To me, a story is an exercise of the imagination—or, as Flannery O’Connor has it, an act of discovery.   I don’t know what a story will be until it begins to unfold, the whole coming to me in the act of composition as a kind of waking dream, and it might begin with the exploration of a subject or a theme or a recollection or something as random as my discovery that the wild creatures in Tierra del Fuego were going blind as a result of the hole in the ozone layer that opens up there annually or that the Shetland Islands is the windiest place on earth.  The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don’t know and find something out.  And it works.  Or can work.  After all, a story is a seduction of the reader and such a seduction can so immerse him or her that everything becomes plausible.  And so with “Swept Away,” the wind story.  I’d never been to the Shetland Islands, though I’d been near enough—on a fishing boat off Oban, where I nearly froze to death—but the story came to me as if I’d been born and raised there in some other life.  After it appeared in The New Yorker, I heard from the editors of The Shetlander, the magazine of the islands, who wanted to know when and where I’d lived amongst them. 

     Still, we are all products of geography to one degree or another, and my immediate environment—what I see out the window and along the streets and beaches and hiking trails, in the bars, restaurants and theaters—has played an inevitable role in the subjects and settings of my stories.  All the pieces in the second volume of my collected stories, for instance, were written after my move to Santa Barbara from Los Angeles in 1993, and the stories that are not locked into a specific locale—the Fresno of “The Underground Gardens,” where Baldasare Forestiere constructed his fantastic maze of subterranean rooms, for instance, or “The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado,” which takes place in Caracas, or “Dogology” in India—have moved north as well.  And west, if you take into account the many stories set in the New York of my younger days, most of which appear in the previous volume. 

     To that degree, I suppose I am writing what I know, at least in terms of exploring the history, ecology, emotional temperature and socioeconomics of whatever environment I find myself in, and this includes the many stories that I’ve set in the Sequoia National Monument (formerly “Forest”), a place to which I’ve been escaping since I first moved to the West Coast.  The recent story, “My Pain Is Worse Than Your Pain,” for instance, grows directly out of an incident I’d heard rumor of up there in a microcosmic community I like to call “Big Timber” by way of eliding the real and actual.  The incident occurred in the wake of a drunken party, after which a man returned home with his wife and then crept back out, dressed all in black and donning a black ski mask, to climb up the side of a cabin belonging to a single woman and peep through the second-story window.  Unfortunately for him (and fortunately for me) he was discovered and unmasked and the repercussions began to play themselves out.  Now, I don’t know the people involved in that incident and I don’t want to know them.  All I want, from that story or any other, is to hear a single resonant bar of truth or mystery or what-if-ness so I can hum it back and play a riff on it.   

     Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, the Sierra Nevada, the desert, the chaparral, the sunstruck chop of the Pacific, jagged agaves and wind-ravaged palms—until I was in my twenties I’d never been west of the Hudson, and when I did go west it was first to Iowa City and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then, finally, to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.  To say that Northern Westchester County, where I was born and raised (in Peekskill, thirty miles up the river from Manhattan) is provincial might seem surprising, but it was when I was a boy, at least in my parents’ milieu.  I was raised in a working-class household in which we didn’t have books or the tradition of them and didn’t know much of the outside world, not even the City, with all its cultural glories, which seemed infinitely remote to us.  We had TV, and TV dominated our household, the gray screen coming to life when we arrived home from school/work and flicking off when we went to bed.  Though the local schools provided a sound egalitarian education, I was pre-literary in those days, a hyperactive kid playing ball and roaming the woods and mainly staying out of trouble.  My mother read to me when I was young—it was she who taught me to read, in fact, as I was too impatient and immature to sit still in class—but my earliest memory of the thrill of fiction comes from my eighth grade English class at Lakeland Junior High, where Mr. (Donald) Grant would read stories aloud to us on Fridays if we were good, and we were very good indeed.  Mr. Grant was an amateur actor and he really put the thunder into chestnuts like “To Build a Fire” and “The Most Dangerous Game.”  We’d leave his class trembling.
     Darwin and Earth Science came tumbling into my consciousness around then and I told my mother that I could no longer believe in the Roman Catholic doctrine that had propelled us to church on Sundays for as long as I could remember.  To her credit, patient woman, she set me free from all that, and I suppose I’ve been looking for something to replace it ever since.  What have I found?  Art and nature, the twin deities that sustained Wordsworth and Whitman and all the others whose experience became too complicated for received faith to contain it.  At seventeen I found myself at SUNY Potsdam, the New York State university system’s music school, where I had gone as an ardent disciple of John Coltrane and lightning-fast technician of saxophone and clarinet.  Unfortunately, I had no feel for the sort of music we were expected to play and I flunked my audition.  But still, there I was in college, and I fell directly into the cold embrace of the existentialists on the one hand and the redeeming grace of Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, Saul Bellow and the playwrights of the absurd on the other.  If I had to choose a defining moment it was when I first read O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” for an English class: here was the sort of story that subverted expectations, that began in one mode—situation comedy, familiar from TV—and ended wickedly and deliciously in another.  And I’d thought there were rules.

     I lived then in a rooming house on a canopied avenue of trees, enduring Potsdam’s Arctic temperatures, the gales that battered the storm windows and the rain that froze over everything in a glistening sheet so that the world became crystalline and treacherous.  Once the temperature hit twenty below, no car would start, even when plied with ether sprayed generously into the steel maw of the carburetor.  It wasn’t a problem, or not at first, not until I began to discover romance and the vital significance of the back seat.  We lived—variously six, seven or eight of us, males exclusively—in three upstairs rooms of a frame house owned by a widow who had been Potsdam’s Homecoming Queen in 1911 and referred to us as “my boys.”  The rooms were dense with ancient furniture that gave off an odor of times long gone, but they were adequate to the purpose, and it was here that I began my first rudimentary assays into this form—the form of the short story—that would come to dominate my life.  That said, I have to admit that I was not a good student or a dutiful one.  Still, I read vastly, read what was current rather than what was prescribed, and came away with a spotty education (a double major in History and English, with a junior-year swoop into Krishna Vaid’s creative writing class), but with a real fever for art.  What do I remember of that time?  A fear of the nausea that Sartre dropped in my lap and a gnawing unformed desire that had me haunting the high steel rafters of the partly constructed library building, alone, in the spectral hours after the bars had closed, trying to taste the future on a sub-zero wind.

     I remember Wite-Out, the very acme of technological perfection, made all the more irresistible because of the rumor that Bob Dylan’s mother had invented it.  I remember Dylan and the instruction rock and roll gave me, years before I coalesced my musical impulses and fronted a band myself, howling out my rage and bewilderment till my body went rigid and my throat clenched.  I remember the feel of the Olivetti portable on which I composed everything I’d ever written—stories, essays, letters, notes—until computers made it redundant.  And I can still summon up the satisfaction of typing a clean finished copy of something that seemed to have value, great value, value for me and the world too, on fresh crinkled sheets of Corrasable Bond.

     Hippie times came along, and that’s where memory solidifies.  I’ve always been single-minded (to a fault, many would say), and I do tend to plunge in with everything I’ve got.  I was a hippie’s hippie, so blissed-out and outrageously accoutered that people would stop me on the street and ask if I could sell them acid.  Which I couldn’t.  And wouldn’t.  That would be too . . . grasping.  Music pounded in my brain, the music that was the culture of the time.  I lived in various houses with various people, but I settled into a relationship with a graceful and encouraging woman who had her finger on the pulse of the day, my wife through all these years and moves and books and children, and I read hungrily, madly, looking for something I couldn’t define.  My fumbling attempts at stories in those times were in the mode then called “experimental,” a playful thrust at parrying the traditional narrative and fracturing it into its discrete elements.  It was then that I discovered Robert Coover and his clean, lyrical, ultra-smart and wickedly funny stories, and I saw what I had been blindly striving toward made perfection.  Next came Barthelme, Borges, Cortázar, Pynchon, Barth, Calvino, García-Márquez, writers of a period in which no one ever said never and there was no form that couldn’t be squeezed and milked and molded.

     I published my first story—in the “experimental” mode—in the North American Review in 1972, under the aegis of Robley Wilson, Jr., to whom I will forever be grateful.  On the strength of that, I applied to Iowa and was accepted and my life as a writer really began to begin.  Now I’d been bitten.  Now I was an adult.  Now I knew what I wanted from my life and I pursued it with devotion and purpose.  My professors at the Workshop—Vance Bourjaily, John Irving and John Cheever—gave me exactly what I most needed, a boost of confidence, and my professors in the English Department, where I completed my Ph.D. in Nineteenth Century British Literature, gave me the foundation I hadn’t been able to build during my years as a disaffected undergrad.  My rationale?  I felt if I wanted to be a writer, it might actually be helpful to know something.

     And yes, I was well aware that formal study, at least to writers of the generation before mine, was anathema.  Cheever, who was unfailingly kind and generous to me, was positively acidic on the subject of my academic pursuits, which he felt had no real place in an artistic repertoire, but I persisted, because, for better or worse, no one and nothing can turn me once I’ve got a notion in my head.  And so, on graduating, I went to Los Angeles and founded the creative writing program at USC, where I continued to teach until becoming writer in residence in the fall of 2012.  The university turned out to be a blessing.  It grounded me, got me out of the house and out of my self, and gave me the precious opportunity of assessing, encouraging and discussing the art of fiction on a regular basis with people, mostly young and still in the formative stages, who were as excited about it as I.

     It was Cheever too who gently chastised me for using that bludgeoning term “experimental,” as did Tom Whitaker, who then edited The Iowa Review, where I worked first as assistant fiction editor (to Robert Coover) and then, during my last year, as fiction editor in my own right.  Cheever insisted that all good fiction was experimental—and, of course, it is—adducing his own “The Death of Justina” as an example.  I took his point.  And during the 1980s and into the 1990s I came under the influence of his stories and those of Raymond Carver, who became a friend during the years I was at Iowa.  If in the beginning I was more interested in language, design and idea than in character (and this is reflected, I think, in Volume I), as I grew as a novelist and came to admire what Carver and Cheever and so many others were accomplishing in a less “experimental” and more traditional vein, I became more at ease with building stories around character as well.
     While at Iowa, I kept after the business of sending stories to magazines, big and small, insisting on walking to the post office the very day a story came back to me unloved and unwanted and sending it out to the next prospect on my list, hoping to match story to editor in a way that was by turns futile, masochistic and defiantly optimistic.  During the five and a half years I was there, I saw some thirty stories accepted, each acceptance an occasion for the kind of fête that involved a rereading of the story aloud to whoever I could rope into listening and an excursion to some dark watering hole that offered up exotic fare like pizza and beer in exchange for mere money.  Exciting times.  I became so attuned to the arrival of the mail I could detect the annunciatory squeal of the delivery truck’s brakes from two blocks away.  There was plenty of rejection, of course—I taped the rejection letters on poster boards and tacked them to the wall of the bedroom that served as my office till all four walls were covered and I resorted to the more practical but less self-righteous system of secreting them in file folders. 

     I was fortunate to place stories early on in Esquire, The Paris Review, The Atlantic and Harper’s—and later in The New Yorker and Playboy—and to develop close working relationships with editors like George Plimpton and Lewis Lapham.  It meant whole worlds and universes to feel that I wasn’t sending things blind, that there were editors out there who actually looked forward to seeing what I might turn out next.  George Plimpton took so many of my stories for The Paris Review in the seventies and eighties that he once joked he was thinking of renaming the magazine The Boyle Review, and his influence and friendship were incalculable.  He made me feel necessary, not to mention appreciated.  On the other hand, the editors of The New Yorker gave me a cold shoulder in those days, finally accepting one of my pieces in the early nineties, but once the magazine changed hands and Tina Brown and her fiction editor, Bill Buford, came to the fore—and now their successors, David Remnick and Deborah Treisman—I have seen the bulk of my stories appear in its pages.  So yes, I’ve been very fortunate, but most of all in my editor, Paul Slovak, with whom I’ve worked on the last fourteen books, and my agent, Georges Borchardt, who took me on while I was a student still and has been my advocate, intercessor and salver of wounds ever since.  If it weren’t for Georges, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this apologia pro vita sua.   

     Finally, in reading through the stories collected in the new volume, I see that there’s a need here to address the question of why, of what it is that impels me and so many of the writers around me to create stories even in the face of the world’s general indifference.  As students at Iowa we thrilled to the notion that we were part of something important, all-important, and we thrilled too to the readings and public displays of the masters of the form who came through town to entertain us—Borges, Updike, Vonnegut, Barthelme, Leonard Michaels, John Gardner, Grace Paley and many, many others.  And yet I remember a student raising his hand after one of Stanley Elkin’s astonishing performances (we knew enough not to sit in the first three rows because of the flying spittle as Stanley worked himself up into an actor’s rage) and asking this: “Mr. Elkin, you’ve written a terrific collection of stories—why don’t you write more of them?”  Stanley’s answer: “No money in it.  Next question.”

     Money or no, a writer writes.  The making of art—the making of stories—is a kind of addiction, as I’ve pointed out in an earlier essay, “This Monkey, My Back.”  You begin with nothing, open yourself up, sweat and worry and bleed, and finally you have something.  And once you do, you want to have it all over again.  And again.  And again.  There is an elemental power in a good short story, an awakening to something new and unexpected, whether it’s encountered on the page or from the lips of an actor in a darkened theater where the words stand naked and take you all the way back to the first voice that ever resonated inside you.  In my own way, I’ve become an actor too, regularly presenting my stories onstage and feeling the pulse of the audience beating steadily there in the darkness before me.  In the beginning, I didn’t fully trust the relationship and performed only comic pieces, hooked on the easy gratification of the celebratory wash of laughter flowing from the audience.  But then I began to read darker things, like “Chicxulub,” and felt the command of tragedy, of horror, of putting myself and the audience in a place we never hope to be in the life we lead outside of fiction.  I will never forget the woman in Miami who began one night to sob openly a third of the way into the story and whose terrible harrowing grief riveted us all.  I wanted to stop and tell her not to worry, that it was just make-believe, a kind of voodoo charm to keep the randomness of the world at bay, but there was no stopping and no consolation: she’d lived the story and I hadn’t.

     There is a daunting power in that and a daunting responsibility too.  We each receive the world according to our lights and what the sparking loop of our senses affords us and all I can do is hope to capture it in an individual way, to represent the phenomena that crowd in on us through every conscious moment as they appear and vanish again.  I want to be playful and serious, investigative and imaginative, curious and more curious still, and I don’t want distractions.  I don’t make music anymore, I don’t write articles or film scripts or histories, I don’t play sports or do crossword puzzles or tinker with engines—it’s all too much.  The art—the doing of it—that’s what absorbs me to the exclusion of all else.  Each day I have the privilege of reviewing the world as it comes to me and transforming it into another form altogether, the very form I would have wrought in the first place if only it was I who’d been the demiurge and the original creator—the one, the being, the force, whether spirit or random principle, that set all this delirious life in motion.