Family dynamics can be such a complicated universe. Having three brothers, I found it only natural to make sibling rivalry and competition a main component of “Staircase to the Moon.” I chose estranged twin sisters for a dark twist. The twins are of Japanese descent to connect them to the immigrant Japanese who brought pearl diving to Australia. Writing about the tensions between the family members gave me the opportunity to explore jealousy, resentment, forgiveness, and reparation without having to interact with any of my own family. Great fun.
And last, pearls and Japan? I was born in Japan and have always coveted my mother’s strand of cultured pearls she bought in 1955.
Lee Martin is the author of the novels The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, River of Heaven, Quakertown, and Break the Skin. He has also published three memoirs, From Our House, Turning Bones, and Such a Life. His first book was the short story collection The Least You Need to Know. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. He teaches in the MFA Program at Ohio State University, where he is a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and a past winner of the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.
• “A Man Looking for Trouble” began, as my stories sometimes do, with a narrator’s voice that I heard one day while I was out for my morning run. I remember hearing the line “My uncle was a man named Bill Jordan.” Immediately I wondered who was speaking and why his uncle’s presence made it urgent that he tell this story. I often write from a point of curiosity. I try to complicate that curiosity while moving the story forward but never quite answering all the questions that are there to be answered. In that way, I’m like the reader with anticipations and expectations and a reason to keep moving forward. When I got home from my run, I wrote the sentence “My uncle was a man named Bill Jordan, and in 1972, when I was sixteen, he came home from Vietnam, rented a small box house on the corner of South and Christy, and went to work on a section gang with the B & O Railroad.” Later, after the story’s interests had announced themselves to me in the first draft, I added the second sentence, about the narrator’s mother’s romance with Harold Timms, and just like that I had two threads to follow. By this point I also knew why this story mattered so much to my narrator. I wanted to place the innocence of his love for Connie alongside the ugliness of the adults’ lives. At the end of the story, my narrator knows that he and Connie are now helpless in a world run by the adults. “A Man Looking for Trouble” is a story about what ruins us. Above all, it’s a story about those moments when love might save us if only we’d let it.
James Mathews grew up in El Paso, Texas, and now lives in Maryland. He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Masters in Arts Program. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Painted Bride Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Florida Review, Northwest Review, The Wisconsin Review, The South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, and many more. His short story collection, Last Known Position, received the 2008 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. He is also a retired air force chief master sergeant who has served overseas numerous times, including two tours in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (in 2003 and 2006). He is currently at work on a novel.
• As an Iraq war veteran who has depended on the “band of brothers” mentality during hazardous deployments, I have always been intrigued by that rare breed of serviceman who willingly rejects the bonding process and instead isolates himself from comrades. It struck me as a defense mechanism, albeit one that was starkly counterintuitive. “Many Dogs Have Died Here” is my attempt — with a dash of mystery and absurdism — to better understand the self-exiled warrior in a postwar setting who must ultimately account for his isolation and face the grief and loss from which there is no hiding.
Thomas McGuane lives in McLeod, Montana. He is the author of numerous novels and short story and essay collections, including Ninety-Two in the Shade, Driving on the Rim, Gallatin Canyon, and Crow Fair: Stories. His stories and essays have been collected in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and The Best American Sports Writing. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
• “Motherlode” is a story that suggested itself out of my preoccupation with life in the American West and its collision with the energy industry, often an enemy of the earth with the capacity to generate, besides money, its own publicity and access to government. These are of course generalizations, but I know intimately people like this vulnerable protagonist, and I have seen much of the deterioration of civic life at the behest of oil and its broadly corruptible allies.
Kyle Minor is the author of Praying Drunk, winner of the 2015 Story Prize Spotlight Award.
• Alice Munro said it better than I can say it:
“Two mysteries, really: Why do they do it? And how do they live with it?”
Joyce Carol Oates is the author of many novels of mystery and suspense, including most recently Ace of Spades, Daddy Love, The Accursed, and Mudwoman, as well as collections of stories, including Give Me Your Heart, The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, and Black Dahlia & White Rose. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was the 2011 recipient of the President’s Medal in the Humanities. “So Near Anytime Always” will be included in Evil Eye: Four Tales of Love Gone Wrong.
• “The Home at Craigmillnar” was written during a very anxious time in my life, about which I can say only that I survived it!
During this enforced time in Edinburgh at the hospital bedside of my husband, stricken with pneumonia, I had the occasion to read of a breaking scandal involving a Catholic-run orphanage that was truly horrendous — dating back decades and involving generations of abused children. The nuns were as atrocious in life — or more so — as in my story. I found the material extremely upsetting, especially as there seemed to be little remorse among the surviving abusers.
The story of the American-set “Home at Craigmillnar” was my way of converting a personal crisis into something larger and I hope more valuable. It is still very hard for me to reread the story and recall those circumstances spent in a Scottish hospital, though — fortunately! — my husband, Charlie, recovered and we returned home a week after we had planned.
Eric Rutter’s first short story appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 2007. Since then he has contributed half a dozen more stories to that magazine, including one that was nominated for a Barry Award. He is a lifelong resident of southeast Pennsylvania.
• My taste in mystery stories has changed over the years. In the beginning I preferred what I think of as the traditional kind, stories of deduction where clues are gathered and a puzzle solved. These days character interests me at least as much as plot. I find the drama more powerful in a story that arises from some personal conflict — someone facing, and then making, a difficult choice. “The Shot” is a good example of this kind of story. The protagonist finds himself in a tough spot, and as the story progresses, the walls close in on him steadily, relentlessly. But he finds his way out.