WHERE Me-K'S STORIES COME FROM

Me-K photo by Ethelbert

Stories usually come to me in first lines or images. They come to me in fragments, so I spend much of the time figuring out what the story itself wants to be about. And then even more time in the editing process. As the stories develop and progress, they become very much character driven. In "Blood Red," I had an image of windows being taken away from an apartment. I was also reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, and I was compelled by the image of the tree in the scarred back of the slave. So I decided I wanted a tree to grow out of the floor of the highrise apartment. That's where I began: a windowless apartment that grows a tree.

My story "Could," was inspired by Christine Schutt's story collection Nightwork. I was startled by her frank and dreamy treatment of sexual taboo and sexuality. I was watching a boring movie while the first line of the story came to me: "She kissed him because she could." I wanted to write about female sexual agency, and how the protagonist struggles with physical and psychological boundaries in her world of excessive desire and uncertainty.