Allison Amend: The earliest story was written in 1997; the last was written expressly for the collection in 2008. But in between I wrote two novels, worked full time, and became an adult, so it’s not like that’s all I was doing.

AA: I didn’t. Conventional wisdom is of course that short stories don’t sell. I started writing stories because at age 20, a novel seems too daunting. Then I was in an MFA program, where stories are easier to workshop. Plus, I didn’t know what wanted to be writing about. Stories allow you to try on different hats as an author without committing to an entire outfit. That’s why they make ideal places for authors to begin. I started sending the collection out to contests when the stories began appearing in magazines. But the “collection” was really just all the stories I’d written. It didn’t have coherence as a book. I think that might be part of the reason that I had trouble finding a publisher for it.

AA: My editors, Gina Frangello and Stacy Bierlein, were really instrumental in this point. Gina told me to send her “everything you’ve ever written.” So I did. And she wrote me back, “I meant everything you’ve written since college.” She should have been more specific. By then, I didn’t feel that I had a good perspective on the collection. There were stories I disliked because I was sick of them, or they reminded me of a younger, less-evolved self. Some were overtly experimental and didn’t fit with the collection. One favorite was the first chapter of my novel (due out from LSU’s Yellow Shoe Series in 2009). But it’s historical fiction, and it stuck out like buckteeth on a beauty queen, to coin a phrase. So we left it out of the collection. So I really gave Gina leeway. I feel she’s a fantastic editor and really knows what’s best and is unflinchingly honest. I accepted her decisions without argument. There were some practical considerations: start strong and middle strong and end strong. Don’t put all the really short ones next to each other. Separate the “golf stories.” And then Gina organized them to her own particular logic. I didn’t even ask her for an explanation.

TSR: What does the word "story" mean to you?

AA:  This question is no softball. Stumped, I just did what I used to do when I was stumped in college, which is look up the word in the Oxford English Dictionary. It was no help, so I’m on my own. To me, a story is the relation of a brief, epiphanal (or at least very important and pivotal) moment in a character’s life. And the stuff you need around that to understand why the moment is so important. That’s in the literature sense. In a more general sense, a story is a narrative told for a specific reason (that reason can be to entertain, to impart a moral, to make the teller seem smart, to humiliate someone else, to teach, to ingratiate the teller to the tellee, etc.).

TSR: Do you have a "reader" in mind when you write stories?

AA:  No, that smacks a bit of pandering. Or, rather, yes, myself. I am my own ideal reader. Is that weird?

TSR: Is there anything you'd like to ask someone who has read your collection, anything at all?

AA: I am fascinated to hear which stories people like best. They are often not my favorite stories, and everyone seems to have a different favorite.

TSR: How does it feel knowing that people are buying your book?

AA: I’m still a tad unbelieving, and disbelieving (they’re two separate words). Are people really buying the book? I feel so incredibly lucky. Isn’t that every author’s dream, to see her book in the bookstore? I saw mine in the public library the other day (it looked unread). I thought about taking it down and signing it, a la “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. But there was a hawk-like librarian hovering, and I thought better of it.

TSR: What are you working on now?

AA: I’m editing my novel for publication Stations West, LSU's Yellow Shoe Fiction Series, fall 2009) and am in the middle of a novel about art forgery and cloning that I’ve been working on off and on for about 4 years.

TSR: What are the three most recent short story collections you've read?