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…

I wrote “Roses” in 1995–6, soon after I started taking writing workshops at Penn State University. My primary interests then were poetry and flash fiction, mainly because I’d yet to write anything longer than 500 words. I didn’t know much about making stories, so everything I wrote that year is an overly precious, roundabout attempt…

I think that I may have written other stories before I wrote “George’s Devil” back in 1995; but it in this story that I see my beginnings as a writer. I was living in Indonesia at the time, in a small village in the Tanimbar islands. I had come to Tanimbar to immerse myself in…

Attached is “Blue Ash,” one of the first short stories I wrote during my first week in the MFA program at the University of Washington.  I was just 24 years old and still imbued with the sense that the protagonist had to be dark and moody in order to be interesting. While I have long…