Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; The Best American Short Stories 2010

And so tonight, on behalf of Harvard Bookstore, I'm so very thrilled to welcome this fabulous panel of amazing writers to the Bridal Theatre. They're all here with us tonight to celebrate the publication of the Best American Short Stories 2010. We're lucky enough to have with us not only two amazing contributors, Steve Almond and Brendan Matthews, this edition's guest editor, Richard Russo, but also the series editor, Heidi Pittler. Ms. Pittler is a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, where she oversees the Best American Short Stories and the Best American Terrible Writing, and edits literary fiction and some literary nonfiction. Her short works have been published in plow shares, and she's the author of the wonderful novel The Birthdays, which I encourage everyone here to read. I'm going to enter in the introductions over to Heidi Pittler now. But first ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming all of our fabulous panelists tonight, Heidi Pittler, Steve Almond, Brendan Matthews, and Richard Russo. Thank you so much for coming out. I am going to start my introductions at the far end of the table with Brendan Matthews.

Brendan Matthews received his MFA from the University of Virginia. His stories have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Epic, Tri Quarterly, the Cincinnati Review, and many other journals. His stories have twice been cited as distinguished in the back of Best American Short Stories, and they've come awfully, awfully close. So I was thrilled that he made it this year. He came so close on the Salmon Rush, a year that Salmon mentioned him in the introduction. So I don't know if that makes you feel good or bad. He teaches at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Western Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and four kids. He's currently working on his first novel about Assassin's Big Band music and the Ghost of William Butler Yates. Welcome, Brendan. Next we have Steve Almond. He's the author of the Story Collections My Life in Heavy Metal and the Evil BV Chow, the novel which brings me to you, co-written with Julianna Baggett, and the nonfiction books Candy Freak and Not That You Asked.

His new book, well this isn't so new anymore, but his book Rock and Roll will save your life, come out the spring, and he's also self-publishing a book called Letters from People Who Hate Me, and another title this won't take but a minute honey, which is composed of 30 very brief stories and 30 very brief essays on the psychology and practice of writing. In 2011, Look Out Press will publish a new story collection titled God Bless America. Finally, Richard Russo is the author of a collection of short stories, The Horse Child, numerous screenplays, and such novels as Nobody's Fool, Straight Man, The Empire Falls, not Thee, just Empire Falls, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently that old Cape Magic, of which the Providence Journal said Russo has a great sense of humor of the absurd and of the intricate, constantly shifting, complex, emotional levels of his characters. The way Russo plums their depths are wonderful, incidents and episodes charm and sparkle. So I thought what we would do is start with by giving a taste of this book.

So I'm going to turn the mic over to Mr. Russo, and maybe he can talk a little bit about his process in choosing these stories, and then we'll have these writers each read a sample of their stories that appear in the book. We had an event, what, 10 days ago in New York, and I had a series of, it's Symphony Space where they do selected shorts, and they provided me with a couple of questions that I thought I might want to talk a little bit about, and the first one I read which chilled my blood was, how does this year's edition of Best American Short Stories differ from all the other years? And I do defy sad and thought about that for a long time, and the only thing that I could come up with is that I had been reading this wonderful anthology since 1978. The only thing that I could think was different this year was this is the only year since 1978 that I've loved all 20 stories.

But I would like to tell you a little bit about the selection process, my selection process. I think it's similar each year, but each writer, depending on his temperament and whatever other things he or she may have going on in their life at the moment, determines, I mean, some writers like to read these guest editors like to read the submissions blind. I decided not to do that early on because I discovered that I couldn't be blind to the extent that I wanted to be. If you're going to be blind, you should be blind. And the problem is that when we get these stories, if you're a reader, you're going to recognize some of them. You're going to recognize, and more than that, if Heidi sends me a story that was published in the New Yorker, the fact that it's in the New Yorker is going to be perfectly clear to me even if the author's name is, we all know what a New Yorker's story looks like even before we read it.

And then after we read it, we still know, but there are certain writers that, of course, you know their style, and it's an author with a particular style, you're going to know, or it's either George Saunders or someone who's gone to school on George Saunders. And so no matter how much you want to be blind, you're not going to be. And so I decided early on to go about things in exactly the opposite way, which was to, instead of pretending to be blind when I wasn't, and pretending not to know the typeface of 10 house when I did, or not to know what McSweeney's looked like, I just decided that I would try to read, in addition to the 100 stories that I knew Heidi was going to be sending me, that I would read another 100 or 125 and just get around in the world of literary magazines. And read as much as I could, I felt that I had a particular obligation to do that because

I'm a novelist. And over what is now a career that's gone on longer than I ever imagined when I started, I've written a fair number of novels, but one very slender book of short stories, seven stories in it, the entire Russo opus of short stories. And of those seven stories, actually three of those were outtakes from novels, things that I had yanked out of novels and then kind of reformed a short fiction. So what I really wanted to do is kind of submerge myself for a full year, just reading as many short stories as I could. And the 100 that Heidi sent me were, I mean, I don't think there was anything on the other 150 that I read that made it onto the final list, but it did help me to kind of retool and refit my imagination to an art form that I myself don't practice all that often.

And it was wonderful, it was instructive, it was a marvelous experience that I don't intend to do again real soon, but was glorious for the time that I did it. When you read, as I did, then to 200 or so, 200 plus short stories, you discover first how much good short fiction there is out there, a lot of it, there are a lot of wonderfully talented writers, many of whom you know, but many of whom you don't, a few of whom are in this collection. So you become aware of this enormous literary landscape out there, many of them young writers who are going to have a difficult time because as we all know, there aren't as many outlets anymore and there isn't as much advertising, there aren't as many book tours for young writers.

And so it was wonderful to find out who some of these, for me, to find out who some of these people were. It was a lot of fun and surprisingly not all that difficult to go from 200 or so short stories down to 50. But let me tell you, going from 50 to 20, as I said in my introduction, is a form of literary waterboarding. The 50, and that's why at the back of this book, I want you to have a look at those stories, the 100 or so listed at the end of this volume, or is it 80 or so there? It's 100 although we decided to throw in sex, sex, right? So I mean, by all means, look around those stories listed in the back of the book because if there were another guest editor, some of those stories would be among this 20. I am a comic writer and it would be impossible for me to sit before you and say that my comic

sensibility did not in some way inform some of the stories maybe that were chosen for this particular volume. And I may have had other prejudices, other things that I particularly loved, that I particularly loathed, that would have made my choices different from some of your choices and I encourage you to read around to discover just how wrong I was about some of these, some of the stories that are in that back list of stories. There are some great, absolutely wonderful stories there. The other thing that I learned in doing this is what the difference is between admiring something and loving something. There is so much to admire out there in other writers. But it's funny, Heidi and I were talking about this earlier tonight, admiration is almost always something you can explain, analyze and sometimes quantify. Falling in love with a short story is like falling in love with a person.

It just defies analysis, often you simply don't know why. The only thing is that your heart did that little flip-flop thing and there you are in love and probably if you could explain it, you wouldn't quite be in love anymore in quite the same way. These are particularly difficult audiences because we know the tricks, we know a lot of these tricks, we practice a lot of them ourselves, it's tougher to get through our defenses. The 20 stories in this volume, I couldn't be more proud of them than if I'd love to have written them myself, I'm very, I feel very proprietary about them because they are the 20 stories that most got through my writerly defenses. I shut down all of my knowledge, all of my skills, all of my art, somehow or other, none of it mattered. I was seduced, I was in love and we're going to hear a short portion from a couple of these stories and then we're going to talk about some of this stuff in the craft of writing

short fiction. Okay, so why don't we do Steve first who is going to read a story called just so I get it right? Donkey greedy, Donkey gets punched, this is maybe read it, just whatever you think. Okay, I have a big man crush now on Rick Russo, embarrassing, so I just read the first couple of pages of this story, Donkey greedy, Donkey gets punched, does not actually have donkeys in it, is there any people who concern, any PETA people, no donkeys punched in this story. Dr. Raymond Oss had become in the restless leisure of his late middle age a poker player. He had a weakness for the game and the ruthless depressives it attracted, one which he probably was fair enough though it wasn't something he wanted known. Oss was a psychoanalyst in private practice in the head of two committees at the San Francisco Institute.

He was a short man with a meticulous trotsky beard and a flare for hats that did not suit him. He cured souls very expensively from an office near his home in Redwood City. On Saturday mornings Oss put on his sweatsuit and orthotic tennis shoes and told Sharon he was off to his Tai Chi class, then he shot up 101 straight to Artichoke Joe's in San Bruno where he played Texas Holdham at the 3-6 table for five hours straight. He mucked 80% of his hands, bluffed only on the button and lost a little more than he won. He didn't mind losing either if the cards were to blame, it was only when he screwed up. When he failed to see a flush developing, he got slow played by some grinning Chinese maniac that he felt the pinch of genuine rage. And even these hands offered a certain mesochistic pleasure, a mortification that was swift and public. It was an inconvenient arrangement, taudry from certain angles but Oss couldn't help himself. The moment he spotted the dismal pink stucco of the casino's facade, the sea of bent cigarettes rising from the giant ash tray under the awning.

He felt a squirt of brainless adrenaline. He had become addicted to the garlic and ginger prawns too, a dish so richly infiltrated with MSG that it made his tongue go numb. I see you've had those, good. Sometimes toward the end of a session having made his third and final promise to cash in after the next hand, Oss would sit back and let the sensations wash over him. The clack of the pow guy tiles being stirred, the nimble flicking of the cars, the confusion of colognes and nicotine, the monstrous lonely twitch of the place. He loved artichoke joes, especially while hating it. There's one more little section here. One day Oss arrived home to find Sharon waiting in his den. She pulled out a green eye shade and a deck of cards began dealing them onto his Oriental rug. She'd done theater in college. How long have you known? Oss said, Sharon frowned, Jacob aged 11 had tipped her off the little shit. He hacked into your computer, Sharon said, I didn't hack into anything, Jacob yelled

from the hallway. I just clicked on the history tab bar for like one second. Sharon began speaking in her calm social worker tone, Oss glared, I'm sorry, Oss glanced at the scattered cards, a cluster of four hearts, queen high, and thought of his henpecked father. You could have told me, Sharon said, I would have understood. He didn't want his wife's understanding. He had enough of that already. He wanted her indignation, her censure, the stain of his moral insufficiencies tossed between them like a bet, but she saw his duplicity and raised her forgiveness. So he bid, Artichoke Joe's farewell, farewell green felt, farewell ginger prongs, and began playing in a weekly game with fellow analysts. The $20 buy-in, the non-alcoholic beer, the arthritic dithering over a 75 cent raise, it was his penance. Overall he felt himself vaguely improved.

He began to hike the Stanford Hills in Rere Dostoevsky and brought Sharon to the Swiss Alps for a month. His elder son, Ike, insisted on calling him Cisco, it being his impression that the Cisco kid had been a famous gambler. Jacob continued to sneak into his office in the hopes of catching him playing online. Check it before you wreck it, daddy-o, he warned. Oss wanted very much to strike the boy, just once, near the eye. Okay and Brendan, Matthew, stories, these have to be the two longest titles in the book. My last attempt to explain to you what happened with the lion tamer. Thank you. I want to say thanks, a huge thanks to Heidi and to Rick for including me in the collection. Rick mentioned that there are plenty of writers out there you've never heard of, and I count myself among them. He wasn't even a good lion tamer, not before you showed up.

He had always looked the part with his whip and his chair and his spangled pants. But honestly, watching him in the cage with those lions was like watching a man staggered blindfolded across a four lane highway. One night in Glenn's falls, the chair slipped from his hand and the cat swatted it around the cage like a chew toy. In council bluffs, a claw snapped his patent leather bandalier like an old shoe string. And in Granite City, a lion caught the whip between its jaws and yanked him around the ring like a fish on a lion. It was a minor miracle every time he stepped out of the cage, bruised in bleeding, but still intact. He didn't seem to care that the clapping was never the thunderous peel you'd expect when a man emerged from a cage full of beasts, and he didn't care that it petered out before half a minute was up. He just stand there with his arms raised, like some avatar of victory, and he'd beam that ivory smile and shake his blonde mane. You'd think the lions had just elected him the king of the Serengeti. Looking at the scars and the shredded outfits with their missing sequins and their webs of

crooked stitching, I'd wonder why the guy was doing this to himself. You told me once that his father was a lion tamer, and that these things run in the family. I don't know. My old man was no clown, but maybe that skips the generation. The first time I saw you, I was alone behind the big top, adjusting the mix in the confetti buckets. Most of the others were still in bed, nursing hangovers or aching limbs, asking themselves for the 10,000th time what it was going to take to get moving today. Me, I was up early because I knew no one else would be. Right away I knew you were no first of May, no circus rookie, five foot nothing, barefoot in a leotard, you strutted like you own not just the big top, but the fairgrounds it stood on. Like the rest of us better get your say so before we turn to single summer salt. You the new girl in the flying trapeze, I said, although I knew without asking. You smelled like chalk dust and hairspray. You the old clown, you said, eyeing my tattered plaid pants and my flop-collared shirt, my white face and painted on smile.

I danced a little jig, letting my head law from side to side, and ended with a pratfall straight down on my keyster. The one and only, immediately I wished I hadn't said that. Still, you smiled. It wasn't a toothy whole face blooming into a laugh sort of smile, but it was a smile. And then without another word, you made tracks for the big top. That confetti wasn't going to mix itself, but how could I take my eyes off you with your legs like cables of braided silk? It wasn't just that you were beautiful. There were a lot of pretty ladies in the circus, tattooed and otherwise. It was that strut. I followed you into the tent, and by the time my eyes adjusted to the light filtering through the canvas, you were already halfway up the ladder to the high wire. Well, ho, I said to myself, a double threat. The tight rope and the trapeze, the wire and the string. The roused abouts had started to hoist the net into place, cursing at the lines and jabbering about this broad who shows up out of nowhere and puts him to work right in the middle of a union-mandated coffee break. They were ornry that morning, still grousing about the case of Jonas Luck they'd had that

morning. Still grousing about the case of Jonas Luck they'd had with the blow-off in Sandusky. The skies had opened, the canvas became cement heavy, and the fists of soaked rope that gripped the tent pegs couldn't be pulled apart. Two days later, they were still looking for someone to piss on, and a green horn tumbler was just the ticket. Hey, down there, you said, your voice knifing through the morning haze. I don't want the net. They kept hoisting the lines because it's one thing to perform with that in net, but no one practices without one, unless you want your first mistake to be your last. So this time you shouted, gentlemen, and that stopped them in their tracks because no one ever called them gentlemen. I said, no, net. The net flopped to the floor, kicking up a fog of sawdust. One of them called you a crazy bitch, but I swear the words were tinged with respect and even a little awe. You were at the top of the ladder, and although you could have stepped lightly onto the tight robe, testing its thickness and tension, you raised your arms above your head and cart wheeled to the middle of the wire.

I heard one of the razor-back's gasp. Another mumbled something that might have been a curse, but could have been a prayer. And me, my heart burst like a child's balloon. Right then and there, I knew I loved you. Okay, so this, I'm going to ask a few questions and then we can open it up and you guys can ask some too. My first question would be for you two down here. What prompted you to write this story? You've always loved a circus. Well, my dad is a psychoanalyst to place poker. So it's kind of like an unauthorized biography. And actually, I've spent a fair amount of time in analysis on the couch lying down, thinking and talking and feeling guilty and blaming people mostly.

And at one point, at some point, I thought about the perversity of that relationship, but also it's beauty that you're totally revealing yourself to somebody who is initially a stranger and then is kind of everybody in your life of real importance and how strange that relationship is. And I also started to think about how I just basically, and this almost never happens to me. And I envisioned what the plot of this story was. My sense of plot is caveman, you know, push character into danger, make character scared, don't let's character go. You know, it's very simple. Now character have sex. And those of you who read my work will say, that's a great description of my work. But in this case, I really had a very clear idea of the events and what was the crucial detail that was going to be noticed and how that, just the whole thing came to me.

And I think that almost never happens. And I didn't write it immediately, you know, I had to just wait a few years, but it was like in that notebook that all writers keep, but we never actually, are I about 5% of the time ever actually get to the ideas that like this is going to be the greatest short story ever, like it's going to be better than the dead. But I never get back to those ideas. But in this case, it just stuck around long enough and I was at work on a dying novel as I so frequently am and I finally said, okay, I want to write this story. It was almost like a treat. And there it was. It was still there probably because I thought a lot about my own experience in therapy and also thought a lot about my dad and my sort of complicated love for him. And out it popped. Yeah, for me, this story was also kind of a treat that I would let myself come back to every now and then when I was doing the hard work of trying to write other stories. I started it, oh boy, the first trip after the story was written in 2004, I think. And I think I had, I was kind of playing with this crazy clown voice because it seemed

like fun. It was different from what I've been doing. And I just wanted to do something different than some of the writing I've been doing. So I suddenly had this clown and I had these ideas for stories about lion tamers, I mentioned some of this in the contributors note, like I had a lion tamer going on a cruise or a lion tamer speed dating, a lion tamer visiting his parents, and none of it ever worked, but I thought, I don't know, I like this lion tamer idea. And so suddenly this kind of clown voice starts talking about this lion tamer that we really can't stand. And then there's a love interest that gets involved. And in earlier versions of the story, there was an ex-girlfriend and there was a lot of other stuff that happened. And I got to research Circus Lingo and that was fun, but it was just, it was that. It was sort of fun. And I remember kind of very clearly that I wrote the story at the end of my first year in graduate school and one of my professors there, Chris Tillman, who's a Boston native, had written just in his very kind of fine pencil scribble at the bottom, psychologically thin.

I was just comment on draft one. And so for a long time, it just sat in the drawer, but every time I finished something, I'd come back to the story and I'd come back to it and I'd kind of hack away at it and I got rid of this whole intro of the clown hat, I got rid of this other stuff. And I tried to psychologically thicken it up a little bit, which was one of the tasks I had. But I also just sort of found that at some point, it wasn't just this kind of crazy lark, although it was that and it was always fun to have that. I really started to care a lot about the characters and kind of tried to let that guide where the story was going. And what would happen next, because the first version was very heavily plotted and I realized that a lot of the plot stuff that was in there, the complications didn't really need to happen. I was just trying to figure out what would they say to each other, when would they talk to each other, what would arise out of some of these conversations. And then I'd put it aside again, because it seemed like it was just this crazy story about the circus and I don't often write about the circus. Maybe I should write more about the circus. And so after enough breaks, finally about five years later, I had pretty much the version that you see here.

It took a long time to get to it. It was sort of in fits and starts, but when I finally kind of put my mind to what I realized that this story had something to it that kind of kept calling me back to it. And it really was a treat to work on, because it was an element of fun and then there was an element of danger, whether I could pull it off. And once I kind of wanted to face up to that danger to see if I could make this story work and not just be this failed effort, I really started to care about it. Okay, my next question is for all of you. What is the most difficult thing about writing for you? You can start. Oh gosh, I mean the list is so long. No, actually that's not entirely true. The hardest thing for me about writing has always been the urge to go fast when I know deep down that I need to go slow.

I've always been either plagued or blessed, depending on how you look at it, with having a good ear and not quite as good an eye. And as a result of that, I've always, when I put myself in the world of my characters, they start speaking and when I'm writing badly, I'm taking dictation. And it's not that what they're telling me, it's not that there's anything wrong with what they're telling me, it's that I'm just, is that I'm moving too quickly, taking down, jotting down too quickly what they're saying. And I'm almost always doing that out of fear because when I'm writing quickly, I'm afraid that if I don't go fast, I'm going to forget what the next thing is or I'm going to forget what the next clue is going to come up and I'm going to forget what that was. There's this great line coming.

It's not this one, the next one, the next one, but I can feel it. It's this great line coming and if I don't go, if I don't get down everything as quickly as they say when they're saying it, I'm going to forget that great line and I'm screwed. That's kind of the shorthand of my thinking. And what I know to be true and yet is very difficult for me, is that since my eye isn't as good as my ear. I'm always trying to remind myself to slow down, see as clearly as you hear, which for me is not easy. And so I find myself missing things. I used to tell my students when, back when I was teaching, that the physical world is not just a series of props that you used to kind of fill out a story or to give it ballast or heft or anything like that.

The physical world is, I used to tell them, a doorway into your character's lives and that's an act of faith that you have to understand is that what they hold in their hand, what they hold dear, whatever the object is that they're worrying in this particular story. It's a way to understand them. And so you can't just listen to them talk. You have to allow them their objects. You have to find out what the important physical objects are in the world of this story and trust that they will be a door that when you open the door is going to get you into the place that I always want to be, which is in these character's hearts and their souls. It's a lesson that I learned very early on, but I have to teach myself over and over. I just kind of never smarten up. And when I'm writing badly, which is often, I always say, what's wrong with this? What's wrong with this? And it's the same thing almost every time that I've just been going too fast.

And I've been going too fast because I'm afraid. I'm afraid because my eye isn't as good as my ear. And I'm afraid that if I slow down and see, I'll lose something that's valuable. When in fact, I know from experience that I will gain something that's valuable, but it's really hard. That's for me the most difficult thing about writing is that notion that for me, speed kills, even as I really like going fast, that's the thing. I really like it. I like the sensation of it. I like the sense that you're getting somewhere, even when you're not. You still have a sense of speed. Well, especially now, I think the main thing is just the pressures of fame. It's always been groupies and that's one thing, but then there's movie people and their very insistent talk about speed and then the endorsements and the corporations calling

and the this and the that and the product demos and these trade shows I have to use. Guys, no, I don't have to tell you this. And at a certain point, it will just crush you. So many people want a piece of what you're doing because it is so valuable in the culture right now. And so I just do my little bit every day to try and basically feed all the mouths that depend on me. Like a posse. But you know, that's an old story. Yeah, so obscurity has its advantages. For me, I'm not a terribly disciplined person and so that's probably the biggest challenge for me is just starting. A lot of times once I'm into the middle of something, I want to keep coming back to it, getting going. And I think for a long time, I had a lot of, I probably have, I could probably publish something called the book of false starts, it would just be the first two pages of a

lot of stories. Because I would start something and then I would think, I don't know if that's going to go, I'll start something else. And I think it was when I learned to stick with something and try to trust that there would be something there, the more I came back to it, that it got a little bit easier. And you know, having written at least enough stories that now I know that I can do it, there's actual proof out there, so that makes that part of it easier. But I think for me, I still struggle with that sometimes, it's not so much about making the time because, I mean, as I had to mention, I have four kids, there's not tons of time around, but there's time. And I think it's the discipline to just sort of sit down and do it and stick with it and keep going. And that's, for me, has been the biggest challenge, then it gets easier. And I felt like I'd finally gotten that with the short stories that I had a pretty good rhythm and I could kind of hold the story of my head, I could stick with it, I could see the whole story, and that drive me forward. So I started working on a novel this summer because I felt like, okay, short story, I got that, at least the routine figured out, the content I can't handle, the routine is good.

So let's start working on a novel and see what happens there. So now that brings on new terrors. So hopefully I'll be back in a setting like this years from now and I can tell you how things worked out with the novel. But right now, that's a work in progress and always. I should say in all seriousness, it is the fame. It's really lonely and that's, and very doubt-choked, you know, there's no secret, you know, the problems that Rick and Brendan have described are really solitary problems. There's no guru you can go to who's like, all right, here's what you need to do. And even if there was, and believe me, I've tried, it still comes down to sitting and out lasting your doubt and being sort of patient and paying attention to your characters who are inevitably leading you towards something you really think you want to get to, but an even stronger part of you often wants to get nowhere near it. So, and that, it just never gets any easier, just sort of stays painful. Okay, on that happy note, I have one more question then we'll turn it over to you guys.

And I think you can all answer this, what's, how is the process different writing a story and writing a novel? However you want to answer it, you can go. Well, as the novelist, I will say that my, I would write more short stories if I could hold the reins tightly enough. Short story, there's a lot going on in short stories. They're not little novels, but part of the short story form is control. It's holding, it's being able to hold onto the reins. And that's sort of, I've always been famously lacking in the ability to do that. And so my novels, even as novels tend to sprawl, they're very digressive. I don't hold onto the reins very well or very tightly.

For me, both the terror and the thrill of writing a novel, is that I don't have to hold the reins not only very tightly or sometimes even at all. And I can enjoy, I can enjoy digression. And I've always had a kind of weird, a weird, of kind of weird faith that even when I don't know what I'm doing, it'll probably be okay. I think that's very important for a novelist to have. Because a short story, Brennan and I were talking about earlier, I think is something that you can hold in your mind, maybe not every single thing in it, but you can hold it, it's shape, it's size. And it will fit in your brain in a way that a novel won't. And that's part of what I love about the novel is that it won't fit in my brain. And that I can either drop the reins or hold them so loosely that I'm only barely aware of where I'm going.

That's a great way to put it. I'm really a short story writer, that's what I, if I could make a living at it, that's what I would do, that's the form that I love. And I cannot hold a novel in my brain. I can't even remember what's in it. I can't remember what characters look like. I can't remember what the last thing they did was and what emotional valence they should have towards another character, it might have to do with pot use. But I think it just is inherently a kind of intellectual, emotional metabolism that I have that wants to keep things at the level of the anecdote. The architecture of a novel is just, you know, it's like a whole big, it's not just one flip on the trepis, it's like a whole bunch of them going at once and everybody has to catch everybody and everything has to build, because it's a novel, you're asking people who invest a lot of time.

And I think also the commitment that you have to have to have to the character's emotional development. And I think I always tend to just overcomplicate it, I think, well, it's a novel, so I've got to have all these things happening. But you know, my favorite novels, Pride and Prejudice are always very simple. It's a love story. Okay, there's some family around, there's some other, but it's, you know, they're usually quite simple. So I've written probably four or five failed novels and just about exhausted all the mistakes you can make. So I'm hoping to go through a second cycle of mistake making. The short stories to me, it's not like they're a breeze, writing a good one is extraordinarily difficult, but it feels to me like a story, like you sit on the bar, you're sitting around the dinner table or whatever, and you hear an anecdote, that I can get my head around. Those just spill out onto the, you know, I can't keep them in there. You could write a great novel about us. Us is a character dying to be in a novel. Yeah.

But interestingly, he's talking about the main character there, the poker analyst, and he is in a couple of other short stories. I like him. That's what I do. I've written probably ten short stories about the same set of bum philosophy grad students. The slagos stories, they're always doing, but interestingly, they're all the same story. It's an entertaining story, but they're all the same story. It doesn't have that thing that a novel has to do where it builds and gets bigger and describes it, you know, it maps out a bigger world. So I'm just going to rub up against Rick and a little static electricity charge of novel writing. Yes, I said, yeah, I'm working on my first now, but I think, and I mentioned this when we were talking about dinner. I think I'm at the point where I feel, well, pretty committed to it. I think it's that moment where if the short story is a more contained thing, I love short stories. I love reading short stories. I frequently teach back short stories. I love to write short stories. I'm really a passionate devotee of the form, but I've always wanted to, you know, try

my hand at a novel as well and feel like, you know, I kind of worked up the gumption, I guess, to do it. And I think I hit the point this summer where it's sort of like with the short story, the ending is always in sight in some way. Like, you know it's coming. There's a clock kind of ticking and you know you're moving towards the end and there's this building energy as you get towards the end of the story. You know, okay, even when you're writing, you have a sense, I think I'm about six pages towards the end. I'm about three pages to go. I know this is where it's got to happen and bang, that's where the ending has to come. With the novel, I feel like I've sailed out beyond the shore and I've just looked over my shoulder and realized I can't see land anymore and all I can see is open water in front of me and I really hope there's something if I keep sailing forward. You know, maybe it's that moment that, you know, Christopher Columbus or the Vikings or somebody had where they're like, well, there goes Spain, next stop India and so off you goes. And like with Columbus, I think I'm sailing to India, but if I happen to hit the Americas, I'll call it India and I'll say, I'll plant my flag and say congratulations

to me. We'll see if that happens. I've always, well, I've been curious about this for a long time, so I'm excited I might find the answer. How does the editor, guest editor get chosen and more specifically like do a lot of people turn it down? Is it a status thing? Like, I'm just really curious about that. I choose them, so that's easy. We try to, we try to pick we being me at this point, it used to be more way and it's going to become me. I try to pick someone that kind of straddles the line between commercial and critical, that has had both commercial and critical success. Status wise, did you get a bump out of it or I think this is a good question. Why did you say yes?

It wasn't for the money. Well it is, it's a tremendous honor, I mean just look at all the, we could go down through the, well we won't, but we could go down through all the people who have been guest editors of Best American Short Stories, it's a wonderful honor to be asked. It is a good list and it's coming up to its 100th anniversary, so I think that gives it some cred. I just fell up like, do you think about who was chosen before and try to get somebody, like I'm just really curious about that. For guest editors? Yeah, like do you think about, oh I need, I had this person last time, so maybe someone who has a really different perspective or do you ever think about that? I do, and some people say no, a lot of it has to do with scheduling and how much time someone wants to devote to their writing versus other projects. It's not as, it's not as well planned as, we've had this perspective, we need that, it used to be men and women, it's a little harder to do that.

I ask, I try to plan a few years out and that's about it, I kind of have a wish list. It's not, it's, it's not that exciting, I'm sorry, you admire who you love, who do I admire and who do I love? Yeah, it's in who you admire, who you love. Oh, based on what he said. How's that? Any coffee shop or library in Berkshire County, my live is a popular writing space, like again, we have four kids in the house, it's not possible, if they know Daddy's in the house, then there will be other requests to build a robot or do something else, which I would love to do, but like I said, the self-discipline thing too, factors in here, if my son's like, Daddy, build me a robot, like, okay, I'll build you a robot instead, I can stop writing for a while. I, I, I worked in offices for a long time, it's actually like to have a little bit of noise around me, it's difficult for me to write in absolute silence, which I think is maybe a little bit weird, but so if I'm in a coffee shop as long as there isn't a discussion

about like dental surgery going on next to me, I can tune things out really easily and I can work for hours at a time in that kind of a space. I have to admit, I'm a sucker for dental surgery discussions too, actually right in the waiting room of a dentist's office, no, you know, my wife and I are both writers and we have just two kids, it feels like a lot, but next to Brendan I'm like, just two, just they're little, and so we have these, you know, we have this little house, it's like a little shoe box house, and it has little upstairs built for oompa loompas, and that's, you kind of have to bend to get into the addicts basically, the addicts space, so that's, that's where we write, we each have a little office, and I do think that rather than the space that you write in physically, like everybody's got their own process, this is kind of a process question, and the only advice I always have on that is like, whatever gets your ass

into the chair and keeps it there, do that, and think about when you wrote the best thing that you wrote, a thing you're proudest of, you think, you know, really reach the deepest and think about the emotional and physical circumstances that, in which that piece was composed and try to replicate them, which sounds kind of weird and cheesy, Amy Bender said it on this panel, I was like, that's kind of new agey, but then I thought about it, and I was like, she's right, and I tried to replicate some of those circumstances, it's what led me to the dental office, and it actually was pretty effective. I have for almost all of my writing life out of necessity written in fairly noisy places back when I was first started teaching, I was stealing time, and would work, if I was in my office, my students would find me in there, and so I would work in the cafeteria, both a hamburger, turn my chair to the wall, and work for 45 minutes until my next class

came along, and it became part of my process, and I've always done that, working in coffee shops and places like that, even when the time came that I had a quiet place to work, by that time it had become part of my process, and I've worked that way until about a year ago, and it took me a long time to realize what was going on, but I've had to come to terms with it, when in fact I just kept waiting for it to go away, I've started working at home now, simply because of cell phones, cell phones, never mind dentist's office, or discussions of oral surgery, for me being in a noisy coffee shop is perfectly fine, everybody talking is perfectly fine, you put one person with a cell phone, and I am lost, I am a lost human being, and I'm discovering that everything that's worked for me for the last 25 or 30 years as a writer suddenly doesn't work anymore, and it's forced me in a way that it's been

very, very difficult, but I've had to move my workspace back into back home, and I've had to adjust all of my rituals, because I think what we're talking about here, when you say whatever gets you, whatever it is that works, and replicate that, it's ritual, and ritual is not to become too mystical about this, it's a way of calling the muse, you're looking for the way of golfer, golfer or a hitter or any in baseball, or you're always looking for repetitions, you want the unconscious part of whatever it is that you're doing to kick in, so you don't have to think about it, and so you're always looking for various ways to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, and so when you sit down you're not even thinking about it anymore, you're just already in motion, but that's for me what my repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, which worked for 25 years, suddenly I find it's not working

anymore, and so I'm having to relearn my golf swing or something I guess now, and what is to me, my own den, my own workspaces, is totally foreign to me, and not all together, I have to say not all together, pleasant, but it seems to be my only choice. I think you buy a coffee shop, and you go, I can't run my glasses, I hope this isn't one of my students. Oh yeah, I'm sure somebody scared you out of it. I steal stories from my students, swear to God, they write some great stories, but you know they have no name so they can't get published. No, it's interesting because the teacher, and I'm not actually exaggerating a little bit, but I did have a student at BC in fact named either Matt Orion because he was male, but it wasn't Matt Ryan.

It wasn't Matt Ryan, it wasn't Matt Ryan. That's a BC joke, if you went to BC or you knew about BC, you would know that all male students are named Matt Ryan or Kevin, unless mom was drunk and then it's shameless, but all right. And there's this great kid, not Matt Ryan, who turned in a story and it was a fantastic possible story. There was like a one interesting moment in it, and I kept saying to this kid, get rid of everything else, it's the one moment, you know, the daughter walks in on the father who's just found her engagement necklace or whatever, that's it, that's your moment, that's the whole thing, and Kevin or Matt said, okay, got it, chief, and came back next week with this revision which was, this scene was extended by two lines of dialogue, he nailed it. And this went on and on through the course of the term until I finally got so frustrated I just wrote the fucking story myself, because it was a great story, you know, but he wasn't ready to execute. But the teaching process, for one thing, it's a great delight to see people considerably younger than myself who have the kind of sort of crazy courage to be trying to do that

kind of work, and it makes me feel like, well I'm their teacher, I better not waste as much time as I'm constantly wasting, like I sort of keeps you honest in a basic way. But it's also, you're having to explain to them over and over again, their bad decisions compassionately with real detail because they're putting a lot of trust in you, and that in fact is how you get better as a writer. You just see other people's bad decisions and start to articulate to them why they aren't as good as they could be and how they could be made better, and that's, because you can't see your own work, you're totally blind to that, so that's been very helpful. Yeah, I think for me, one of the first class I taught was in the School of Continuing Education at the University of Virginia, and so I had students in the class, there would always be a couple of people in their 20s, but mostly people in their 30s or 40s or 50s or 60s and even a couple of students in their 70s. And it was, I don't think I have any of my current students here now, it was the best

workshop I've ever taught, these were the best writing students, and not because they're always the most talented, although some of them were quite talented. These are people who were taking three hours out of every Monday to meet and talk about stories, their own work, their kind of classmates' work, and the stories I was assigning them to read, and they had jobs, and they had mortgages, and they had kids, and they had so many reasons not to be there, and they were showing up and doing it, and there were a couple of people in the classroom still in touch with, and they were just knock out great writers who had no idea how good they were. For most of them, it was the first time they ever taken a writing class, they hadn't gone through the whole workshop process as undergrads, and they hadn't spent their whole young life doing that, and thinking a lot about themselves, they'd already been through the process of realizing that there were a lot of other people in their lives who mattered, and now they're finally taking the time to reflect on that, and write stories about all sorts of things. I had students who were army vets, who were woodworkers, who were antiques dealers, who were doctors, who were just, I mean, the whole, really ran the gamut.

And what I took away from that was just their commitment to writing was hugely inspirational to me, that mattered so much to them, and they were all, they were like me, I mean, I was working, working full time, and I was teaching this class at night, and I was carving out time to be there, because I felt like I should probably see what it's like to teach see if I like it, and I just fell in love with it, with that experience to have people who had this time to talk about work and find a language we're talking about it, and had that kind of commitment. So that's, I mean, I still think about those classes, I'm still in touch with a few of the people there, because that was, for me, a really galvanizing experience, and I, whenever I'm in class with the students at Simon's Rock, who, you know, were 16, 17, 18 years old, sometimes I want to, I want to just sort of show them that bad class every now and then and say, see how much time you have and see how much talent you have, and you see these people here, and, you know, it would be sort of a wake up call for them in some ways, like what they can do with what they have and how they should take advantage of it, but then to do that, I would sound even older than I am, because it would be like me waving my cane like you, whipper snappers, you have it so easy now, look at these people with

jobs. So I try to avoid stuff like that. I don't do that, I never make reference to popular music and stuff, because I always make a reference to a movie or something, and you'll be like, I came out in like 1995, which to them is ancient. So I avoid things that make me look like a curmudgeon. I think one of the longer you write, I think one of the great, one of the great enemies of good writing, one of the great enemies of writers who have been around for a while, and been doing it for a while, is cleverness. I think that when you teach, I always used to particularly like teaching the beginners. So there's a particular thrill in teaching, say a graduate student who is, if it's a spectrum is one to a hundred, and you catch a really talented graduate student who's at 95, and really only has to go those last five steps, and to help them go those last five steps can be exhilarating and wonderful.

But I used to like teaching the beginners in a very selfish way, because when you teach the beginners, you're talking with them about the most fundamental things, about what makes a story work, what makes it run, what makes it move, and I found that it was impossible to teach the beginners semester after semester, and explain to them why a story isn't going to work without a clearly articulated conflict, without everybody, every reader knowing what's at stake in this story, what is this character afraid of, what to poker metaphor, is this character all in, are all the chips in the center of the table here, and to ask a student, do you really know everything that you need to know about this character? Have you chosen the correct point of view? To ask a student, a beginning student, those kinds of questions, is to force you, I think to ask those same questions of yourself when you're working, and sometimes the answer

to those questions can be very revealing. It's important to ask those questions of ourselves, or to be forced through our students, sometimes to ask those questions, because as we get older, and the more stories we write, the more tricks we learn, the more clever we become, the more possible for it, for us, it is to paper over things. And you've been at it for a while, you really can polish a turd, and it will shine. But it's still a turd. And so sometimes teaching, especially teaching the beginners, will, if you are a writer who's been at it for a while, and have begun to think that because of all the tricks you've learned and everything like that, you're a better writer, sometimes being forced to ask yourself, have I clearly articulated what's at stake for this character in this story? It can be very revealing to you at a time when you, maybe that's exactly the question that

you need to be asking yourself. This is a wonderful investment for you. In the back, there's a list of all the magazines that I read, and it really is up to date. I work every year to make sure all the contact information is correct, submission is correct, if you guys can answer this just as well. I submit everywhere, that's my answer, anyone who will have me is kind of where I start from. You know, when you're just getting started, you send stuff out, and you just hope that you get somebody to say yes, you know, there are stories that I've sent out that have been published, but they've been turned down by 20, 30 different magazines, and then you get somebody that loves it, and that's what matters. You know, everybody has their dreams probably, like their dream list of the places they hope to publish someday, but when you're just getting started, you just want to get out there. But you know, I think I had some of you said, you know, you sort of start at the top and you work your way down, but everybody has a different top, and there's such a huge spread. And as much as people talk about the short story being in peril, there are a lot of great

places to publish that care so much about your stories, and that if they accept one of yours and treat you for at least until the next issue comes out, like, a prince, it's great. You know, you get proofs, and they tell you they love you, and how much they love your story, and they're so happy to be there. And that's just what you need to hear, because like Steve mentioned, it's such a solitary profession. I mean, it's you and it's the page, and something like this, I mean, I don't think I've ever published in a magazine with a circulation of more than 5,000. So when I saw the print run for this thing, I was like, holy cow, that's a lot of people reading my story. I mean, the story that's in here was in the Cincinnati Review, which is a wonderful magazine that's, I think they're in their sixth year now. Brock Clark, who's a great writer, is the fiction editor there. They do incredible work, but, you know, they're a tiny magazine, and they have to fight for attention like everywhere else. So when I got into Best American, I was thrilled partly, because it's like, you know, hooray, I'm in. But I also thought like, hooray for the Cincinnati Review, because now more people will, I hope, read the Cincinnati Review, and see what incredible, incredible work they do. And over time, you, I mean, you have to read the journals, you can't, it's kind of disingenuous,

it's dishonest, it's probably immoral, to submit to places and never buy a literary magazine yourself. This is the thing I got on my students all the time about, because they'll ask, well, where should I submit? And I'll say, well, where do you, what magazines do you read? Like, well, I don't read new literary magazines. Like then, don't submit your stories to any literary magazines. You, you, you find when you read them over and over, the places have a feeling, a kind of tape. When I wrote this story, I, this was for a long time, my Cincinnati Review story, because since the Cincinnati Review loves kind of voice-driven stories, you know, first person voice, you really get into it. And I thought for a while, like, this is going to be the one that Brock's going to like, because I've been at him for a while with other stories. And I knew, I knew we'd like it because he not liked other things I'd written. So when he said, yes, I felt like that was honest. But you, you know, you read these, you read these magazines and you realize Rick mentioned, you know, the New Yorker story, not just in the layout, but from the feel you kind of know that it's a New Yorker story. The more you read other magazines, you get a feeling for what, you know, maybe what a tin house story or a Paris Review story or Cincinnati Review story, a Southern Review story is.

And you kind of can target your stories better in that way, not that you want to give them what they always publish, but you kind of get a sense of the writer's aesthetic. I mean, one other shortcut, sorry, but I would say, you know, decide which writers you have an affinity for, you maybe have some similarities with, see where they've published. But first go out and read some magazines, follow your advice first. I think that is it. Thank you so much for coming tonight. Heather, do you want to say anything else?