Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

I read too much and I read too critically. Both things are occupational hazards for writers. We have a lot of books to get through. Writers reading are like magicians going to catch a show at a magic club. You sit in the audience thinking, Oh, I can see how he's sawing her apart. We long to be amazed again, since it was that sense of amazement brought on by words that led us to this job in the first place, but once you know how to pull the strings and work the levers yourself it's never quite the same.

When I read, one of three things happens: 1) I think something is bad, and I immediately break it down technically so that I can say why it is bad; 2) I think something is good, and I immediately break it down technically so that I can say why it is good; 3) I simply step into the story. I do not see how it is working. I do not care. I am in that world, walking around with those people. For the number of pages I am given to read, they are my life.

The third option is rare, breathtaking, and akin to falling in love. Sherman Alexie's story, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” is exactly such an experience. I want to stuff it in every mailbox I know. As a writer he is nowhere to be found on the page. He does not preen or try to impress. He has nothing to prove to his reader, only something to tell them. Like me, Sherman Alexie is in love with his homeless Spokane Indian narrator and so he simply steps aside to let his character have every inch of the stage. From the very first sentence the voice takes over and you know you will no longer be thinking about the art and craft of fiction because you will be too busy listening. Alexie follows this man through his world not as a character but as a human being. Every turn in his day is unexpected and true. As I read I was moved by sorrow, compassion, and joy. I felt all three things deeply and separately in the course of twenty pages. We are lucky when we get that much from life-we should be nothing short of rapturous when we get it from short fiction.

Ann Patchett is the author of the novels Taft, The Magicians Assistant, Patron Saint of Liars , and Bel Canto , as well as the memoir Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. She lives in Tennessee.

Richard Russo on “Mudlavia” by Elizabeth Stuckey-French

As usual, this year's O. Henry anthology is full of fine stories, but the one that burrowed deepest under my skin was by Elizabeth Stuckey-French. I loved everything about “Mudlavia”-the deceptive simplicity of its storytelling; the way its private and public stories play off each other; its fond, gentle humor; the heartbreaking, hard-won wisdom of its narrator, who comes to understand that “life eventually takes away everything it gives.”

Which stories burrow under our skin, of course, has a lot to do with who we are and how as readers we allow ourselves to be approached. I admit that I’ve always been a sucker for a good coming-of-age story, especially if it involves, as such tales so often do, the loss of innocence. What makes “Mudlavia” work so wonderfully within its appealing genre is that its private story of a boy coming to terms with difficult truths-that the pain in his knee is no rheumatism to be cured by mud baths, that his doting mother is tragically unhappy in her marriage to his controlling father, that magical Mudlavia may be a con game-dovetails so perfectly with its public story of America's own impending loss of innocence. In “the last summer of peace” before the beginning of the first world war, the narrator and his mother fully believe that “as a nation… we were getting bigger, better, and more stylish.” The story slyly asks whether America, with its unbridled, energetic optimism, is itself a kind of con game (in the literal sense of the term, where “confidence” is itself the dubious guarantor of the future). Are we a nation that first underestimates, then misdiagnoses its own ills, bullishly promising, like Mudlavia, more than it can hope to deliver by way of a cure? It's this public story that signals “Mudlavia” s considerable ambition, that tips us off to the fact that Stuckey-French is hunting bigger game than at first we might suppose.

No doubt the other reason that the story particularly appealed to me was that its true subject is the power of the literary imagination, or, if you prefer, of narrative itself. It's not just the boy protagonist who comes of age in “Mudlavia,” but also his mother, and it's the act of storytelling that allows for their transformation from innocence to experience. The lies the narrator tells “Harry Jones” as the two are sheathed each morning in soothing mud are not just untruths, but narrative inventions that draw equally upon his youthful imagination and his growing knowledge of the real world, his first adolescent attempts to acknowledge the frightening complexities of his family, his world, even his own body. But the story's finest and most unexpected turn occurs when his mother takes up his narrative, embracing it as her own and thereby allowing her son to understand that she shares his need for another reality, as well as his joy in invention.

For me, though, it's the story's flash-forward ending that seals the deal. By the end the boy has become a man who, with every reason to be bitter and disillusioned, has made a separate peace, preferring the “good” life he's lived to the “happy” one promised by Mudlavia. The pursuit of happiness may be our constitutional right as Americans, but, he seems to imply, it's always been the most childish aspect of our collective American dream. Elizabeth Stuckey-French has given us a story with the emotional and intellectual weight of a longer fictional work. Only the very best short fiction manages that.

Richard Russo is the author of Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody's Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls, as well as The Whore's Child and Other Stories. Russo lives in Maine with his family.

Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”

“What You Pawn I Will Redeem” started out simply as a writing exercise. I thought, “Hey, I’ll take highly stereotypical urban characters (homeless Indian, Korean grocery store owner, white cop, white pawnshop owner) and see if I can write a story that humanizes all of them. I’ll make them decent and loving.” I wrote the first draft very quickly in a few hours really, and thought it was cute and sentimental, so I set it aside. A year or so later, as I was gathering stories for my latest collection, Ten Little Indians , I came across the story again, reread it, and was surprised by its quiet power. I don’t think I’ve published anything that's ever received as much fan mail. Heck, I got fan mail from writers who haven’t liked anything else I’ve ever done. This story's journey still feels magical to me.

Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington, a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He is the author of Ten Little Indians, The Toughest Indian in the West , and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven , among other books. Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons.

Wendell Berry, “The Hurt Man”

I am always pleased when I know that a story I have imagined has grown from a real story. This is pleasing to me because I always need assurance of the connection between imagination and reality. “The Hurt Man” grew out of a family story about my great-grandmother. That story came to me a long time ago in only a few sentences, and so what I have imagined surely bears little resemblance to what actually happened. The old story grew into imagination, so to speak, over many years. It became writable finally when I began to see it as an episode in the early life of Mat Feltner, a character I began writing about in 1960.