The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

takes up his narrative, embracing it as her own and thereby allowing her son to understand that she shares his need for another reality, as well as his joy in invention.

For me, though, it's the story's flash-forward ending that seals the deal. By the end the boy has become a man who, with every reason to be bitter and disillusioned, has made a separate peace, preferring the “good” life he's lived to the “happy” one promised by Mudlavia. The pursuit of happiness may be our constitutional right as Americans, but, he seems to imply, it's always been the most childish aspect of our collective American dream. Elizabeth Stuckey-French has given us a story with the emotional and intellectual weight of a longer fictional work. Only the very best short fiction manages that.

Richard Russo is the author of Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody's Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls, as well as The Whore's Child and Other Stories. Russo lives in Maine with his family.

Writing The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

The Authors on Their Work

Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem”

“What You Pawn I Will Redeem” started out simply as a writing exercise. I thought, “Hey, I’ll take highly stereotypical urban characters (homeless Indian, Korean grocery store owner, white cop, white pawnshop owner) and see if I can write a story that humanizes all of them. I’ll make them decent and loving.” I wrote the first draft very quickly in a few hours really, and thought it was cute and sentimental, so I set it aside. A year or so later, as I was gathering stories for my latest collection, Ten Little Indians, I came across the story again, reread it, and was surprised by its quiet power. I don’t think I’ve published anything that's ever received as much fan mail. Heck, I got fan mail from writers who haven’t liked anything else I’ve ever done. This story's journey still feels magical to me.

Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian from Wellpinit, Washington, a town on the Spokane Indian reservation. He is the author of Ten Little Indians, The Toughest Indian in the West, and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, among other books. Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons.

Wendell Berry, “The Hurt Man”

I am always pleased when I know that a story I have imagined has grown from a real story. This is pleasing to me because I always need assurance of the connection between imagination and reality. “The Hurt Man” grew out of a family story about my great-grandmother. That story came to me a long time ago in only a few sentences, and so what I have imagined surely bears little resemblance to what actually happened. The old story grew into imagination, so to speak, over many years. It became writable finally when I began to see it as an episode in the early life of Mat Feltner, a character I began writing about in 1960.

Wendell Berry has farmed a hillside in his native Henry County, Kentucky, for over thirty years. He is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and essays, including Jayber Crow, Citizenship Papers, and, most recently, his collected stories, That Distant Land. A former professor of English at the University of Kentucky, he has received numerous awards for his work, including the T S. Eliot Award, the Atken Taylor Award for Poetry, and the John Hay Award of the Orion Society. Berry lives and works in Kentucky with his wife, Tanya Berry, and their children and grandchildren, who live and farm nearby.

Kevin Brockmeier, “The Brief History of the Dead”

I wrote “The Brief History of the Dead” in November of 2002. Whenever I’m beginning the sort of narrative that I hope might turn into a novel, I try to approach the first chapter as though it were an independent short story, as a way of easing myself into the water. That was what happened with “The Brief History of the Dead,” and the story has indeed become the first chapter of a novel-in-progress. William Maxwell, whose “The Thistles in Sweden” is one of my all-time favorite stories, talks about using an image or a metaphor as a way of developing the structure of his books: he would envision a tree with its center cut out, for instance, or a walk across flat ground toward distant mountains, and he would adopt that image as a sort of imaginative compass while he was writing. The image I had in mind as I wrote “The Brief History of the Dead” was that of one thing spreading open inside another-doors opening within doors opening within doors. Most of the doors never close, and my hope was that this would give the city and its inhabitants a sense of ongoing existence in the mind of the reader. I tried to fit as much of the life of the city into the story as I could-as much of the landscape, as many of the people, and as many of their dreams and expectations and notions about the place where they found themselves-while I elaborated on my central premise, that of a world of the dead-but-still-remembered undergoing its own quiet apocalypse.

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novel The Truth About Celia, the story collection Things That Fall from the Sky, and two children's novels, City of Names and the forthcoming Grooves; or, the True-Life Outbreak of Weirdness. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, among other publications, and have been included twice before in The O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Timothy Crouse, “Sphinxes”

To my mind, one mark of a true human being is the desire to know, and to share knowledge, once acquired. What motivates me to write my stories is the need to come to grips with an actual situation, and, having understood its deepest meanings, express its multiplicity of levels. Since this story, which still remains alive in me, required much elaboration, I have to admit, paraphrasing Paul Valery, that I prefer one reader who reads it several times to many who read it once.

When beginning the story, I made this note: “Being-God?-leaves us free within a prison.” Not for nothing do we have the concepts of the no, the yes, the perhaps. How wonderful when the yes or the no presents itself as a clear choice; but this world is the kingdom of the perhaps. In my perception, the Great Teacher is a bystanding witness to this same problem of the no, the yes, and the regrettable perhaps. What a collection of sphinxes play on the keyboard of this planet.

Timothy Crouse has been a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, and the Washington columnist for Esquire, writing numerous articles for these and other publications, including The New Yorker. His 1974 book, The Boys on the Bus, was reissued in 2003. He translated, with Luc Brebion, the Nobel laureate Roger Martin du Gard's Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort. The new version of Anything Goes that he coauthored with John Weidman was staged at the Royal National Theatre, London. He is writing a book of short stories, collaborating on a screenplay, and cotranslating works by the Chilean poet David Rosenmann-Taub. Crouse lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Charles D’Ambrosio, “The High Divide”

I just checked the folder in my computer where I’ve kept the various versions of “The High Divide” and there are, no kidding, 116-plus there's a sheaf of papers in my old Steelcase file cabinet that includes typewritten scenes and scribbled notes and a handful of rejections from people who, I would love to imagine, had some ideas that this story was destined to knock around, alone and unloved, stupid and blind, until it found its present shape and home. Of course, going forward the floundering hardly felt that way. Despite writing lots of versions over the course of twelve years, there was very little agony involved in making the story-it just seemed that every two or three years I’d haul it out and write a bunch of drafts and forget about it until the next time. It was like owning a pet that didn’t need to be fed very frequently. Big and little things changed along the way. At one point the crazy father was on the loose and the narrator lost the tip of his tongue when a basketball fell on his head. The dead mother was alive and the whole family lived in a bungalow in West Seattle with blackberry vines scrabbling up through the floor. Somewhere in all this the story ballooned to about twelve thousand words. In order to reduce the word count, I