David Boles: Human Meme

People sometimes ask writers how long a book takes. The honest answer is always unsatisfying because the honest answer is: the whole time. Everything I have read, studied, failed at, observed, and lived through is in these stories somewhere. My training in dramatic literature at Columbia is in the structure. My years studying medicine are in the neurological precision of "The Limerick Ward" and the physics of "The Atomic Man." My time studying law is in the procedural architecture of "The Man Who Knew Too Much." My decades of teaching are in the conviction that a story should leave you knowing something you did not know before, not because the author lectured you, but because the character's experience rearranged something in your understanding. But the specific creative archaeology of this collection, the work of recognizing that these twelve pieces belonged together and then preparing them for publication, that involved a different kind of effort. It meant going back into stories I had written years ago, so