Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Wendell Berry has farmed a hillside in his native Henry County, Kentucky, for over thirty years. He is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and essays, including Jayber Crow, Citizenship Papers , and, most recently, his collected stories, That Distant Land. A former professor of English at the University of Kentucky, he has received numerous awards for his work, including the T S. Eliot Award, the Atken Taylor Award for Poetry, and the John Hay Award of the Orion Society. Berry lives and works in Kentucky with his wife, Tanya Berry, and their children and grandchildren, who live and farm nearby.

Kevin Brockmeier, “The Brief History of the Dead”

I wrote “The Brief History of the Dead” in November of 2002. Whenever I’m beginning the sort of narrative that I hope might turn into a novel, I try to approach the first chapter as though it were an independent short story, as a way of easing myself into the water. That was what happened with “The Brief History of the Dead,” and the story has indeed become the first chapter of a novel-in-progress. William Maxwell, whose “The Thistles in Sweden” is one of my all-time favorite stories, talks about using an image or a metaphor as a way of developing the structure of his books: he would envision a tree with its center cut out, for instance, or a walk across flat ground toward distant mountains, and he would adopt that image as a sort of imaginative compass while he was writing. The image I had in mind as I wrote “The Brief History of the Dead” was that of one thing spreading open inside another-doors opening within doors opening within doors. Most of the doors never close, and my hope was that this would give the city and its inhabitants a sense of ongoing existence in the mind of the reader. I tried to fit as much of the life of the city into the story as I could-as much of the landscape, as many of the people, and as many of their dreams and expectations and notions about the place where they found themselves-while I elaborated on my central premise, that of a world of the dead-but-still-remembered undergoing its own quiet apocalypse.

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novel The Truth About Celia , the story collection Things That Fall from the Sky , and two children's novels, City of Names and the forthcoming Grooves; or, the True-Life Outbreak of Weirdness. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories , and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror , among other publications, and have been included twice before in The O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Timothy Crouse, “Sphinxes”

To my mind, one mark of a true human being is the desire to know, and to share knowledge, once acquired. What motivates me to write my stories is the need to come to grips with an actual situation, and, having understood its deepest meanings, express its multiplicity of levels. Since this story, which still remains alive in me, required much elaboration, I have to admit, paraphrasing Paul Valéry, that I prefer one reader who reads it several times to many who read it once.

When beginning the story, I made this note: “Being-God?-leaves us free within a prison.” Not for nothing do we have the concepts of the no , the yes , the perhaps. How wonderful when the yes or the no presents itself as a clear choice; but this world is the kingdom of the perhaps. In my perception, the Great Teacher is a bystanding witness to this same problem of the no , the yes , and the regrettable perhaps. What a collection of sphinxes play on the keyboard of this planet.

Timothy Crouse has been a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice , and the Washington columnist for Esquire , writing numerous articles for these and other publications, including The New Yorker. His 1974 book, The Boys on the Bus , was reissued in 2003. He translated, with Luc Brébion, the Nobel laureate Roger Martin du Gard's Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort. The new version of Anything Goes that he coauthored with John Weidman was staged at the Royal National Theatre, London. He is writing a book of short stories, collaborating on a screenplay, and cotranslating works by the Chilean poet David Rosenmann-Taub. Crouse lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Charles D’Ambrosio, “The High Divide”

I just checked the folder in my computer where I’ve kept the various versions of “The High Divide” and there are, no kidding, 116-plus there's a sheaf of papers in my old Steelcase file cabinet that includes typewritten scenes and scribbled notes and a handful of rejections from people who, I would love to imagine, had some ideas that this story was destined to knock around, alone and unloved, stupid and blind, until it found its present shape and home. Of course, going forward the floundering hardly felt that way. Despite writing lots of versions over the course of twelve years, there was very little agony involved in making the story-it just seemed that every two or three years I’d haul it out and write a bunch of drafts and forget about it until the next time. It was like owning a pet that didn’t need to be fed very frequently. Big and little things changed along the way. At one point the crazy father was on the loose and the narrator lost the tip of his tongue when a basketball fell on his head. The dead mother was alive and the whole family lived in a bungalow in West Seattle with blackberry vines scrabbling up through the floor. Somewhere in all this the story ballooned to about twelve thousand words. In order to reduce the word count, I had to lock the nutty father away in a mental institution. Committing the father also softened the narrator's anger, which in turn cut down the number of personal cruelties in the story. The pain spread out beyond the petty question of personal fairness, widening into sympathy. All the quotes were removed from the dialogue-which is how I’d had it originally-and that fixed a tonal problem, since all the dialogue was written to sound reported rather than realistic. Thus my first vague impulse was integrated back into the narrator's voice. The sentences felt healthy and true again. The engine driving the story had always been anger, but in the last stages of rewriting a new note of love crept in. If anger is endless and the deepest urge of love is toward completion, then love, I’d have to say, did the trick-however unliterary that insight may seem.

Charles D’Ambrosio is the author of The Point and Other Stories and The Dead Fish Museum. His fiction appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review , and various anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories. His nonfiction appears regularly in Nest Magazine and The Organ Review of Arts. D’Ambrosio lives in Portland, Oregon.

Ben Fountain, “Fantasy for Eleven Fingers”

I was sitting at my daughters piano recital watching all those kids ripping the keyboard in that extraordinary way which we tend to take for granted, the fingers hitting the keys bam-bam-bam-bam as if each separate finger had its own brain, and two things occurred to me more or less simultaneously. One, that artistic skill and achievement of this sort are an everyday miracle that ought to blow our minds, and, two, how would throwing an extra finger into the mix change things? I walked around with those notions for a couple of days, pretty sure that I wanted to write a story about a piano prodigy, a young girl, with eleven fingers, and after a few more days I realized that I’d begun thinking about her in the context of that lost, hyperattenuated world of the Jewish intelligentsia of fin de siècle Vienna. Which felt right to me; after that it was just a question of doing the work.