• I’ve always been attracted to, and at the same lime appalled by, true crime books and television shows — a conflict I let Patricia and Larry argue for me in “All Through the House.” A couple of years ago I read two books that affected me particularly. The first — which has left my possession, and whose title I can’t recall — was a biography of Charles Whitman, the University of Texas sniper. Whitman killed his wife and mother the night before his shooting spree, and the book included photos of these murder scenes with the bodies entirely blacked out — an odd touch that disturbed me more deeply than other books’ lurid gore. Not long afterward I read a book called Shadowed Ground, by Kenneth E. Foote (a professor at UT; his book examines Whitman too), which is about the ways people either memorialize or erase the sites of murders and tragedies. From it I learned that the vacant farmhouse of serial killer Ed Gein had become, after his arrest, a twisted kind of tourist attraction, and that it was destroyed by an anonymous arsonist just before it was to be sold at auction. The idea of telling a story that melded both image and vignette — a story that was at once the history of a place and of the people who had been deleted from it — seemed pretty potent to me. I knew from the start I wanted to move backward; the metaphor I used for this process, which I realize is not 100 percent accurate, was that of an archaeological excavation. If I kept digging in the same place, what would I find?
I finished a draft of the story during my first year at Ohio State, and I was sure it was an incomprehensible failure. But Lee K. Abbott, who is (don t tell anyone) not quite the curmudgeon he claims to be, explained its worth to me during his workshop. Then he spent months badgering me to finish my revisions and submit the story to journals. Finally he grabbed it out of my hands and gave it to the good people at the Gettysburg Review himself. That a writer of his caliber could champion any work of mine continues to awe me... so my deepest thanks, Lee, yet again.
Patrick Michael Finn was born in Joliet, Illinois, in 1973, and was raised there and in rural southern California. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of California, Riverside, and completed his M.F.A. at the University of Arizona, where he was a Dean Charles Tatum Teaching Fellow. A winner of many fiction prizes, including the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Award and the 2004 Third Coast Fiction Award, his stories have appeared in Quarterly West, Ploughshares, the Richmond Review, and Third Coast.
I wrote “Where Beautiful Ladies Dance for You” during my last semester of graduate school, when I was studying with Elizabeth Evans and Jonathan Penner, two terrific writing teachers who cultivated my imagination and productivity. The story began with only a vague sense of Ray Dwyer. I pictured a big Joliet guy who worked in the quarries, but I didn’t really know what to do with him, which obviously meant I didn’t know what to do with the story. And then one night while I was pacing and biting my nails, I remembered a young man I went to high school with — I hadn’t thought of him for years — who was the son of Greek immigrants who owned a restaurant in nearby Tinley Park. His father actually had hired a belly dancer once or twice to entertain the customers: the city told him to stop, and that was the end of it. At the high school, we joked with his son about it. “Hey, Sam,” we’d say. “How are your dad’s belly dancers?” Anyway, once my memory dug up that information. I knew exactly where Ray Dwyer belonged. Thank you, Susan Straight, for believing that my story belonged somewhere as well.
Rob Kantner (www.RobKantner.com) has published, in addition to nine mystery novels featuring ex-union enforcer Ben Perkina, some four dozen short stories and novellas in the realms of crime, suspense, and the supernatural (and, in a single instance, romance), plus three nonfiction books and many articles and essays. He lives with his wife, Deanna, on their rural Michigan farm.
• As a writer I’ve always loved to tinker with point of view. As a person I’m intrigued by the idea that seemingly random events may be, unbeknownst to the participants, linked in a domino-game chain of cause and effect. In a sense, “Wendy” is a merger of these interests. The point of view is handed off like a baton from one mini-protagonist to the next, and the story is really a chain of vignettes depicting busy, messy lives linking for brief moments in a dance of cause and effect, ending with a positive outcome for the title character, whom we never really meet. I began it as an experiment and finished it because it refused to let me go. It was fun to write, and also about drove me nuts.
Jonathon King was horn in Lansing, Michigan. His first novel, The Blue Edge of Midnight, introduced P. I. Max Freeman and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author in 2002. He has been a street reporter for newspapers since 1980 and has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists (the Green Eyeshade award), the National Association of Black Journalists, and the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors. His third Max Freeman novel. Shadow Men, was published this year. He has lived in Florida for the past twenty years and continues to work as a senior writer for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
I’d been spinning the storyline of “Snake Eyes” since 1999 when I wrote a series for my newspaper on the last one hundred years of South Florida. The foundations are historical. Men were hired in the 1920s to clear diamondback rattlesnakes from the scrubland where Hialeah Race Track was eventually built. Colonel E. R. Bradley ran an illegal casino for the rich and famous visitors to the City of Palm Beach for forty-eight years, starting in early 1898, and bragged that he had never been robbed. When a friend of mine first read the story, he commented that he thought it well written “but the hero is a thief!” To which I replied: “Yes?”
Stephen King was born in Portland. Maine, and raised in Durham, a no-stoplight town twenty miles north of that city. He graduated cum laude from the University of Maine (known by some New England wits as the University of Cow) in 1970. He’s written a lot of novels and short stories since then. Some aren’t too bad, and a couple really kick ass.
• One night in early 2003, I woke from a terrible nightmare. In it, my wife and I were in our kitchen and I was making our breakfast while she read the newspaper. The telephone rang. She answered it, then held it out and said, “It’s for you.” But I didn’t want to answer it, because I knew — positively knew, the way you sometimes do in dreams — that someone wanted to tell me one of our children was dead. I went directly from my bed to the word processor and wrote “Harvey’s Dream” at a single go. All I really needed to do to make it work was to subtract the love that still powers the marriage I share with my wife, and change the point of view from the man to the woman. There’s no explaining why these things work: you just know they will, and you do them.
Michael Knight is the author of a novel, Divining Rod, and two collections of short fiction, Dogfight and Other Stories and Goodnight, Nobody. His stories have appeared, among other places, in Esquire, The New Yorker, StoryQuarterly, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee.