When people ask what I write about I used to say “lots of things.” But the truth is, after awhile, if you’re lucky, you don’t write about so many things.  I don’t know how it happens but your material finds you. Certain characters, setting, and time periods never bore you. You keep thinking about what might happen to those people, in that place, at that time.
My characters have been Irish immigrant women who worked as maids and the soldiers of World War I. My interest in these characters and this time period has led to stories about Typhoid Mary, Lizzie Borden, and other maids. It’s also led to stories about Irishmen who served in the British army during the Great War when their own county was in rebellion against British rule.
I thought again about how wonderful it is to find your subject matter when I visited the Monet exhibit at the de Long Museum in San Francisco. Even though I knew of  the artist’s interest in water lilies, I didn’t know that lilies were virtually the only thing he painted in his later years. Monet employed eight gardeners - one to skim the pond, another to remove dust from the plants - six others for additional jobs to maintain his garden pond. He also paid for the nearby roads to be paved so that dust could be kept from reaching his water lilies.
“It took me a long time to understand my water lilies…,” Monet said. “I cultivated them without thinking about painting them ….And then, all of a sudden, I had a revelation - there was magic in my pond. I seized my palette. Since that moment, I’ve scarcely painted any other subject.” There are times when short story writers feel about their material the way Claude Monet felt about his water lilies.

When I was little one of my favorite activities was listening to my record player tell me the story as I “read” along in my book. Later, all through school, I loved having the teacher read to the class. One of my favorite memories is sitting in Peter Taylor’s writing class -- a hot classroom at the University of Virginia, and hearing Peter read a Frank O’Connor story in his wonderful southern accent.

So I must confess it’s a total puzzle why I don’t listen to audiobooks. I should love them. I love them in principle. I’ve even signed up for Audible. But I don’t do it, and honestly, I don’t know why.

Then came a call for an audio story, and my friend Jackie (Miss Sound Savvy Genius) and I decided to “do” a story. I read my story “Night Patrol,” set in the trenches in World War I, and Jackie put in the sounds that went with the story. It was so much fun. Of course, before we got going we had to find the booms made by Big Bertha, and the whizzes made by the short range howitzers. We had to find the sounds of men marching on cobble stones and slogging through mud. Our most wonderful find though was the sound of a rifle bolt going into the breech. We were ecstatic at that sound and kept smiling every time we heard it.

Coordinating the sounds with my reading was a bit of a challenge but we got the hang of it after three practice runs. The end of the story is the end of this post -- I’m back in love with the audio story. I’ll   post a new World War I story, “Actions in the Field,” next week. It’s in the current issue of the ANTIOCH REVIEW.  The story will definitely have artillery sounds and maybe some mooing cows. Why cows at the front? You’ll have to give a listen to answer that question. Stay tuned to hear it!

ROSE AND THE ANARCHIST
I’m obsessed with World War I.  I love writing about the soldiers, maids, and Irish immigrants that lived through the war and in the decade before and after it. And I’ve been lucky to have a number of family stories - and story fragments - handed down to me from that period. Still, after writing more than a dozen stories set in my favorite time I thought my material had run out. Then I remembered Uncle Jack.
My father’s older brother was a fifteen-year-old messenger boy in the financial district when Wall Street was bombed in September, 1920. The blast, which went off when the streets were packed with lunch time crowds, killed 38 people and injured hundreds more.
Over a hundred pounds of dynamite and five hundred pounds of cast-iron sash weights had been packed into a horse-drawn wagon that was left across from the J.P. Morgan bank. The horse and wagon were blasted into small pieces but the driver escaped before the explosion. Although no one was ever prosecuted, a mountain of evidence - including flyers stuffed into a nearby mailbox - pointed to this being an anarchist bombing.
Remembering that my uncle was a witness to the 1920 bombing motivated me to start writing a story I’d been thinking about for years - a story I’d thought would be set in 1920. My story, inspired by a friend’s account of how her grandfather had been murdered by a drunken friend, didn’t have anything to do with anarchists or bombings. Still, placing the Wall Street bombing in the background was important - especially to Rose, my old lady character, who sits by a window looking for danger in the street when the real danger is in the house she’s guarding.
I love how historical events anchor me in time. In a way, I need them to get me going, and that’s how I came to be writing “Rose and the Anarcist.”
 
 

I’ve spent half a lifetime reading, writing, and thinking about short stories. A lot of that time was given to figuring out what makes a great story - and (Big Surprise) there’s no right answer. It’s all - as Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography -  “I know when I see it.”
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“Herman Melville, Volume I” by Victor Lodato in the March 27 issue of The New Yorker  is a great work of fiction. It has character, plot, language and theme. It pulls you in, keeps you reading, then forces you to reread because there’s just so much there.

Of course my first love is short stories. Still, I used to read lots of novels. I mean, up until the past two years, I FINISHED novels. But then this new thing happened where I’d get about three-quarters of the way through and lose interest. It wasn’t that I hated the book - I’d read far enough to know I liked it - just not enough. So you can see why I’m excited by finishing three great novels in the past two weeks:

 THE GIRLS by Emma Cline was the first. It’s a great fast read about the Manson girls and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. It’s also a literary jewel with pitch perfect details that create a time and place.

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES by Karen Joy Fowler was the second. The great writing forced me to put up with my confusion. Then BAM! Along comes the big surprise that answers one question but poses dozens more. I kept reading and learning.

AN UNNECESSARY WOMAN by Rabih Alameddine is the ultimate literary novel. The old woman narrator has given her life to literature - as a translator. She’s a quirky hermit who keeps her work to herself - in tied up boxes in her Beirut apartment - while her mind is totally unbound. I wondered how this brilliantly meandering book could possibly stop - and there it was - the perfect ending. 
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Women my age are always talking about CLEANING OUT THE STUFF. You can’t have a conversation about hair, diet, and exercise anymore because now it’s all about what you’re going to do with the stuff. By stuff, I mean the clothes, furniture, books, papers and clutter that rob you of your sanity and make it impossible to concentrate in your own house.  
Here’s what we say (We’re all talk and no action). Give it to the kids. Put it in the attic. Die and let somebody else DEAL WITH IT.