Laura Furman - The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

As is the case in many stories about drug or alcohol abuse, the addiction itself is a character, unavoidably yoked to the protagonist. In that way, Melinda not only humanized a social ill but also animated it. It was impossible for me to write about Melinda without meth and impossible to write about meth without Melinda.

“Melinda” is set several years in the past. Methamphetamine cooking is like any other kind of manufacturing: technological advances improve production. Now people can make meth in the back of a van or on a stove. It’s a true American cottage industry.

Judy Doenges was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 1959. She is the author of a novel, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World , and a short-fiction collection, What She Left Me . Her stories and essays have appeared in many journals, among them The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review , and Western Humanities Review . She has received fellowships and awards from many sources, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and Artist Trust. She teaches at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Brian Evenson, “Windeye”

I owe a debt to Dan Machlin, since his poetry introduced me to the Old Norse word vindauga ( vindauge in contemporary Norwegian), which translated literally means “wind-eye.” That word worked on me, haunted me, and slowly took on for me a life of its own. Over a month or two it somehow subconsciously cross-pollinated with games my younger siblings and I used to play when we were little, with my own fascination with the difference between childrens’ and adults’ perceptions, with problems I was having with shingles warping and cracking on my house, and with my own basic distrust about the nature of reality. All of that secretly gestated for a long time, but when I finally sat down to write it, it came out all in a rush, something that rarely happens for me.

Brian Evenson was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1966. He is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the limited-edition novella Baby Leg , and his work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Slovenian. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. Other books include the story collection Fugue State and a new collection of stories, Windeye , that will be published in 2011. His work has been included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories three times, and he has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Evenson lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.

Adam Foulds, “The Rules Are the Rules”

The story began with a single image: a priest who longs to be a father holds an infant for baptism. It was this predicament, this public moment crowded with private feeling and detailed physical experience, that compelled my attention, and I wrote a few pages to try and get hold of it. This then was set aside, and it wasn’t until Granta commissioned me to produce something for their “Sex” issue that I returned to it and the story became more than this fraught tableau. I thought about sex as an urgent, risky, and difficult kind of intimacy, as procreation, and as something that structures an individual’s personality, determining what they notice and react to in the world. Peter’s character and wider situation unfolded with these thoughts.

Adam Foulds was born in London in 1974. He is the author of two novels, The Truth About These Strange Times and The Quickening Maze , as well as a narrative poem set during the Mau Mau uprising in colonial Kenya in the 1950s, The Broken Word . In 2008 he was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and he has won the Costa Poetry Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and was a finalist for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. In 2010 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London.

Lynn Freed, “Sunshine”

Perhaps it is the wildness itself of feral children that has always intrigued me. Or perhaps it is the very idea of life in a state of nature, beyond or before civilization. I don’t know. What I do know is that the girl in this story, which was originally a failed attempt to begin a novel-several stories I have written have begun this way-has been with me always.

Lynn Freed was born in 1945 in Durban, South Africa. She came to New York as a graduate student, receiving her MA and PhD in English literature from Columbia University. She has published six novels (Friends of the Family, Home Ground, The Bungalow, The Mirror, House of Women, The Servants’ Quarters); a collection of essays, Reading, Writing & Leaving Home: Life on the Page ; and a collection of stories, The Curse of the Appropriate Man . Her short fiction, memoirs, and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House , and Southwest Review , among others. In 2002 she received the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Northern California.

David Means, “The Junction”

In order to write “The Junction” I had to write another story first. That story-still in a rough draft-was about a kindly Pittsburgh doctor, during the Depression, tending to a patient in a flophouse who mysteriously disappeared-against all medical odds-and took to the rails, ending up at State Line Junction, where he saves the day by falling across a switch mechanism. I put the Pittsburgh story aside and began to write a new story, using a little bit of the background material-i.e., when he tells the story at the dinner table-and some of the same energy of the other version. I didn’t see the men in my story as drifters. They’re looking for something, on a quest of sorts, trying to pin down exactly where they need to be to find solace and hope. Part of what inspired me to write this story was the image of a fresh-cut piece of pie on a windowsill waiting for someone. The ideal sense of home is something we’ll never really find, but we keep wandering and changing our own stories in the hope that, at last, we’ll find ourselves in the perfect place. Perhaps it’s hard to write about the search for home right now, in this culture, because the Internet has provided all of us a hyperlink into what might or might not feel like safety: the safety of drifting from site to site, following one link to the next as if we’re free. Setting the story back in the day before cell phones, before high-speed hookups, before Facebook and satellite hookups, back when all you had to do was take a few steps away from the campfire and find a complete solitude, allowed, I like to think, an access to a certain kind of situation, purified down, that allowed a certain pattern to be exposed. (The gibberish above is exactly why writers should, in most cases, avoid talking about their work. The truth is I just wanted to tell a good story and respect my characters and get the words right.) In any case, one other thing that informed this story was the fact that, when I was growing up in Michigan, my grandfather-a lovely man, a true self-made gentleman, who in many ways saved my life-often told me stories about surviving the Great Depression. He had a big cupboard in which he still stored canned goods in case the world crashed again and the food supply became short. Some of the cans actually dated back to the Depression, with labels that were so simple and beautiful and clear they seemed to be hand-painted. He vividly described the way men would come to the back door, knock, be invited in for dinner, and sit at the table with the entire family. There was an old coal yard up the road from his house, and it still had black mounds of coal left over from the days of steam. I paid careful attention to those old piles of coal-half-buried in the weeds, just glints of shiny dark coming through the green. Coal and steam engines weren’t that far in the past in the late sixties.