Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

■ I had sketched out what I thought would be a campus novel someday, where one inciting event triggered a progression of responses, and multiple narrators would tell the story. A few years later, I realized I was most interested in only one of the narrators. Having written a lot about the experience of racism, I wanted to find a different way to inhabit that narrative. I think a lot about the James Baldwin line “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” I wanted to write a story that invited not just empathy but implication, and explored the relationship between the two. I wanted to write about what it is to live always in the present and avoid a sense of history and consequence, which was about race and politics, but also, I realized once I started writing, about the messy spiraling of grief and denial. I was drafting the story during a time when I was spending a lot of time in hospitals, sharing a kind of forced intimacy and vulnerability with some people I realized wouldn’t like me or be likable in other contexts. That grief and intimacy let me get closer to Claire, let me care about her, without forgetting that as much as the story is about her real human grief, it’s also about what the desire to generously and forever forgive some people costs others. A few times during the years I was writing and revising this story, I put it away for a while because I thought the national conversation around Confederate imagery might have changed enough that I’d have to factor it into the story. The story got finished faster than the changing did.

CAROLYN FERRELL’s story collection Don’t Erase Me (1997) was awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award of the Los Angeles Times, the John C. Zachiris Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Literary Review, Ploughshares, and other places; her story “Proper Library” was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ferrell teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with her husband and children.

■ I’d long tried to figure out how to approach the individual pieces of “A History of China” while also thinking about the larger story. Ultimately, I was guided by a few short stories that have helped me consider form and content in new ways: Steven Millhauser’s brilliant “Phantoms” was one such guide, as was Edward P. Jones’s incredible “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” and Alice Munro’s harshly poignant “Wild Swans.” Robin Hemley’s “Sympathy for the Devil: How to Deal with Difficult Characters,” an essay I’ve taught for years, was another beacon.

“A History of China” has its earliest roots in an experience I had with a now-defunct German porcelain company, my first job out of college. I was fascinated by the role a five-piece place setting could play in a world that cherished patterns and platters, soup tureens and replacement soup tureens—a world about which I knew nothing. In fact, I was fired a few months in, my supervisor explaining that I didn’t have what it took to make it in that world. Years later I went and used those dishes to my advantage.

ANN GLAVIANO is a writer, dancer, DJ, and born-and-raised New Orleanian. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Ninth Letter, Prairie Schooner, Fairy Tale Review, the Atlas Review, Slate, and the anthology Please Forward: How Blogging Reconnected New Orleans After Katrina (University of New Orleans Press), among other publications. Her novella, Dickbeer, was published by Amazon’s Day One . Glaviano is an alumna of Louisiana State University and the MFA program at Ohio State.

■ I attended sleepaway summer camp of the traditional outdoors variety from the ages of eight to ten, followed by nerd camp (shoutout to the ADVANCE Program for Young Scholars!) every summer till I was sixteen. Camp changed my life utterly and for the better—in fact, nerd camp was where I took my first creative writing course—so I have a real soft spot for camp stories, plus a wealth of material to draw from.

I came across a writing prompt years ago, and I wish I could credit the source but I can no longer find it, that suggested writing a story about a camp organized around a theme we don’t usually have camps for—such as wife camp. When it was time to start a new story, I pulled out this camp prompt, and I considered other weird camp concepts, and finally I realized that my favorite thing about the prompt was the idea of wife camp. What would one do at a wife camp?

It turns out wife camps exist, usually in a religious context, and this took me down a deep rabbit hole of research on the ways we teach girls, across different cultures, what will be expected of them as women. I looked at initiation rituals, both formal and informal, and superstitions regarding menstruation. I also thought about how baffled kids often are when they first encounter adult behaviors that are upheld as norms but are, from an outsider perspective, bizarre and absurd; I wrote from that place of absurdity. I had a great deal of fun.

I have hated epistolary stories my whole life, starting with Dear Mr. Henshaw (no shade toward Beverly Cleary), but Donald Barthelme changed my mind; the structure of this story was inspired by “Me and Miss Mandible.”

JACOB GUAJARDO is a graduate of MFA@FLA at the University of Florida. His fiction has appeared in Passages North, Hobart, Necessary Fiction, The Mondegreen, and elsewhere. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, but was born and raised in St. Louis, Michigan.

■ This story took two years and eleven drafts to write. It took about the same amount of time to get it published. I grew up in St. Louis, Michigan, the geographic center of the state. My family lived two hours from all of the beaches on the Great Lakes. When we did get to go to the beach (my parents both worked full-time jobs) it was a treat. When we were at the beach, it was like we were a different family. My favorite beaches are in Grand Haven, on the west side of the state, where this story takes place. I loved imagining what it would be like to grow up there. Would a boy like me, a queer, light-skinned halfie, survive? What if he fell in love? What if he fell in love with someone he shouldn’t? Young, queer people of color become adept at hiding, but it’s hard to hide that you are in love.

My dad grew up in a single-parent household with two sisters and two brothers. He’s a first-generation kid. His mom worked hard to give him and his siblings what they had, but not without the help of her friends. I have always known that it takes more than a set of parents to raise kids. I knew I wanted to write about the people who raised me. I knew I wanted to write about beach boys, and I knew I wanted to write about first love.

CRISTINA HENRíQUEZ is the author of three books, including, most recently, the novel The Book of Unknown Americans, which was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Oxford American, the New York Times Magazine , and elsewhere. She is also the recipient of an Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award. She lives in Illinois.

■ A few years ago, I went to a hotel by myself for one weekend to do nothing but write. Armed with Japanese whiskey and Goldfish crackers, I holed up in the room, intending to make progress on a novel I’d been struggling with. Instead, I sat down and wrote this story.

It’s rare that I start a story with what could properly be called an idea. For me, the seed is always language, and when the words come, they open a path before me. So I wrote the first line— On the first day, there’s a sense of relief —and continued from there, letting the story reveal itself. It’s a scary way to write, and it requires a certain amount of faith, but by the end of that weekend, I had the first draft. From there, it was a matter of understanding what the story was really about, and one of the things I wanted to show was that in trying to find safety, the main character, this woman, only managed to trade one sort of horror for another.