Q. How did this story come about? Every day I walk on floors and have no fear they will buckle and that I will fall through and be crushed in the plummeting wreckage. Some people don’t have that luxury. A mother’s job is to protect. How does a mother protect a child from the phantoms…

Candy’s fingers streak along the tiles in a pattern that matches her jagged wails and acicular sobs. “Please be strong,” she whispers to the dirty squares, her face paper close. “For us…” Her fingers trace familiar angles; thin lightning veins – a miniature electrical storm in the floor. She counts cracks. Fourteen. Still. She knows…

Q. How did this work come about? “The Subway Station” is from a project I’ve been working on that I jokingly refer to as my “sex labyrinths.” I wanted to attempt to self-consciously write something driven more by sentences, acoustics and images than by character and plot. Around the same time, I started looking at…

That evening I’d resolved to stay indoors, forgoing a party at Gerry’s, Gerry who was a friend of a friend. Alone, I savored a sauvignon. Glass followed glass, until, late in the evening, I felt a stirring, a quiver in my toes. I conjured Gerry’s thick fingers, the temperature of his breath, and my little…

Most of the time they aren’t willfully bad but there’s a sick three year-old taking a nap in the back on a pile of dirty aprons because the daycare doesn’t care for sick children and the manager insists they wear heels and short skirts and the combination makes it hard to concentrate because one step…

I am a writer but I am not an exhibitionist. In about six months, my first book will be released and there are some other projects on the horizon that will likely result in… attention and attention makes me uncomfortable. I am, despite what people assume about me, quite shy and awkward. I confess I…

Q. How did this story come about? I wrote this story in the summer of 2007. I was working in a microbiology lab, studying for the MCAT, and I’d just finished an atrociously bad 8000-word story—a bunch of things I probably wouldn’t have been doing if I hadn’t met my girlfriend (now my wife) several…

I saw one of those women the other day. You know the kind I’m talking about. You’re walking down the street, on the sidewalk, maybe cobblestone, and there she is walking towards you. Her clothing is impeccable, alluring, dangerous. Denim, buttons, and curves. Thick, wavy, raven hair. Not trashy in the slightest bit: it’s all…

Q. How did this story come about? Last summer my wife and I went back to Sweden, where she worked for a couple months and I stayed home with our boys. We borrowed a little studio apartment from some friends who were in the process of moving and let us use their old place, which…

The bird, which I planned on naming Profitt after my wife’s maiden name, was I now believe, a great folly. I had been reading an article on the computer about birds when I came across a photograph of an Indian Blue Peacock with its plumage unfurled, and knew immediately I needed such beauty in my…

Q. What inspired this story? “A Brief History Of Nephology” is a text from the field guide to weather that my sister Christy and I are writing. The guide has sort of grown out of this constant fascination we’ve had with weather. I can’t completely speak for my sister, but I do think it’s important…

During the wondrous days of our childhood, my sister and I learned to find meaning in the intricate shapes of clouds. We saw upon the sky a shoe, a circus pony, our mother’s fly swatter, and as we rested in the freshly mown grass, our parents taught us to decipher each message: the shoe-cloud urged…