The stories in Laura van den Berg’s rich and inventive debut, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, illuminate the intersection of the mythic and the mundane.

A failed actress takes a job as a Bigfoot impersonator. A botanist seeking a rare flower crosses paths with a group of men hunting the Loch Ness Monster. A disillusioned missionary in Africa grapples with grief and a growing obsession with a creature rumored to live in the forests of the Congo. And in the title story, a young woman traveling with her scientist mother in Madagascar confronts her burgeoning sexuality and her dream of becoming a long-distance swimmer.Rendered with precision and longing, the women who narrate these starkly beautiful stories are consumed with searching for absolution, for solace, for the flash of extraordinary in the ordinary that will forever alter their lives.

Barnes & Noble recently selected What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us as a holiday season pick for their Discover Great New Writers Program.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her MFA at Emerson College. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the 2009 Julia Peterkin Award, and the 2009-2010 Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College. Formerly an assistant editor at Ploughshares, Laura is currently a fiction editor at West Branch and the assistant editor of Memorious, an online journal of new verse and fiction. She has taught writing at Emerson College, Grub Street, and in PEN/New England’s Freedom to Write Program. Her fiction has or will soon appear in One Story, Boston Review, Epoch, The Literary Review, American Short Fiction, StoryQuarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV: Best of the Small Presses, among other publications. She is currently at work on new stories and a novel.

ABOUT THE BOOK
“”In her affecting debut collection, van den Berg taps into her characters’ losses with an impressive clarity. Each of these stories is meticulously crafted, and often the protagonist is recovering emotionally from a staggering life’s blow. In ‘Goodbye My Loveds,’ two siblings are reeling from the death of their parents, scientists fatally snake-bitten in the Amazon; a sister leaves college to take care of her 12-year-old brother and recognizes the need to suppress her own needs in order to help her brother face their new lives. In the beautifully elegiac ‘Where We Must Be,’ a failed actress gives up on L.A. and finds work as Bigfoot in a theme park; her love affair with a young neighbor dying of cancer underscores the preciousness of time’s passing. In the title story, a young woman learns to face her fears while spending time with her scientist mother observing endangered lemurs in Madagascar. These tales are the work of a notable author finding her voice.”
—Publishers Weekly

“These characters lose themselves, intentionally and otherwise, but they’ve got the courage to go about finding themselves, or changed versions of themselves, in the elegant process of drowning, cleansing, and rebirth.”
— The Believer

“In her debut collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, Laura van den Berg finds the tension between science and magic and walks it like a tightrope. These stories find the common ground between myth and the human condition, exploring the inner lives of men and women who cross paths with the Loch Ness monster, or Bigfoot, or lemurs in Madagascar whose screams can turn a heart into stone. It is a fantastic and fascinating world, full of discoveries and moments of wonder, a book meant for the explorer in all of us. Any reader will be glad to have found it.”
— Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

“What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us is a lovely, remarkable book, full of people who strive mightily to believe in things ”Bigfoot, the Lochness and Lake Michigan monsters, a tunnel leading to the other side of the world, husbands, wives, lovers, parents” they shouldn’t. But Laura van den Berg lets her characters believe, and believes in them, and makes us believe, and care, too. Calm, wry, and compassionate, somehow all at once, this book is impossible to resist, and I’d bet big money that we’ll be talking about Laura van den Berg and her fiction for years to come.”
— Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

WHERE TO BUY
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Powell’s [buy new, even if used is available]
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Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness. Ten superb new stories by one of our most beloved and admired writers—the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize.

In the first story a young wife and mother receives release from the unbearable pain of losing her three children from a most surprising source. In another, a young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other stories uncover the “deep-holes” in a marriage, the unsuspected cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story, we accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian émigré and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera, where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and Denmark, where she has a fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician.

With clarity and ease, Alice Munro once again renders complex, difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their lives.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven collections of stories and two volumes of selected stories, as well as a novel. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award, the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.

ABOUT THE BOOK
“Munro’s latest collection is satisfyingly true to form and demonstrates why she continues to garner laurels (such as this year’s Man Booker International Prize). Through carefully crafted situations, Munro breathes arresting life into her characters, their relationships and their traumas. In ‘Wenlock Edge,’ a college student in London, Ontario, acquires a curious roommate in Nina, who tricks the narrator into a revealing dinner date with Nina’s paramour, the significantly older Mr. Purvis. ‘Child’s Play,’ a dark story about children’s capacity for cruelty and the longevity of their secrets, introduces two summer camp friends, Marlene and Charlene, who form a pact against the slightly disturbing Verna, whose family used to share Marlene’s duplex. The title, and final, story, the collection’s longest and most ambitious, takes the reader to 19th-century Europe to meet Sophia Kovalevski, a talented mathematician and novelist who grapples with the politics of the age and the consequences of success. While this story lacks some of the effortlessness found in Munro’s finest work, the collection delivers what she’s renowned for: poignancy, flesh and blood characters and a style nothing short of elegant.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

WHERE TO BUY
Your local independent bookstore
Powell’s [buy new, even if used is available]
Amazon.com
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You worked for many years as a journalist. How did that experience prepare you to write fiction? Did it, in some part, influence your decision to use the third person, as well as the present tense, in these stories?
Reporters learn to hunt details. I remember Rick Bragg’s New York Times profile citing the verse to which an old woman’s Bible fell open after a lifetime of hard use. In stories you just take it deeper, reporting from the imagination and the subconscious, not only from life.

But when I began writing fiction, 15 years of journalism lessons were useless until I understood what fiction is, what it does. Madeleine L’Engle said in a workshop that nonfiction is about things that are true, but fiction is about truth. Jim Krusoe, an L.A. novelist, teaches about enabling details: the one or two unexpected things you give a character or a room that allow a reader to fill in all the rest. Now all that training runs together—when I give Bonita Prideau all-black furniture in Normal People Don’t Live Like This, it’s because Bonita would only have black furniture, not just because I covered interior design for the Chicago Tribune and find black furniture intriguing.

Any decisions about third person or structure, or revealing and withholding information, are purely in the service of fiction.

Your collection was a finalist for the AWP prize for short fiction. Did you enter a lot of contests before finding your agent, Joy Harris? Or did she encourage you to enter the contests?
Joy is a true defender of the faith. She took me on originally for a novel manuscript that’s also about Leah Levinson, the hyper-observant, science-obsessed girl from Normal People. Joy’s agency sent out most of these stories individually before I had a collection, and those she couldn’t place, I entered in contests on my own. Sometimes they won. Then she sent out the collection. After a couple of impassioned rounds she said: Let me put it aside and sell it with your next novel.

But I was turning fifty; I was starving for this book. I asked her blessing to try a few small presses and contests on my own. Joy suggested the Drue Heinz contest. I added AWP’s Grace Paley competition, and submitted directly to Persea Books. Joy never stopped representing the book.

This fall you’re making many appearances in bookstores and other venues to promote Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Do you enjoy this part of the process? Some authors just want to crawl back in their caves.
There’s a cave?

I love this book, I love the troubled girls and their struggling mothers in this book, I want to give them voice. I’ve been rasping since September, but my Q&A’s go on so long the bookstores have to stop them. This is the second most fun I’ve ever had, where writing is concerned. The first most fun is when the writing itself is working.

Some authors stay in the cave because they’re so artistically focused. Or maybe their work sells itself. I’m in awe.

But some writers are in the cave because of a huge misunderstanding: They think their publishers will handle everything, an impossibility in this economy, or that publicity starts when the book comes out. Yikes, no. Publicity starts five or six months in advance, and a writer without a name needs to kickstart it herself. I chose to do readings, because that’s my strength. And I chose to relish it. If I could type more—it hurts my hands—I’d be writing essays and guest-blogging a lot more.

Finally, don’t you think some writers stay in the cave from stagefright? I know many of us struggle with that.

Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but what are you working on now?
A novel about an Irish cook in 1907 New York who was told she was spreading typhoid. When she refused to believe it, the city locked her in quarantine and the press called her Typhoid Mary. But Mary Mallon, who was only responsible for three deaths, has her own story to tell, some factual and some that I’m channeling. I spend a lot of time now in the early 20th century, writing about food and sex and disease and dogs—Mary loved dogs—and relishing that too.

How the Indians Bury Their Dead is your first story collection in a number of years. Were the stories written during that long span of time, or did they emerge more recently?
The stories were written over the last decade; however, the story “Chekhov’s Gun” is the most recent story and I had intended that it be the cornerstone of the collection—even the name of the collection. It came from my complete disgust with our country’s behavior in the Middle East, Iraq, and what I consider to be the moral degeneration of our principles and history. However, the people at SMU did not agree with my choice for a collection title and chose the present one.

You’re also the author of several books of nonfiction, including Last Stands: Notes from Memory, a memoir. How do you articulate the difference between nonfiction and fiction? And do you still think of yourself as a fiction writer who writes nonfiction, or are the genres now equal in your eyes?
I think of myself as a novelist and essayist, the inquiring, self-questioning form of essay invented by Montaigne. Of course, each of the two genres follow different rules; however, the motivations and procedures followed in the literary essay are similar to the devices to be found in the novel. My sort of novel, anyway. What I do know about a subject, to rephrase Montaigne’s original question, is also the incitement experienced by the protagonist that launches him into the narrative.

What is the biggest challenge literary writers must face today, compared to when you first started publishing stories, poems, and essays?
My first novel was published in 1967, and it was a radically different community. Writers were respected by their editors and their publishing houses. Today we must deal with bookkeepers who are called editors. The shift in publishing in the 70’s to the all holy profit line has created, I think, the production of sensationalism and the “hit” syndrome. So, the challenge is to find a safe haven where one’s work is respected and encouraged and allowed to mature. These venues do exist, and at the moment some of the university presses meet the criteria.

What single piece of advice would you give to the young writer just now beginning the journey?
Above all and despite all—keep working.

Note: This is an excerpt from my interview with Patricia Henley, which first appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle and was later excerpted in the two-volume The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction.

You’ve published books of poems and stories, and two novels. How has each genre helped your development as a writer?
I started out writing poetry. I always say, half-kidding, that I wrote poems first because I couldn’t sit still long enough to write fiction. That lasted until my late twenties when an illness required sitting still. I began a novel then, about life in a back-to-the-land community. I had lived in one—Tolstoy Anarchist Peace Farm in eastern Washington—in the mid-seventies. But I had no idea of structure. I was just writing. That material turned into the first stories, the stories published by Graywolf Press, Friday Night at Silver Star. I enjoyed writing stories and admired and learned from Alice Munro and Andre Dubus and William Trevor and Richard Ford. Writing stories felt like something I could do combined with the hard jobs I held back then. Still, my work was sometimes called “quiet.” I took that to mean that not much happened.

I loved reading novels as a child. But I did not think writing one was possible for me. I saw myself as a short story writer who managed to incorporate poetic imagery in my work. I used the few poems I wrote as a way of seeing images and distilling what was really important to me at any given time. I went to Guatemala in 1989, casting about for some story ideas, partly. And I had followed the repression of the eighties and wanted to see for myself what had happened there. I was there about a week when a doctor told me the story of Father Stan Rother, who had been killed during the 1980s. The Mayan villagers he served asked his family if they could have his heart to bury near the church where he had been the pastor. This story electrified me. I knew right at that moment that I needed to write about Guatemala and that it was a bigger story, a story that needed to be a novel. I had no idea what I’d taken on.

That’s right—Hummingbird House, from the seed of an idea to publication, took ten years. What did you learn about fiction writing, about yourself as a writer, during that decade?
Writing Hummingbird House changed my life. Or perhaps, since it took so long to write, my life inevitably changed and was influenced by the writing process. I didn’t know a thing about writing a novel when I began. I threw out the first 200 pages—the voice wasn’t right and those first 200 pages were in first person. I don’t think I really knew, for sure, what I wanted to write about. Each new phase of researching would teach me that there was yet another layer required. Often that meant starting over or nearly starting over. I found out what it feels like to be obsessed with a project. I like that feeling.

I developed a profound respect for the men and women of the Catholic Church who have aligned their lives with the poor of Latin America. That led me back to the church—I’d been raised Catholic but had left the church at the age of nineteen in favor of a more bohemian lifestyle and an eclectic spiritual search that included LSD and living in the back-to-the-land community. While working on Hummingbird House, I dropped in to the local Newman Center across from Purdue’s campus and I just kept going back. Whatever its faults and warts—the church is a good venue for peace and justice work.

Another thing I learned while writing Hummingbird House—I’m capable of writing for long hours. Coming down the homestretch, while on sabbatical in New Mexico, I was able to write for six to ten hours a day, go out for a long walk, sleep, and get up and do it again the next day. The most difficult period—except for being nervous sometimes in Guatemala—happened during the two years between finishing the book and having it accepted. It was pretty much rejected everywhere in New York. I felt like a fraud as a teacher. I was wounded and grieved over what I thought of as the book’s failure. I felt fairly certain I wouldn’t write another novel since that one had taken so much out of me. MacMurray & Beck accepted the manuscript two years after I’d finished it. Their belief in the book and its subsequent success charged me up to write another novel. I like solving the problems inherent in writing novels.

An impressive overview of a writer whose career is still climbing, Worship of the Common Heart allows us a rare opportunity to observe twenty years in the evolution of Patricia Henley, a writer of uncommon talent and heart. Emotionally complex, achingly real, these nineteen stories focus on the everyday, defining moments of life, celebrating the unsung and calling attention to the ignored. A young woman comes to an absolute and sad realization about her relationship at the very moment she gives birth. A woman enamored of younger men stumbles upon joy in the most unlikely place. A young nun takes a vacation with her earthy, unpredictable sister and learns a lesson in worship. Told with stunning confidence and honesty, the stories in Worship of the Common Heart revel in sensuality and the complexity of longings.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patricia Henley’s first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and The New Yorker Best Fiction Book Award. Henley has also written two books of poetry, Learning to Die and Back Roads, and two other story collections: Friday Night at Silver Star, which won the 1985 Montana Arts Council First Book Award, and The Secret of Cartwheels. Her stories have been published in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and The Missouri Review, and anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Henley lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, where she teaches in the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at Purdue University.

ABOUT THE BOOK
“[Henley's] stories turn on the strength of her elegant, homespun prose, rich with stunning images and quick wisdom…”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Post-hippie attitudes — disdain for conventional mores, a preference for relationships with like-minded free spirits and an appreciation of nature –inform this impressive third story collection by Henley. Set across the U.S. wherever loose communities of family and friends settle down, from hardscrabble rural Indiana to the Pacific Northwest, the 19 stories capture defining moments in otherwise ordinary lives. “The Secret of Cartwheels” is one of two tales about a large Catholic family, no doubt inspired by Henley’s own experience as the eldest of eight children. At age 13, narrator Roxanne and two of her younger sisters are sent off to a children’s home because their mother, an alcoholic, can’t cope with her many offspring. Roxanne, plagued by her inability to turn cartwheels and her habit of wetting the bed, dreams despite herself of the life she used to know. In “Cargo,” Roxanne reappears as an adult, settled in Montana. Her sister has called to say their mother is dying and the family is gathering. In attempting to decide whether she’ll go home, Roxie acknowledges that she’s left many places hoping for a new beginning, forgetting every time “that the things you hate the most are the things that travel with you.” Many of Henley’s characters live transient lives, work at menial jobs — mechanic, fruit picker, waitress — identify with the lyrics of country music and look to dope, booze and casual sex as palliatives. They recognize their weaknesses, but they don’t give up the game. The author’s sense of humor shines often. In “Slinkers,” Joanne, whose “laughter always made you feel good” is an “intuitive shopper” who proclaims, “If you find a pair of jeans that really fit, buy two pair.” These stories, by a marvelous writer who speaks from both the heart and the head, are as comfortable as well-worn denim.”
—Publishers Weekly

WHERE TO BUY
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The fourteen stories in Hilary Masters’s third collection, How the Indians Bury Their Dead, are set in New England, upstate New York, and various European locales. They range from a late-blooming romance between two shoeshine booth operators to uninvited mourners crashing the funerals of people they don’t know, from a felon-turned-chef watching his son sample his savory meatloaf to a dual tale involving two unlikely murders.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hilary Masters is the author of nine novels, two other story collections, a memoir, a collection of personal essays, and a book-length essay on a Mexican mural. He is the recipient of an American Academy of the Arts and Letters Award for Literature, the Balch Prize for Fiction, and the Monroe Spears Prize (for his essays). His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is professor of English and creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

ABOUT THE BOOK
““Hilary Masters investigates relationships with such delicacy, he’s like the hummingbird of short story writers. I couldn’t put the book down. The story ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ is amazing. Masters’s many admirers have reason to celebrate the publication of this book; new readers will be fascinated.”
—Ann Beattie, author of Park City

“This brilliant new collection of stories by Hilary Masters is masterful. Always wise and tender, the stories’ beginnings embrace, their middles bewitch, and their endings trump our expectations. Throughout, a companionable intimacy holds our attention. Here is a book with no boring parts!”
—Kelly Cherry, author of We Can Still Be Friends

“I liked watching these stories peel away, layer by layer, the secrets and tensions that exist between parent and child, friend and lover, present and past. Masters has a keen sense of how to recapture the nuances of memory, via language or image, and while each story delivers its insights with satisfying force, some of them seem to me alarmingly wise.”
—Robley Wilson, author of The World Still Melting

WHERE TO BUY
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Normal People Don’t Live Like This, the fiction debut by Dylan Landis, piercingly yet tenderly portrays the inner lives of a girl and her mother in New York City in the 1970s.

In ten discrete installments, written from a variety of perspectives, we follow the uneasy yet magnetic relationships between Leah Levinson, a guarded teenager, and the delinquent girls she worships. Leah and her artistic mother, Helen, struggle against the confines of their pasts and personalities, unaware of how similar their paths are as they make repeated, touching attempts to break free. Just when they seem to have reached an impasse, each makes an impulsive change of place: Leah takes a trip abroad with an endearing young man, and Helen rents, and fantastically ornaments, a secret room in a welfare hotel. Jolted from the patterns of their old existence, daughter and mother independently glimpse the possibility of a different, more vibrant life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dylan Landis has published fiction in Bomb, Tin House, Best American Nonrequired Reading and elsewhere, and has won the California Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, the Writers@Work Fellowship and special mention for a Pushcart Prize. A former journalist, Landis covered medicine for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and interior design for the Chicago Tribune, and has written ten books on decorating and other subjects. She lives in Washington, D.C.

ABOUT THE BOOK
“Dylan Landis has a keen eye for the right detail, and is a master of deciding what to include–and what to leave out. Leah and her enigmatic mother Helen are authentic, vulnerable characters, whose private truths are exposed at perfect, unexpected moments. Normal People Don’t Live Like This is a wonderful, intriguing, and original debut.”
—Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

“In this bracing debut, Dylan Landis guides us into the harsh, secretive world of girls, where the mysteries of power and sexuality baldly govern, and adults and teenagers occasionally intersect across the barbed wire of a mutually earned mistrust.”
—Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander

WHERE TO BUY
Your local independent bookstore
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How early in the process did you know that Triple Time would become a collection of connected stories, and what did you learn about this form?
I always knew that I was going to write a collection set in Saudi Arabia, but the stories weren’t initially connected. I was experimenting with the style and form of the short story by trying different things: first-person narrators and a more grand and formal third, contained set-pieces, various prose structures and rhythms, sections and longer sustained momentum, and so on. Just having fun as a writer, seeing what I could do within each piece and what kinds of story arcs I could create. What happened is that three very strong characters emerged in the drafts: Gus, the WWII pilot who has a relationship with the son of a Bedouin chief; Thurayya, a Bedouin girl; and Kimberly, an expatriate from California. I knew then that these characters needed more space to be heard, and the idea of linking the collection by showing characters at different points in time and from different perspectives just felt organic.

But I also knew that I wasn’t going to switch to the novel form. Yes, I was conscious of trying to tell a larger, historical story about people in this country (and as a writer I tend to think in terms of big projects, things or themes I’m obsessed with). Larger stories are so often thought of as being told in novels, but why is that? I think that you can put worlds into short stories—like Alice Munro does, like Andrea Barrett or Katherine Anne Porter or Alistair MacLeod. So I felt a bit stubborn about sticking to the short form, actually. Not all of the stories are what I’d consider to be epic, but I hope that the cumulative effect does a little something like that for the reader.

American writers who write about other countries are sometimes accused of being “literary tourists,” with the implication that they can never know what life is really like in other cultures, other worlds. Were you conscious of this mindset while working on the book? Did it seem riskier to write about Thurayya than to write about Jill?
In the beginning I was overly conscious of that mindset, and thought I should abide by the “write what you know” adage. This led to early drafts wherein various Western expatriates went about their lives spouting pithy, jaded remarks. These were terrifically boring stories. “The Date Farm” was the first completed story that I truly liked, and because Jill’s experience was closest to my own in Saudi Arabia she was fairly easy to do. I didn’t want to keep writing the same story, however. From that point it was about continually daring myself to delve underneath and write what I didn’t know at all. I buttressed my confidence with a lot of research, but then I just had to let go, and the deeper I got the more nuanced and complex the situations and characters became. For me, nuance is honesty, and every writer owes that to the reader no matter where the stories are set.

Thankfully, when you get to a certain point in the writing your strongest characters just won’t let you disappoint them. That happened with Thurayya, a minor walk-on character who ended up taking over the narrative in “Slow Stately Dance in Triple Time”—the shifts into first-person and plural first-person are hers, and I think she in effect owns the entire piece. She also proved herself strong enough to narrate a story of her own, as an adult (“Rub al-Khali”). So while she is farther from me than is Jill, I think I grew to love her more, and that made writing about her (and in her voice) so satisfying that I just stopped worrying about how she’d be perceived.

Ann Patchett, who selected your book for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, said: “This is the kind of manuscript that reminds me why people want to become editors and agents, and why writers are willing to judge contests: you hope that among the bad manuscripts and the good ones and the very good ones there will be one that is great. This book is great.” It is a great book, larger in theme than “regular” collections of stories, with a subject matter that has perhaps never been timelier for American audiences. So why did it have to win a big prize to find publication? Had you approached agents with the project before submitting to the contest?
Can we insert wry laughter here? Ann Patchett’s comments are lovely and generous, and perhaps if she’d been an agent instead of a best-selling literary writer when I was submitting this book to agents a few years ago, or the market for short stories were better at the time, or . . . who knows? I did try that route and it just didn’t work out, and I won’t pretend that it wasn’t more than a little frustrating. (One question I got a lot was, “why isn’t this a novel?”) Having worked in publishing myself, however, I at least had a little insight into that process and therefore understood how subjective it can be. Winning the Drue Heinz was wonderful: I’d looked to that prize for years and thought, wow, this is part of what holds up the tradition of short-story telling in the United States. I see myself as a fairly traditional writer, so it feels just right.

The stories in Girl Trouble are longer than average. Has this always been the case for you, or have your stories grown larger as you’ve learned more about structure and your own interests as a writer?
I didn’t always write long stories. As an undergraduate, I generally wrote around 12 pages a story, and my first workshop submissions at grad school were probably 16, 18 pages. It’s funny, though, because when I started finding my voice—when I started doing my own thing instead of impersonating writers I admired, or writers in Best American Short Stories—the stories immediately grew longer, and their pacing changed. I think this is also because my prose style adapted. I began my adult writing life pretending to be Bobbie Ann Mason, but that voice wasn’t ever natural for me. Take the present tense, for instance. Bobbie Ann Mason uses it so well, but that immediacy isn’t the right mode of expression for my point-of-view characters, who (like me) are worriers, dwellers, with a tendency to analyze their own situations. I realized that my characters, the types I’m drawn to, often have a heightened self-awareness; they don’t delude themselves. If anything, they wallow.

A possible exception in Girl Trouble is Theo from “Life Expectancy.” He’s a high school girls’ basketball coach who gets his star player pregnant. He’s the closest I come to a character who’s kidding himself, and you might notice that the story, though still longish, is one of the most compressed in the book. When you have a guy like that who chooses not to delve too deeply into himself, you just don’t need as many words.

Reviewers often praise a male writer’s ability to write from a woman’s point of view, but less is said about women who write from a man’s perspective. Since this is something you do well (“Life Expectancy,” for one example), can you share your thoughts about this aspect of writing fiction?
I hadn’t thought about this issue as a double-standard, which is interesting. If anything, it’s a compliment that I’m used to getting about the stories, and I appreciate it one-hundred percent, though that over-analyzer in me wonders if there’s a subtext to it. For instance, sometimes men react to the book’s title in a strongly negative way, because they don’t think it represents the stories, which are dark and violent and often male-driven. I understand the argument, and I struggled, along with my publisher, to decide if this was indeed the right title. But my niggling doubt is that what people are bristling at is the “girl” part, the suggestion that a girl’s trouble is less significant than a man’s. The irony, of course, is that the whole concept of “girl trouble” is lodged in the male perspective.

But I’m not answering your question. I think I write so often from the male perspective because, for this book, I wanted to look at these conventional acts of violence and aggression—but I didn’t want to always take the conventional victim’s perspective. The project rose out of intellectual curiosity first and foremost—not because I wanted to front an agenda or grind an axe. On the simplest level, it’s also just a really fun challenge. Can I sound like a man? Think like a man? You know, though, I generally just think of my characters as humans, first, and I figure out what they have in common with me, and that’s the foundation from which all else springs. And my husband won’t hesitate to tell me if I’ve gotten it all wrong. In this novel I’m working on now, I was writing recently about a thirteen-year-old boy whose girlfriend is kind of toying with him sexually – teasing him, tempting him, scaring him. I felt like I had a lock on her motivations, and I’d intellectualized his, but I relied on my husband to help me revise for some of the finest points—not language, of course, but motivation, physicality—in this one pivotal scene between them. There’s a lot of guesswork involved. You’d be surprised how far guesswork gets you.

When you sit down to write a story, how conscious are you of your past experiences at the desk? How do you try to separate what you’ve done before from what you’re writing now?
It’s not something I think about consciously, that’s for sure. I’d be paralyzed. My husband, who’s in the visual arts, works in series. He’ll do sketches, then he’ll focus on an aspect of a sketch and do more sketches of that, then he’ll do a sketch model, then he’ll build a more polished model. And one finished work prepares him for the next finished work. I can’t compare writing to that directly, at least in the sense that I don’t do the little exercises and journal entries and character profiles that some do, but I can identify with that belief that every work you create teaches you how to begin the next piece. I couldn’t have written “Proof of God,” the story of a murderer, without first writing “Parts,” the story of the mother of the girl murdered. I couldn’t have embarked upon the novel I’m now writing without first having written the stories in Girl Trouble.