When Steve asked me to find an early story for the January issue, this was the first one I thought of. I couldn’t remember the title, or what it was about, or any words or phrases from it, or exactly when I’d written it, though I thought I knew where it was stored. But it…


“The Peach” represents one of my first forays into literary fiction. I wrote the piece approximately twelve years ago after giving up trying to write science fiction. The story shows my early influences: Paul Bowles, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver and certainly attempts to follow their minimalist example. Like Bowles and Hemingway, I chose an…

I wrote this story/essay in 2003, during a semester abroad in Australia. The Iraq War was in its early stages, and the rest of the world was still trying to figure out what to think about the U.S.‘s reaction to 9/11. When I thought about contributing to this series, there were other pieces that embarrassed…

This is the first short story I ever wrote. I was 17 and studying Advanced Higher English at my high school in a suburb outside Glasgow. My teacher loved the story (thanks, Mrs. Deans!) and I think her support and enthusiasm was a big part of why I went on to study English Lit at…

Not having this story published is something I am very thankful for — even though I tried to trick editors into taking it for a while. It is one of the first pieces of fiction I wrote, if we don’t count my time as a journalist. Maybe the second or third thing I would call…

The first short stories I wrote were zany and cartoonish. Back then I didn’t know what being “literary” meant or what a “character arc” was. I just wanted to make people laugh. When I took writing workshops in college, suddenly I learned all these rules that made me abandon all silliness and go in a…

The piece below is one of the first thirty stories I’d ever written. It was never published and hardly ever submitted due to its strangeness.  I’ve always been an avid fairy tale fan, and I think some of the influence for this piece came from a love I have for old romantic poetry and fairies,…

I spent an hour or so this morning going back through my folder of old stories and found this. I must have written it around 2002/2003. I remember showing it to a couple friends at the time. I don’t think I ever submitted it anywhere, though maybe I did and I have just forgotten. It’s…

I wrote this story when I was in graduate school, studying under the wonderful, encouraging Mark Mirsky at the time. It was around 1995. When I was 16, I tried to kill myself. I took three times the lethal dose of drugs and was in a coma for a day. This story is an imagining…

This story is absolutely preposterous, and when I realized that I decided to give up on it and no longer devote any working time to it. That was about four years ago, when I added to the story that already existed the details of Jack and Leo building a spaceship and taking off from the…

This story dates back to the year 1991. Around this time I had declared my aspirations to “become a writer” and my college roommate bought me a leather bound copy of the collected works of Edgar Allen Poe. After his touching vote of confidence, I read many of those stories, which I think is evident…

I found this novel, Walking on Broken Glass, on my hard drive when I was a writer in residence here at Necessary Fiction. I don’t even remember writing this, but apparently, I had 50,000 or so embarrassing words to share about a young girl named Sela and her sexually abusive brother Seth, which is an…