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I've always loved how in the back of the Best American Short Stories there's a bit by each author on their selected story. I find it very interesting to learn what the inspiration was, or the thought process involved, or even just some mundane fact like, for instance, Alice Munro never really says anything about her stories. At any rate, for those interested, and since my book Other Resort Cities actually comes out this week (not the date on Amazon, for those of you waiting for your books), here's the background on the ten stories in the book:
The Book In General: This is a collection which has been ordered, story-wise, in a very specific way. You can certainly read the stories as you wish, but there are a couple of surprises in the stories that will be most surprising if you read it in order. Since I always get asked, I'd say that my favorite stories in the book are Palm Springs and The Salt. The ones I tend to read at events are Walls and Mitzvah.
The Salt: This story first appeared in Two Letters and is upcoming in the anthology No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts. This is the third published piece of fiction to feature Sheriff Morris Drew, who also appeared in Living Dead Girl. Set in and around the Salton Sea, this story actually came to me a few years ago after a day trip to the Salton Sea with my wife Wendy and my friend Todd Harris where we scouted out a few locations, took some photos and smelled some really foul things. I originally wrote the story in the spring of 2007 over the course of about three weeks. It took me a few drafts to get it right and then Amy Hempel & Lynne Sharon Schwartz gave me some additional excellent edits while at Bennington.
Mitzvah: Written specifically for Las Vegas Noir in fall 2007. I'd been doing a series of articles for Jewcy called Goldberg PI where I investigated certain aspects of Judaism and thus was becoming really well versed both in my culture, so when I was asked to contribute to the anthology, my head was filled with a lot of interesting Jewish tidbits. In the process of writing the story -- which later was a Distinguished Story in the Best American Mystery Stories -- I fell in love with the main character and have been thinking very deeply about continuing his adventures in a longer form. We'll see how that turns out.
Walls: This is a story I tried to write for several years but could never figure a way into until my wife gave me the idea to write it in the "we" voice, which finally opened it up for me. I ended up writing the entire story in just a few hours, which is unusual for me. Initially, I sent it to West, the reincarnated, and since killed, magazine of the LA Times, which, at the time, was publishing weekly short stories by Southern California writers. A few weeks later, the editor of West sent me an email that said, "Here's another opportunity to say that life has screwed you..." and proceeded tell me that the magazine was about to die, again, and thus my story wouldn't be in the magazine. Then, the good people at Barrelhouse asked me for a story and saved Walls from the slush pile and then, later, the story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Palm Springs: This story was written as result of a challenge. Gina Frangello, one of my two editors at OV Books, suggested that I needed to write a story from a woman's POV, that I needed to challenge myself to find a different way of telling stories. I waited for a long time for the right story to manifest itself, as it were, and then one night I was listening to Jay Ray's song "Palm Springs" and suddenly the story of a Palm Springs cocktail waitress mourning the disappearance of her adopted Russian daughter suddenly appeared. There's a line in the song that goes "How can we leave Palm Springs, it's taking our memories," that was my literary touchstone as I wrote. Jay has promised to come do a combo concert/reading with me, which would be a dream come true. Later, the excellent literary journal Hot Metal Bridge asked me for a story and I was happy to have this one to give them.
Living Room: The only surreal story in the collection -- as opposed to Simplify, which had several. I wrote this story in 2006 and it was later published, in a significantly different form, in the journal Silent Voices. Though I was happy with the original story -- it concerns a man building a Starbucks in his house -- I was unhappy with the history I gave the narrator, which seemed rather silly in retrospect. So before turning in the entire manuscript of ORC, I rewrote the narrator's history, which ended up changing some of the more salient plot elements later on in the story as well. This story is also the last surreal bit of fiction I've written in a very long time and, I think, perhaps the last one I'll write for a very long time longer.
The Models: Originally published in a slightly different form in the Santa Monica Review in 2007. This story reflects a rather persistent obsession I have in real estate and model homes, specifically, which I find very odd. But it's also a story that delves into my continuing interest in the bad things normal people seem to do, the lengths we'll go for the people we think we love, and the consequences of actions taken and untaken.
Granite City: This is the only story in the collection written before 2006. In fact, it wasn't even written originally in the 21st century at all as the earliest version of it dates back to 1998. Originally, the plan was to include it in Simplify but it just didn't quite fit. Now, updated somewhat, it ended up fitting perfectly here for reasons that would be a spoiler to reveal.
Will: Originally titled Lines, this story was originally written for Hobart's baseball issue, but unfortunately I just couldn't finish it in time and so it was bumped to Hobart's duel America/Canada issue in early 2008. The genesis of this story boiled out of personal experience: the memory of my sister Karen once telling me, "Stop fucking up. Stop being a fuck up," when I was in the middle of a series of stupid decisions that required bail money. It's also a story about baseball, and about families, but a lot about fucking up.
Other Resort Cities: I owe a great deal to Lynne Sharon Schwartz for the success of this story -- she read it in an early stage at Bennington and gave me some tremendous advice on how to improve it, angles I simply did not see, and thus I am indebted to her perception. I also owe much to Gina, again, for telling me this was a story I had to write, and to my other editor, Stacy Bierlein, for some excellent editorial thoughts late in the process. For reasons that will become clear once you read the book, I won't say much else.
Rainmaker: This is the last story I wrote for the book. It was originally slated to appear in OC Noir, but unfortunately had to be pulled when the release date for the anthology was pushed past the release date of my collection. The idea of the story -- which recently was excerpted on FiveChapters -- was born out of a feature story I wrote on sprinkler technology that brought me tremendous psychic pain. And the only way to deal with psychic pain is to exorcise the pain on the page.
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