. 

A friend of mine told me that he went to pick his kid up at daycare one afternoon and found that the teachers had taken out the dress up box and all the kids were in old costumes. He noticed that there was a boy wearing a fake mustache, sitting slumped over and crying, saying he couldn't remember any more what it was like inside his mother’s stomach. My friend said the kid was trembling, like the realization had just struck him. Standing next to the boy was a girl in a gauzy pink princess outfit, holding a wand. She waved it slowly over the boy's head and said, “Forget, forget, forget....” All I can say is that the way he told it, it seemed to me that this had been an authentic experience. It didn't matter, though, as it was a little too neat to use as it was. Over a period of months this incident bubbled up in my thoughts quite often and I’d think about it. Eventually it formed itself into a story, “The Scribble Mind.”

When we lived in South Jersey, the guy who lived in the house behind mine, Jake, told me that his cousin, Bobby, was employed down by the Delaware river. His job was to dive to the bottom of the river, using only a snorkel from K-Mart and carrying an acetylene torch at the end of a few hundred feet of hose connected to canisters on shore. There was a wreck of an old yacht down there, and he was supposed to use the torch to remove the brass from it. At night, he stayed in a trailer next to the river, drinking 40s and snorting speedballs. “Bobby’s the Walking Prince of Death,” said Jake. I met Bobby eventually, and I could tell instinctively that he was a dangerous character, but he was also funny as hell. For the time that he was around, maybe a year before he wound up in jail in Camden for assaulting and robbing an old lady, the cousins would hold a poker game every Thursday night at Jake’s house. I heard a lot of stories at those games and, after all was said and done, I made a story out of them, “The Golden Dragon.”

Stories and even pieces of stories give birth to stories, like some virulent meme that uses human beings to manifest itself in the world. I keep all the interesting stuff—the colorful bits and pieces of stories people tell me stored away in my head for future use. Here are two I've been holding for a long time. Maybe there's a good reason why. 

When I taught college I had a student once who missed a lot of classes. She could have done very well in the course if she’d shown up more. Near the end of the semester, she dropped out. I got a call from her. She explained that when she would get her period, she’d suffer bouts of amnesia for a few days. She hinted it had something to do with hormones but that it wasn’t absolutely clear. It seemed outlandish, but I figured it might be possible. I told my boss about it and he laughed and said, “That’s bullshit.” I’m not convinced he was right, but either way it seems like something that belongs in a story. 

Has anybody seen Kozlavsky?

When I lived in Binghamton, in upstate New York, I had a friend, Barney, who told me to be on the lookout for Kozlavsky. In all the bars up and down Clinton Street in the first ward, in the lobbies of the two local motels, in the offices of gas stations and the check cashing place, there were oil paintings by a guy who signed his name Kozlavsky. My friend gave me a walking tour one bright Saturday of the local Kozlavskies. The painter had three basic styles, all rendered with a kind of naive approach. One was nature scenes—deer, jumping fish, a cabin in the woods by a lake. The second type was all about flying baby heads, little fat cheeked, hollow eyed heads with wings on them. They flew in various formations across a brown landscape beneath a brown sky. The last type was portraits. My friend told me that when he’d first moved to town, he had an apartment with a big Koslavsky hanging in the living room. The land lord of the place was an insanely angry man, always yelling if the rent was even a day late. Still it was a cool old place, and he and his roommate liked it and took an interest in the painting—a study of a stern looking, dark eyed man, standing in a brown landscape with three baby heads flying over him. They wondered if it was Kozlavsky’s self-portrait. Later on they discovered the proliferation of the artist’s paintings all over town. My friend said he’d inquired a few times about the painter in the local bars, and people said they knew him and that he frequented The Palace A and The Marble Grill. Sometimes Barney and his friend went down Clinton Street, hitting every bar in hopes of running into him, using their memory of the figure in the painting as a guide to maybe spotting him, but they never did. Barney and his roommate were big dart players, and he said he didn’t remember how it happened, but they were drunk and high one night and his roommate threw a dart at the Kozlavsky painting and it stuck right into the center of the figure's left eye. It was just such a perfect throw, Barney said it inspired him to throw one himself. A direct hit in the figure's lips so it looked like the dark eyed man was smoking a dart. After that, it was bombs away. In a week's time the Kozlavsky portrait was riddled with a thousand holes. At the end of that week, they were a week late with the rent and the landlord showed up. He let himself in and caught them sitting on the couch smoking a joint. He started yelling about the rent, and then he noticed the painting. He went silent, stood still, and Barney told me that in that instant he and the roommate realized the guy in the portrait wasn’t Kozlavsky, it was the landlord.

Fred Arroyo Finds Stories in the Land

In the 24th in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Fred Arroyo, author of Western Avenue (University of Arizona Press), tells of his path to becoming a writer and what inspires him.

What made you want to become a writer?

 In our house we had two or three books—a bible, a picture-book history of Puerto Rico, and a history of the Civil War, volume 7 in some colorful historical set you initially bought at a grocery store. Reading did not seem that important in my family, nor education, and maybe that was because making a living was most necessary. I was a poor student (my father only had a third grade education, had been working since forever, and I never thought of much else for myself). I do remember reading some Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn), The Red Bad of Courage, a biography of Wild Bill Hickok, Catcher in the Rye, and several times a book by Laura Ingles Wilder, either Little House in the Big Woods or The Long Winter. One winter we lived in an apartment next to rail lines, right next to a viaduct over the tracks. My back bedroom was not heated, and one night all the lights were off after I had finished reading a chapter of Wilder, and I tiptoed to the window and scratched off a circle in the light sheen of frost and ice covering the window: Outside the back yard seemed like a cold sea of silver from the moon pooled in the snow. I remembered Laura doing and seeing something similar in the big woods.

I'm not sure what made me want to become a writer—I had no inclination for that kind of want. At twenty-two I was working a 12 hour swing-shift in a factory, living in the top dormer apartment of a big house, with a card table set up near the pot-bellied stove and a window. It was night. Rain was falling. I had read The Sun Also Rises. I liked the smells and sounds, the images, and the physical sensations and details—there was something material in the words (regardless of the setting and storyline) that reminded me of the people in my life who worked, and of the work I had been doing. On Fridays I would wake up about 4:00 AM and drive to northern Michigan, where I would drive along the lakes, follow country roads in the woods, and walk in the town where Hemingway's family had a summer home. I stood on the steps of a library where it was noted he once gave a talk. I must have been searching for something.

Back in that room, looking out the window, the rain was falling. Memories and stories I had heard appeared, and I was overtaken by a kind of visual and musical process that looped inside of me, something I felt and now see as pre-verbal and yet very close to a form or story shape. I started writing brief paragraphs in a college ruled notebook that night. I didn't claim writing with any intention, nor did I see myself as a writer. I was only writing.

  

Where do you find inspiration?

I find inspiration in the memories that are sources of what I wrote a moment ago. Writing is still exciting, inspiring, and it makes me confront my real losses and imaginary gains.

My greatest inspiration is probably the land. I'm convinced stories are in the land, they exist within a place, and part of what I must do is listen closely to them. The lived, storied earth is more central to me than an idea or an aesthetic aspiration, as are the people who live and work the land. For some reason certain characters and peoples continue to turn to me, speak to me, and I try to tell their stories. In my fiction, I write of peoples rooted in a physical world—workers living, dreaming, and struggling in their place, even if they are often forced to migrate or question their place because of larger social pressures, or say the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These are peoples I admire greatly, even though I know they are often overlooked, and when they are recognized they are more than likely seen as not belonging, or failures. Their stories inspire me to move toward new emotional borders or regions, where fiction has the power to eliminate borders and entangle us in the drama of the human heart.

I don't feel obliged or responsible in these matters. The land itself has stories that inspire the telling of them.

  

What writer or writers have you learned the most from?

The short story form is still a territory of unlimited literary possibilities. At the same time, I've been suggesting that stories arise all the time from the most “unliterary” of places. I learn a lot from all kinds of writers for my teaching of the short story. For myself as a writer, too much of what I do exists unconsciously, mysteriously, and naturally. I feel I've learned greatly from Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery O'Connor, James Joyce, Jorge Louis Borges, and Joyce Carol Oates. That is, the short story's sources and inspirations, how modern a form it is, and how it is still in the midst of discovering itself, while recognizing its ancient antecedents. Alice Munro and Alistair MacLeod amaze me all the time with what they can do with the short story. Ha Jin too, and the young master Manuel Muñoz. Daniel Chacón's stories are composed with spectacular humor, imagination, and storytelling. I'm learning as much as I can from Brad Watson and Chris Offutt—I keep returning to their short stories. Russell Banks, Gina Berriault, Raymond Carver, Patricia Henley, Richard Ford, and Larry Brown are, I guess, writers who may seem obvious, but I keep them close and return to them often. Just that yearning to tell a story, to look at the situation straight on, and the vision to distill a series of events into a story where a character discovers the glimpse of change, reckoning, or redemption speaks to me strongly. Although I could name a dozen new writers who are doing wonderful things, and who I teach, I recently found myself enthralled once again in reading Chris Offutt's Out of the Woods, and from this experience I can't help but strive to become a better a writer, and, hopefully, a more necessary storyteller.