Alec Niedenthal’s Comments

I wrote most of these stories—it is probably clear—while “discovering,” if one ever truly discovers them, the writers Gary Lutz and Diane Williams. This was last semester; classes weren’t a priority then, so I had plenty of time to maneuver adverbs and commas like I knew what I was doing. I was writing these quasi-incestual one after the other, which is a phase I’m still trying to “get over” or abandon when I write, which recently is rarely. The incest here is resolutely caught up in a, uh, let’s call it a state of mourning: mourning a relationship (incestuous in a sense but also not) that was at once profoundly there and absent from the start. I’m still trying to escape this alarmingly personal and frequently disturbing (to me) mode of storytelling. Which would require me to no longer write stories, and, too, to write stories anew.

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