Why did you decide to write the story in the present tense?

I rarely use the present tense. But, for a story in which the protagonist’s uncertainty about the future is a central subject, it felt a little misleading to write in the past tense, which implies a kind of retrospective narrative—as if the story were being told from a future that already exists.

I became convinced that the present tense was necessary when I reached the story’s final section. The end of a good story often feels inevitable. In some of my very favorite stories, which are told in the past tense, the endings are made clear from the beginning. But what happens at the end of this story is not inevitable. It is not implied. It does not need to have happened.

I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, but it was interesting to me that the moment of the story that is by far the most dramatic and shocking is not described—and happens entirely offstage, so to speak. Why did you make that choice?

It was, for me, a question of point of view. The character through whom we learn what has happened was not there to witness the event. It’s possible that I chose that perspective because it is the perspective I can relate to. But I also believe that those who have been close to these kinds of events should not be the only ones tasked with confronting them. Both the character and the reader must face the reality of what has happened. My hope is that the story has done its job and has made that reality as palpable as it should be.

You’re currently working on a novel and a story collection. How do you see this story fitting with the others in the collection? Are they linked in any way?

The stories are not explicitly linked. What excites me about story collections is the potential diversity of the works within them. I think the term “story” can be just as open-ended and fluid as the term “novel,” if not more so. After many expeditions, I still have not found the outer boundaries of the form.

And yet . . . all the stories in the collection were written by the same person, and so there are a great many reverberations and through lines among them. There are, for instance, quite a few teachers and quite a few students. Many of the stories take place in the Northeast; many feature men and boys; many, somewhat perplexingly, feature bodies of freshwater. And all of the stories are concerned, in some way, with time: the unrelenting speed with which it moves, the inevitable changes it brings. To say that these patterns are “unintentional” seems wrong; a better word might be “emergent.” And emerge they did. When I read back, it appears that I could not for the life of me keep them down. ♦