Steven D. Stark’s Comments

When I look back at it, all three stories deal in some ways with being a parent. The oldest, “Folie à Trois,” started out as a simple meditation about what it’s like to have a child go to sleepaway camp for the first time. You don’t really know much about where he or she is going, no matter how much research you’ve done. Maybe you’ve made a mistake. From there, my imagination took over.

“I Don’t Eat Risotto” is a story that had roots in my thinking about what it might be like for someone to go out with my older son, who is a great cook (though not really anything like the character here). Again, once I’d started, it seemed to sort of write itself.

As to the third, “With Malice Toward None,” I was driving by a boarding school and saw a teacher walking away from the campus with a very young-looking boy, probably his son. But what if it weren’t? That launched me into this one.

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