Peter Moore Smith was born in Panama and has lived in Nebraska, Alaska, North Carolina, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and West Germany. Currently his home is Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, Brigette, a graphic designer. His short fiction has appeared in a number of literary publications, and his story “Oblivion, Nebraska” was selected for the Pushcart Prize 2000 volume. His first novel, Raveling, is forthcoming.
• There is something about the image of a little girl splashing around in one of those backyard swimming pools and the play of light across the surface of the water that is to me central to my American childhood. I can practically taste the chlorine. There is also something about the idea of losing a sister that I find deeply disturbing. I have two. Losing either one of them would be the worst thing in the world and, to my twisted writer’s imagination, well worth writing about.
Brad Watson’s collection of stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. He was born in Mississippi, was educated there and in Alabama, worked as a newspaper reporter among other things, and taught at the University of Alabama. He currently is Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction and director of the creative writing program at Harvard University.
• “Water Dog God” began as a major revision of another story, then became its own thing. I first thought of it, though, as a failed revision of the other story, “A Blessing,” and put it away in a drawer. Only after Dog-Men had come out did I rediscover it and realize it had possibilities. I revised it every six months or so for the next couple of years, and revised it more than once for Marc Smirnoff at the Oxford American. It went from very weird to nicely strange. Or at least that’s my view. In “A Blessing,” a couple expecting a child drive out to get a new dog from the owner of this place on the lake. The couple became, after a fashion, the girl Maeve, and the dog owner became a very different person from the one he was in “A Blessing.” The original story was in the third person, from the point of view of the pregnant woman. As far as I can tell, the only things the two stories still share are the setting and the sense of nascent — later delivered — violence about this place. The sorts of things the pregnant woman fears in “A Blessing” are realized in “Water Dog God.” Sort of.