First Draft - Jess Row

Story Knife contains 14 stories.

The 14 stories in here are, to me, a lot about storytelling.

They're a lot about the artifice of storytelling and exposing some of that and questioning storytelling.

I'm curious what was really on your mind when you started these, and maybe they were written over a long period of time.

I don't know.

They certainly were.

So I started writing the first stories in Story Knife all the way back in like 2009, 2010, 2011.

So a very long generation process.

Basically, starting in the early 1990s when I was in high school, when I first really got into writing fiction.

My early teachers were very staunch, realist teachers.

They taught the canonical modern short story.

Alice Munro, Chekhov, Hemingway, Mavis Gallant, people like that.

New Yorker stories, John Cheever, that kind of thing.

A lot of those early teachers I had sort of acted as if experimental or avant-garde fiction didn't exist.

And so it took me, because I was a really devoted student, it took me quite a while to realize that there was a whole other world out there of people like Borges and Julio Cortazar and John Barth and David Markson.

And then of course, you know, in my own era, people like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace and the sort of postmodern American writers of the 90s.

And so for me, it was kind of like a delayed development.

And my early work was very earnest.

and very sort of conventional and realist in its technique, my early short stories.

Then having done that for a while, I got a little impatient and I also got a little cynical having been through the sort of publishing pipeline a couple of times and also realizing that short stories are such a tiny part of the literary marketplace and that they're so devalued compared to the novel.

So I sort of started thinking, you know what, if there isn't an audience for my work, I'm just going to do whatever the hell I want.

And I'm going to write stuff that is a little incisive, a little inflammatory, a little cynical, and that is very much in keeping with the energy of the avant-garde tradition, which isn't really avant-garde anymore because it's been around for so long.