Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

■ A few years ago, during the penultimate week of a fellowship at the New York Public Library, I had the fortune of taking a tour through the labyrinthine stacks of the Stephen A. Schwarzman building on Fifth Avenue. A controversial renovation had been announced, and for months New Yorkers had debated the logistics and consequences of moving the lion’s share of the collection offsite in order to address concerns that the library’s stacks might be too fragile to continue the twin tasks of housing its books and supporting its weight.

It was eerie to go all the way down into the warm, green-gray catacombs of the old girl and see her skeleton laid bare. Infinities of struts and empty rectangles receded in every direction. Halogen tubes flickered overhead. A right here, a left there, a deserted corridor, a stairwell leading to basement storage. On an otherwise empty shelf at the foot of a metal ladder I barely survived sat a box labeled:

ITEMS AWAITING PROTECTIVE ENCLOSURE

I’m not a note-taking kind of writer (managing to lose every single Moleskine I’ve ever carried has cured me of trying to catch those daily jolts of inspiration) but when I saw these words, I scrambled to grab them, get them down on paper, preserve their correct order. Right away I knew: this was something, a thread, a line if I’d ever seen one. A gift. Just sitting there in the library basement. A title—maybe. I told myself that I would wait as long as necessary for the right story to come along and claim it. Of course, this would turn out to be the one I had already been writing for the better part of a year—though two more years would pass before its hazy, disparate threads (shed hunting, unrequited first love, a father obsessed with littering transgressions) finally came together.

RON RASH is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times best seller Serena , in addition to many prizewinning novels, including The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright , which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories , which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of both The Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

■ As with almost all of my fiction, this story began with an image: a baptism scene on a frozen river. I sensed the time period was the late nineteenth century and that the minister was deeply conflicted about performing the rite. Where the initial image came from I cannot say. It was not derived from anything I’d ever heard of happening. After finishing the first draft, I realized that my naming the child Pearl established a connection to the Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, but that too was, at least initially, subconscious. My perspective on stories is Jungian. They already exist; thus writers are more transmitters than creators. But how well the story will be told is conscious, a matter of craft.

AMY SILVERBERG is a writer and stand-up comedian based in Los Angeles. She’s currently a Doctoral Fellow in Fiction at the University of Southern California. Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly , Los Angeles Review of Books , The Collagist , and elsewhere. She will be performing stand-up on season 6 of Hulu’s comedy showcase Coming to the Stage. She’s now at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.

■ The way I enter stories is almost always through voice; I rarely have a character or premise in mind. I just had that first line in my head for a while—the line of a character saying she made a bet with her father—so I wrote one paragraph and set it aside for months and months. I’m not sure why I decided to pick up the story again, but I know that line ran through my head enough times, stayed with me long enough, that I felt I wanted to revisit it and go from there. Maybe I just had a deadline! At the time, I was teaching an Intro to Composition class that was mostly freshmen, and I met with them three times a week, so I got to know them pretty well. We’d talk often about their relationships with their parents—who had a helicopter mom, whose dad wanted them to really embrace being on their own. I was definitely thinking about that at the time, the myriad of ways in which parents and children learn to let go. Eighteen has always struck me as a very strange, particular age—especially for the kids I was teaching—so many of them were living away from home, but still talking to their parents every day. I’d just read the short story “The Paperhanger” by William Gay and admired the mystery of it, how it seemed to go confidently into an unknown world, a world that felt a little surreal and a little absurd. At least that’s how I remember feeling about the story at the time. I was also in a workshop taught by Aimee Bender, and while I hadn’t set out to write anything with a magical realism element, I’m sure her stories (which I’ve read many, many times) rubbed off on me—or if not the stories, then at least the courage or freedom to go confidently into that so-called unknown world. Finally, I love writing about Los Angeles. I’ve lived here most of my adult life, and I perform comedy here. It still feels exciting that a friend of mine, who works as a waitress, might quit her job at any moment for an acting role. For as long as I’ve lived here, it’s always felt like a city of transition and transformation—that you might be one thing and then become another over the course of a single day will always be compelling to me.

CURTIS SITTENFELD is the best-selling author of five novels— Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, and Eligible— and one story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It. Her books have been selected by the New York Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and People for their “Ten Best Books of the Year” lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into thirty languages. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and Esquire , and her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, and on This American Life.

■ I joined Twitter in 2013 and, as someone who had been a social media skeptic, was both surprised and a bit alarmed by how quickly I took to it. (As the saying goes, the twenty minutes I spend on Twitter are the best four hours of my day.) I also thought about the strangeness of the fact that many tweets are exchanged between people whose identities are unclear. If a person from my own past about whom I had ambivalent feelings emailed me, the truth is that I might ignore the email. But if the same person reached out on Twitter, with a jokey username, I might, in the spirit of being a pleasant author, engage in a back-and-forth while having no idea who the person really was. Although I certainly am not famous like Lucy Headrick, it was this strangeness that inspired me to write “The Prairie Wife.” Of course, the story ended up being about a few other things—celebrity culture, forty-something sadness—but its origins are in how weird I find Twitter.

RIVERS SOLOMON writes about life in the margins, where they are much at home. They graduated from Stanford University with a degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and hold an MFA in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers. Though originally from the United States, they currently reside in the United Kingdom. Their debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, is out now.

■ When I wrote “Whose Heart I Long to Stop with the Click of a Revolver,” some years ago now, I’d been thinking a lot about guns—specifically how much I liked them compared to others who hold socially progressive values. I’d never held one myself, but it seemed to me that the world’s bank account, its balance of power, if you will, was mighty in arrears and needed to be set to rights. I couldn’t envision a way of doing that that didn’t involve a gun.