Introduction

Not so long ago, in trying to dislodge a student from some writing that -- due to her fear or complacency -- was overly safe and conventional, I experimented with a bit of pedagogical brutishness. I looked her in the eye, held up her story, and said, "
I could have written this." Now I didn't say, "A baboon could have written this." I only said that I, the teacher -- the writer and writing professor -- could have written it. Nonetheless, she burst into tears and ran from the room.

Did I have a banana in my purse to snack on right then and there? I believe I did. I'm afraid I did.

Of course she was right to be upset. "I could have written this" is an anathema to both a writer and a reader. It inserts the alleged skills and the boastful-if-deflated ego of the reader into a conversation where they have no place. It is the knuckleheaded reader-reply that every writer prays never to hear -- and every avid but busy reader hopes never to feel inclined to utter. (It is also the typical response of writers at the movies, squirming or dozing in some cineplex of mutual disregard.) Though it is usually assumed, usually goes without saying that readers are looking for something that they could never have written themselves, such a standard is no flimsy thing. It may be simple and basic -- but it's simple and basic the way gold is. When readers think "I could have written this," they have not been successfully distracted from the stupidest fact of themselves (or from making unfortunate remarks). They have been told nothing interesting and taken nowhere convincing, new, or newish. They have been
shown only the obvious physical and moral surfaces of the world, the cheapest, most available experiences and perceptions -- all set forth in possibly stale or unfeeling or mistaken or ham-handed and perhaps commercially mediated language. Consequently, such readers encounter only their own irritation and a disheartening idea of collective mediocrity.

So let me say of the amazing stories in this issue the thing that should go without saying, the thing that sounds like the faintest, feeblest praise: I could not have written any of them. I, who have not had a suntan in fifteen years, was in thrall to the narratives of bright, wounded women traveling in Chile, Ecuador, and Barbados (Vicki Lindner's "To Cole Cole," Pam Houston's "Three Lessons in Amazonian Biology," and Debra Spark's excerpt from
The Ghost of Bridgetown). I was moved completely by the lyrical stories of boys orphaned through terrible accidents (Howard Norman's chapter from
The Museum Guard and Max Garland's "The Land of Nod"), as well as boys living through other kinds of violence (Robert Boswell's "Guests" and Bradley Owens's "A Circle of Stones"). Two comic stories by Alice Adams and Meg Wolitzer begin in a therapist's office, surely a gloomy place made funny only by the most spritely of minds. Meditations on fraught but holy marriage (by Charles Baxter and Michael Blumenthal), tales of the bourgeois aftermath of Asian-American assimilation (Gish Jen's "Just Wait") or of struggling rock musicians in San Francisco ("17 Reasons Why" by Paul Leslie), I could not, on my own, have imagined my hobbled way toward. Wayne Harrison's enraged and melancholic auto mechanic, Sheila Schwartz's endangered and passionate young mother, Mona Simpson's twenty-eight-year-old already in a condition of pre-nostalgia for her quickly passing life, all concentrate their narratives on states of mourning I feel I've known. But they are contained in very specific dramatic circumstances or
richly nuanced settings that show off each writer's particular genius; and so, the stories startle, remind, refresh, take aback, and powerfully engage the reader.

The sequence I've imposed on the stories is the result of the same irrational process I have in the past imposed upon my own story collections. I have tried to make an unruly assortment resemble, well, a book. Some instinctive or mysterious aesthetic takes over -- one juxtaposes color, mood, size, as in flower arranging; one lumps, then separates, then steps back and squints. At times, I aimed for a kind of ragged emotional arc: from adventure/misadventure, through catastrophe and reminiscence, toward grief, and, finally, to love. It is a trajectory that lands on the only note worth landing on. Sheila Schwartz's "Afterbirth" contains that entire arc within its own narrative, and so I have started there. If one cares to read the stories in order.

My apologies to the authors of the many fine stories I was unable to include. And to my student who dashed from the room, but who eventually returned with brilliant new work.