Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

JAMEL BRINKLEY is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories . His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Threepenny Review, Epiphany, and LitMag. He has received scholarships and fellowships from Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also the 2016–17 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He is currently a 2018–20 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

■ As I worked on the initial draft of “A Family,” I had a few stories swimming around in my mind: “Old Boys, Old Girls” by Edward P. Jones, “Three People” by William Trevor, and the brilliant reply to that Trevor tale, “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” by Yiyun Li. In addition to those stories, I was, as I came to discover along the way, also thinking about black men and mass incarceration, a changing New York City, the urgency and variety of human companionship, the way a friend can be the love of one’s life, the multiple forms that families can take, and both the speed and stickiness of time. My first working title was “Lena’s Men,” which I’m still fond of in many ways. She’s my favorite person in the piece, the story’s true living link, connecting each of the other principal characters. I decided against that title, ultimately, because I wanted to emphasize all the characters together as one unit, even on the level of grammar. The next working title was “A Kind of Family,” but I decided against that one because I wanted to avoid any unconscious or deliberate misinterpretation on the part of some readers (in, say, the tradition of the Moynihan Report) that I was writing about kind of a family or sort of a family, not quite a family, a family only in degraded form. The title I settled on asserts, simply and directly, what I believe to be true about these characters in the end, who and what they are with one another.

YOON CHOI lives in Anaheim Hills, California, with her husband and four children. Her work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review and New England Review . A current Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she is working on a collection of short stories.

■ This story began as a promise to myself, after the last of our children was born, to find an hour a day to write. What I came up with in those hours was perfunctory at best. An old man with Alzheimer’s wanders from home and drowns in a municipal pond. Six thousand words, tops. But one night, as I was typing toward the inevitable, it occurred to me that the old man would probably have a wife. The wife gave me the structure of the story—and then the story itself. Structurally, the use of his/her sections solved the problem of narrating from a single unreliable perspective. But the double narration also raised questions. There was a wife. This probably meant there were children. Maybe even grandchildren. A grandchild in particular. I thought: What if the old man was left alone with his grandson? What if he brought that child to the edge of the water? What if the old woman had left the two of them together, against her better judgment, because of… what? A secret. Suddenly, I was not so sure that the old man would be the one to die. I was not sure about anything at all. That’s when the story found in these pages slowly began to get written.

EMMA CLINE is the author of The Girls, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, and an LA Times Book Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House , and the Paris Review . In 2014 Cline won the Plimpton Prize from the Paris Review , and in 2017 she was named by Granta as one of the Best Young American Novelists of her generation.

■ I wanted to think about “cost” in this story, both in terms of the actual exchange of goods for a set price, and in terms of the cost of our experiences, what they exact from us. Alice thinks she understands how the world works, but she consistently mistakes surface information—how things look, their external value—for reality. Her life is a kind of recurring anecdote, her painful experiences just fodder for stories. As long as she squints a certain way, keeps certain information from herself, nothing can really hurt or affect her. I didn’t want to moralize about her choices—the danger doesn’t come from what Alice is actually doing, but from her inability to fully inhabit her own life. I wanted the reader to think about what living this way might cost, what the price might eventually be, even if Alice can’t.

ALICIA ELLIOTT is a Tuscarora writer living in Brantford, Ontario, with her husband and child. Her writing has been published by The Malahat Review, New Quarterly, The Walrus, Globe and Mail, VICE, and many others. Her essay “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won Gold at the National Magazine Awards and was published in Best Canadian Essays 2017 . Most recently, she was the 2017–18 Geoffrey and Margaret Andrew Fellow at UBC. Elliott is currently Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Fiddlehead, Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths, and a consulting editor at New Quarterly . Her first book of essays is forthcoming from Doubleday Canada in spring 2019.

■ The first line came to me while I was sitting in a coffee shop in a city I didn’t know. “They found him while laying the groundwork for a fast food restaurant.” I wasn’t sure what I was writing about at first, but the idea of consumption loomed large in my mind. I initially tried to write the story about a white family, but nothing was gelling. It always felt wrong, unfinished.

After visiting the Mohawk Institute, otherwise known as the Mush Hole, the residential school closest to my rez, I realized where Henry had gone, and why he hadn’t come back. I realized why I was continually circling back around to the idea of consumption, and why it was so painful that a fast food restaurant was being built on those lands. Canada has fed so many of my people to the monster of colonialism. They’ve stripped away our lands, eroded our rights, stolen our children, then criminalized them, then imprisoned them—all for the purpose of pushing forward white, Western capitalism. A fast food restaurant is the perfect symbol for this sort of capitalistic, colonial consumption.

As soon as I realized Beth and her family were Mohawk, it was like the story opened up. Everything came fast. Everything made sense. What didn’t make sense—what was painful to ask myself—was why I was writing all my characters as white before this. It’s important to recognize the ways that whiteness works its way into our imaginations as Indigenous writers, the way it forces us to diminish our own people, our own stories, and elevate either whiteness itself, or a version of Indigeneity that pleases white audiences. This story helped me realize that my writing didn’t have to do either of those things. My writing could center Indigenous people, voices, and experiences instead.

I’m beyond grateful that this messy, complicated, and (I think) ultimately hopeful story was chosen to be included in this collection. It gives me faith that the old standards of what’s been traditionally considered literary and acceptable are changing. It tells me that Indigenous stories, which we as Indigenous people have always cherished and revered, are finally being cherished and revered by non-Indigenous readers, as well. What a gift.

DANIELLE EVANS is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award, the Paterson Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 selection. Her stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including the Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, New Stories from the South, and The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, and 2017. She teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.