Laura Furman - The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

David Means was born and raised in Michigan. He is the author of four story collections, including Assorted Fire Events, The Secret Goldfish , and, most recently, The Spot . Means lives in Nyack, New York.

Susan Minot, “ Pole, Pole ”

I began this story initially as a challenge to myself-to complete something. I’d not published a book-or a story for that matter-in a long time, and in the long years of working on what looked as if it was now turning out to be two novels, I wanted simply to finish something. So one winter I took a break from the book to write this story. I had spent some time in Kenya in the late ’90s, and imagining a tryst there was a way of revisiting a place I’d been intrigued by. In the writing of the story I also began to envision a collection of intertwined stories set in east Africa of which “ Pole , Pole” would be a part. So that’s another book that now needs to be written, though I have its title already: Fatina .

Susan Minot was born in 1956 in Boston. She is the author of Monkeys, Lust & Other Stories, Folly, Evening, Rapture , and a poetry collection, Poems 4 A.M . Her nonfiction has appeared in McSweeney’s and The Paris Review , among other publications. She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty . The film Evening was the first adaptation of her fiction. Minot divides her time between New York City and an island in Maine.

Matthew Neill Null, “Something You Can’t Live Without”

The drummer tale is a staple of storytelling. To be kind, you’d call it well-worn; to be cruel, cliché. So many have done it so well: Faulkner, Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Malamud. Breathing life into the form seemed an impossible task, so I had to try. Sitting down to the desk, I wanted to see if I could outdo the established demigods of fiction. An act of hubris for sure, but what isn’t? I hope the reader judges me kindly.

The story, for me, always begins with an image. In college, my first love was geology. A group of us went down into a cave, and after what seemed like miles of dodging bats and slogging through mud, a professor showed us where the remains of an extinct bear -Arctodus simus , I think-had been discovered. I began with the vision of a skull, and then I had to dream the characters to find it. The story unspooled from there. Other stray images found a home: twin boys working fence posts by the roadside; a high meadow drowning in beaver dams; a pair of dead foxes, one red, one gray. Also, the story gave me an opportunity to write one of my favorite landscapes in West Virginia, where the karst lands meet the mountains.

Most of my work is a variation on one theme: the crisis of people who love the land, but are faced with the prospect of selling or destroying some aspect of it to translate the landscape into dollars. This is West Virginia’s story. From timbering to coal mining to Marcellus shale fracturing, the ground has been sold again and again. Despite our common myths and party rhetoric, extractive industry has failed to improve the lot of West Virginians. For me, “Something You Can’t Live Without” is a middle chapter in a long, fraught history.

Matthew Neill Null was born in Summersville, West Virginia, in 1984. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his stories have appeared in Oxford American and Gray’s Sporting Journal . He was the 2010-2011 Provost’s Postgraduate Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa. Null lives in Iowa City.

Lori Ostlund, “Bed Death”

In 1996 my partner and I moved to Malaysia, where we taught business communications at a college very much like the one in the story. There was a bed, for example, behind glass in the lobby, and we looked at an apartment in Nine-Story Building, which, at least then, was the tallest building in our town and was thus, sadly, attractive to jumpers. We found an apartment elsewhere, but during our stay, several people committed suicide by jumping from the building’s roof, and so we became familiar with the building through newspaper accounts and public lore as well as through a friend who lived there. What intrigued me was the way that people sometimes spoke of the jumpers, with a detachment that allowed them to view the suicides as an irritation, an occurrence whose salient feature was its ability to make less pleasant the lives of those who lived in the complex. Yet, on another level, I understood how and why the tenants came to feel this way, and this understanding-of the way that others’ pain or suffering can become a minor and curious backdrop for the drama of our own lives-became the framework of my story.

Like the couple in the story, we stayed at a seedy hotel where the smoke alarms beeped every few minutes. After trying to explain that the batteries needed to be changed, to no avail, we spent an afternoon trying to buy replacement batteries-also to no avail. Finally, we were moved to the only beep-free room-outside of which lay a wounded, moaning man on a chaise longue. We never learned what had happened to him, which is ultimately for the best when it comes to writing fiction.

This story evolved slowly, over the course of ten years, beginning with images and scenes that I wrote down but did not necessarily regard as parts of the same story. Usually, especially with my first-person narrators, the narrator “arrives” first and starts telling the story, but this time the narrator came along later, a narrator who is nothing like me except for a shared navel phobia. As I recall, that narrator appeared one morning as I was reading through all these bits and pieces, wondering whether they would ever amount to anything; she began commenting on them, weaving these disparate parts together, and through her seemingly insightful and often cynical analysis, I began to see how ill-equipped she was for the world, how fragile her relationship was, and how incapable she was of extending compassion to another lost soul.

Lori Ostlund was born in 1965 in a town of 411 people in Minnesota. Her first collection of stories, The Bigness of the World, received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and named a 2009 Notable Book by The Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Kenyon Review, New England Review , and The Georgia Review , among other publications. She was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in San Francisco.

Leslie Parry, “The Vanishing American”

When I was a nerdy, Zoobooks-reading kid, my parents, tired of seeing me use their fancy ice tongs and expensive olive pitter to dissect my stuffed animals, sent me to a marine biology summer camp on Catalina Island. I learned many things there-how to breathe through a snorkel tube, the life cycle of a garibaldi-but what I remember most is shivering in my pup tent at night, listening to stories about the wild bison who’d been roaming the island since 1924. They’d been shipped out as “scenery” for a western movie, our counselor said, and afterward, when filming was done, they were-“Wait, what?” I sat up in my sleeping bag and blinked against the orange light of the mosquito lamp. “Just left there? Like … abandoned?” I wasn’t sure what was more astonishing-that the movie people could be so extravagant and indifferent, or that the herd had managed, despite its new environment, to adapt, flourish, and survive. As an adult, I had tried a few times to write about a soldier who’d lost his voice in World War I. However, I just couldn’t get any purchase on the character, so I put my notes away, frustrated and disappointed. A few days later I saw that The Vanishing American (hey, that buffalo movie!) was screening at the Silent Movie Theatre here in Los Angeles. I had a free night and so, perhaps nostalgic for the bygone days of peeing in my wet suit, I went. Afterward, as I emerged from the theater and crossed Fairfax Avenue, these two ideas-the bison and the soldier-joined serendipitously in my mind. I went home and began to write.