Karen McGee grew up in Berkeley, California, but has spent the past few decades in Tokyo, where she teaches at Nihon University College of Art. She is the co-organizer of the Tokyo Writers Workshop. Her stories have recently appeared in Bête Noire, The Font, HiddenChapter, Twisted Vine, and 9Crimes, and she is currently working on a novel. She is an avid reader of mysteries and a big fan of Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers.
• I was inspired to write “Dot Rat” after watching The Drop and then tracking down and reading the source material for the film, Dennis Lehane’s brilliant short story “Animal Rescue.” I have never been to Dorchester, but I was attracted to the setting as a town with a tough reputation, a place that might be home to an old-school organized crime head. I was also interested in creating a character that appears vulnerable but is actually dangerous. As with much of my work, I subjected a draft of the story to my monthly workshop. At that time it was titled “Fence” (for lack of a better idea). The title inspired much confusion and several fascinating theories. As usual, the group was also a big help.
Joyce Carol Oates is the author most recently of the novel A Book of American Martyrs and the story collection The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. Recently inducted into the American Philosophical Society, she teaches alternately at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. A new poem of hers will appear in The Best American Poetry 2017.
• “The Woman in the Window” was first imagined as a dramatic monologue giving voice to Edward Hopper’s mysterious woman in the window (Eleven A.M., 1926). The young woman in the painting is sensuous, pale-skinned, lost in thought. My evocation of her was originally in the form of a poem of long slow meditated lines that replicate the thought-patterns of one contemplating her future (suggested by the window in front of her, through which the viewer can’t easily see) as well as her past.
In transforming the poetic monologue into prose, I opened up the story considerably, providing the young woman with a revealing backstory and also with a lover, a married man who has paid for her apartment and is locked into an intense emotional relationship with her, which, we are allowed to see, will not come to a happy ending.
Steven Popkes’s work is found largely in the science fiction and fantasy world. His first sale was in 1982 to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Since then he has published three novels: Caliban Landing, Slow Lightning, and Welcome to Witchlandia. He is better known for his short fiction. Since 1982 he has published about forty stories. In 1988 his story “The Color Winter” was nominated for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Award. Since then he’s been collected in several year’s best science fiction and year’s best fantasy anthologies. His novellas, Jackie’s Boy and Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected, placed second in the 2011 and 2013 Asimov’s Readers’ Award Polls. He lives with his wife in a Boston suburb, where he raises turtles and bananas.
• There are a couple of sources for this story. One is very personal. I was born in Southern California and lived there until we moved to Alabama in 1964. My parents both loved horse racing. I have many memories as a child hanging out with them in the stands watching magnificent animals run their hearts out for us. I remember my parents shoving me forward to shake hands with someone they said was Willie Shoemaker. I was probably around seven.
Another is more writerly. A number of years ago I wrote a novella entitled Mister Peck Goes Calling. This involved Cthulhu and the Boston Irish gang wars before Whitey Bulger got involved. It provided the character that ended up in “The Sweet Warm Earth.” I live in the Boston area now. After being here for over thirty years, it’s not hard to imagine an Irish mobster falling in love with California.
William R. Soldan received his BA in English literature from Youngstown State University and studied creative writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program, where his focus was fiction. He teaches Writing at YSU and is a board member of Lit Youngstown, a nonprofit organization focused on facilitating and nurturing the literary arts. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of publications, such as New World Writing, Thuglit, The Vignette Review, Kentucky Review, Jellyfish Review, Elm Leaves Journal, and others. He currently lives in Youngstown, Ohio, with his wife and two children.
• Stories often first present themselves to me in the form of an image or an ending. Or an ending image. But in the case of “All Things Come Around” it began with a situation and grew from there. My wife and I had decided to stop at Popeyes for some food on our way home one night — the same Popeyes in the story. Our son was about a year old then, and he was teething and miserable in his car seat, screaming and crying something fierce. So this element of the story — a fast-food chicken joint and a shrieking child in pain — was drawn straight from real life. As for the rest of the story, let’s just say it could have happened, or something close to it.
In my twenties I lived a reckless life and kept company with some rough individuals, some of whom did their dealings in the neighborhood my family and I found ourselves in that night. Some of whom still do, for all I know. As is the case anytime I find myself in a place where I used to run around during the darker days of my youth, I began to imagine what might happen if I crossed paths with someone from back then, back before kids and marriage and making other positive changes in my trajectory. That was when the idea began to take shape, while still sitting in the drive-through, waiting for my chicken. I must have had a faraway expression on my face, because my wife looked at me and said, “You’re writing a story, aren’t you?” She knows me well. Now, rarely does a story come into view fully formed, this one being no exception. However, the scenario and the players for this one came in a flash, and the rest was really a matter of organizing the content.
I originally started at the end, with Travis lying on the cold concrete with a bullet in his chest (I drew some inspiration for the scene from Tobias Wolff’s story “Bullet in the Brain,” in which he does some wonderful things with time and perspective). As Travis lay there, the events of the evening leading up to his being shot swirled through his mind, during which time the story slipped into flashback and came around full circle, ending where it began, more or less. I soon scrapped that idea, though, deciding it was better told in a linear fashion. Evidently my instinct was right, because Todd Robinson over at Thuglit, who had previously published another one of my stories, “The Long Drive Home,” loved it and included it in his journal’s farewell issue, Thuglit: Last Writes. I owe Todd a huge debt of gratitude for that. Now more than ever.
Peter Straub is the author of seventeen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. He has written two volumes of poetry and four collections of short fiction, and he edited the Library of America’s edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales and its two-volume anthology American Fantastic Tales. He has won the British Fantasy Award, ten Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and four World Fantasy Awards. In 2008 he was given the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award by Poets & Writers. He has won several lifetime achievement awards. His most recent publication is Interior Darkness (2016), a collection of selected stories.