ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

1  It can hardly escape the reader's notice that the first and concluding words of the story are nothing, the former in a peripheral character's dialog ("'Nothing wrong with that'"), the latter in the text of the story itself ("That night by the moon's pale light he dreamed of nothing at all, nothing").


2  Here we encounter one of the first variants: "this" or "his"? The source text reprinted here is from Anvil & Stirrup, a small-circulation quarterly; between that and our best fair copy, an early draft on yellow "second" paper from the author's files, a number of variants exist, perhaps resulting from editorial changes, possibly from subsequent authorial revision.


3  The author had at this point just met Roz (Rosyln Robyns), the woman who was to become his companion for the rest of his life.


4  From his story "Wasp Pounding Stone Onto Tunnel With Tool": "Their life together was a landscape, Barbizon by way of Wyatt. From on high you'd look down on something very much like Appalachia: hills unfolding into sudden groves, long-forgotten pools of still water, these soundless footfalls of history."


5  Shirt. Variant: an r appears in the A&S text that does not exist on the second sheets. Author's correction or editorial addition?


6  "Miracles happen in the corners of lives," the author was fond of quoting in these days. (Conversation with Eric Stall.)


7  "Waiting for the Echo" begins: "Tuesday night, early morning actually, 4:15, darkness rolling over to show its dull silver underbelly, Jan dreams that he is a corpse."


8  In his copy of John Banville's The Newton Letter, the author underscored this passage concerning "tradesmen, the sellers and the makers of things": "They would seem to have something to tell me; not of their trades, nor even of how they conduct their lives; nothing, I believe, in words. They are, if you will understand it, themselves the things they might tell."


9  The author's phonetic spelling here prepares for the outrageous pun—Dja startchur own shurts ("Do you starch your own shirts?") is heard as "Did you start your own church?"—that precipitates a page of truly strange dialog and provides the story's plot.


10 "Destined as we are by fate and our own disabilities to be wrong, we might at least contrive to be wildly, brashly, definitively wrong. That's the full measure of grace given us." Life: A Fair Copy


11  Civilization, elegance, and terror—to invoke once again the encomium employed by University of Nebraska Press on its first slim volume of the author's stories and carried down, such that it has become with title and author's name a kind of single parcel, from edition to edition.


12  At this point in the draft a single oblique line scores across the following paragraph: "Perhaps our lives consist not so much of what happens in them as of the explanations and connections we make." In the margin is penned: "The same is true of deletions."