A Roundtable With the PEN America Best Debut Short Stories Judges: Tracy O’Neill, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Deb Olin Unferth

So many of the stories I liked best played with understatement and a sort of quiet, confident pacing.

Best Debut Short Stories returns with another lineup of new fiction writers to watch! Each year, PEN America and the Dau Foundation award twelve writers the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for the best debut stories published recently in literary journals. Winners are selected by a trio of judges known for their work in short fiction, and are published in an annual anthology by Catapult, with an intro by series editor Yuka Igarashi.

We checked in with this year’s judges—Tracy O’Neill, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Deb Olin Unferth—about the selection process, trends in contemporary fiction, their first publications, and rethinking what counts as writing in pandemic times.

Catapult: What (if anything) surprised you when reading the stories submitted for the prize?

Deb Olin Unferth: I was surprised by the selection of journals the entries came from. There were several I hadn’t heard of, and it was fun to get to know them. I’m happy to know that the journal is alive and well, thriving, changing, and that new ones are cropping up all the time.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires: I was also impressed by the geographical range of the authors’ backgrounds and stories’ settings.

Tracy O’Neill: It was delightful to see the number of stories that looked past the United States to understand human experience as necessarily global.

Catapult: Were there particular things you were each looking for as you read?

DOU: I was looking for a spark of energy and originality—for complexity in thinking about the human spirit and concerns. I was especially excited about stories that may have had a bit of a raggedy edge to them, but stood out nonetheless for their rejection of simple cause and effect, of simple answers.

TO: Sentences that would snap back against their initial clauses, and fringe-y desire.

NTS: Work that sizzled on the page, that made me gasp or toss it aside dramatically, but without sentimentality or soapiness.

Catapult: Can you think of examples of passages or images from the stories that did these things? Or passages, images, or language from the stories that you still remember?

NTS: I really loved “Cats vs. Cancer,” which uses understatement frequently to describe harrowing procedures. Here’s one of my favorite passages in particular:

“Between Notting Hill and Beauty and Briefcase, I opened the window to throw more birdseed on the sill. The air was cold and the snow wet my face. I felt the small hairs coming out of each pore, each snowflake that hit my skin, and my heart thumping under the frozen peas, the bandage, and the traumatized breast tissue. I felt oddly alive and wondered if the birds would come.”

Catapult: Did you notice any trends/patterns in the concerns or subject matter in this year’s entries? (A particular undercurrent in the zeitgeist this year?)

DOU: I loved the diversity, a lot of stories about sexuality and gender, about cultural shifts, about race. It was exciting to read the mix of voices.

TO: The stories largely erred away from the forms we associate with postmodernity. They were not calling attention to the instability of the act of narration itself. There was a confidence and authority about language as a force of transmission.

NTS: So many of the stories I liked best played with understatement and a sort of quiet, confident pacing.

Catapult: I think it’s very true that the stories have quiet confidence and authority. It’s interesting to see, especially in an anthology of stories. I wondered if any of you had more thoughts about this in relation to, say, recent debut novels. Are we moving away from postmodernity in contemporary fiction?

TO: I personally believe that there is a reality hunger, yes, and a desire to identify fiction writers as truth-tellers at a moment in which so often it’s painful to live with the consequences of misinformation, an entertainment president, and branded content in spaces once reserved for journalism. What’s funny is I think about John Barth writing in “The Literature of Exhaustion,” about reaching a moment in narrative where finally there was no more to do except deal self-consciously with story; storytelling itself was exhausted. We’ve swung back now. I think of autofiction as a sort of paradoxical bridge between these two moments in literary culture.

DOU: That is so interesting, Tracy, because I keep thinking about how fiction writers seem to be moving more and more into the sci-fi business, or speculative, if you will, because reality is so strange as to make “realism” feel unthinkable, gone, dead, besides the point. Carmen Machado’s Her Body, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black, are two examples that come to mind.

NTS: Yes, Tracy, you raise a good point, and Deb, I like those examples. I think the real world is too exhausting right now for realism to feel quite right. Octavia Butler practically predicted all of this. And Nana’s stories sort of point us, with accuracy and prescience, toward a potential future.

Catapult: Can you share points of discussion or debate between the three of you when you met to come to a consensus about the final list of twelve?

DOU: There was quite a bit of agreement, as I recall. For several stories, it came down to the writing, that the writing was beautiful and that lifted it over the edge and got it into the final twelve.

TO: I remember that Nafissa made an important point about one story’s investment in racialized pain being tired. I appreciated her bringing a sort of socio-morphological argument to the table.

NTS: We got along really well, and I was impressed by how easy it was to find agreement between us.

Catapult: What were your first published pieces, or your first pieces that felt like big breaks?

DOU: My first stories appeared in NOON, the literary annual edited by Diane Williams, and I was overjoyed at each one she accepted. I also remember my first story in Harper’s. That felt like a big break.

TO: My first short story appeared in The Literarian, the journal that the Center for Fiction put out at the time. I got to work with Dawn Raffel, who was a writer I admired, and I couldn’t believe I got to correspond with Dawn about my own work.

NTS: My first published story appeared in a magazine called Blinders, and I think the story was “This Todd.” I won a contest run by StoryQuarterly and judged by Mat Johnson; that felt like a big break, because I was already a huge fan of his work.

Catapult: Tracy mentioned how this year’s stories reflected “human experience as necessarily global.” How can writers and readers keep our attention on the wider world, especially during a pandemic that keeps us, at least physically, in one space?

DOU: I feel like the wider world is in our homes more than ever, during the pandemic. We can’t help but understand in a very personal way how connected we are, how much our lives have changed because of a series of events that started far, far away and moved closer and closer, taking down everything in its wake until at last it was upon us.

NTS: If there was ever a time to move beyond canonical and Western literature, it’s been forever, but especially now when the smallness of the world seems much more real. So many of our submissions were from international writers who are telling both completely universal and very specific stories that demonstrate how much difference matters but that in the end, we’re all in this together. So I’d say, read as broadly as you possibly can, from as many regions as possible. Read work in translation. Read beyond your comfort zone. Read books on how to dismantle white supremacy. Read Black women, who have been telling the same truths for centuries, and then absorb and act on that knowledge.

Catapult: As the circumstances of our day-to-day lives have changed dramatically over the past few months, some of us now find ourselves with more time available for writing; some of us really don’t; some of us are eager to fill empty time with activities that feel productive; some of us need a serious mental break to process . . . everything. What is your relationship to writing like right now? And what advice do you have for emerging writers who might be battling feelings about what they “should” be doing with their time?

TO: Maybe it’s contrarian, but I refuse to ever think I’m not writing. I’m convinced that a lot of writing—or the process that sets the mind up to do the imprinting of words on a page part—happens in a submerged space-time of the brain. I’m convinced that I’m writing when I’m walking the dog or trying to motivate myself to clean the house or obsessing over news. In this pandemic, there are so many moments where a mysterious tension builds even when ostensibly I’m in a conversation where I agree with the other person or I’m picking up a pizza and somehow end up thinking, “I love this person selling me a pizza, I love everyone right now,” and those are the experiences that do something in the back of your consciousness and end up on the page, I think.

DOU: I like that. I think a lot of us have spent a lot more time just walking around and looking at things, thinking, and the thinking is urgent, thinking things like, “I love everyone right now.” I hope that’s what we’re doing. That’s a thought I want to have. Thanks for that, Tracy.

NTS: I love what Tracy said, and Deb, I feel the same sense of urgency. I consider myself a way-too-old Harriett the Spy, and I’m always taking things in, recording them, saving them for a project later. The brainstorming and drafting never end. All of that counts as writing, and it’s exciting.