Beth Thomas’s Comments

I wrote “Phoning It In” and “Here’s Where You” in the voice that comes most naturally to me and is the most fun for me. I think these are closest to showing the voice in my head. I like these stories where you have this narrator who is so unreliable, who is flip, irreverent, dark, but beyond that there is something more, something almost hopeful. They’re in a really bad way and they know it, but the reader can see the way out. I wrote “On the Road to Kirkuk” after I talked to a friend of mine who is in Iraq. She told me about the crows who land at sunset and face due west, and other things that didn’t make it quite so literally into my story.

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