Night at the Fiestas: Stories (31 page)

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Authors: Kirstin Valdez Quade

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For time, space, and support, without which I’d probably be in some other field entirely, I am eternally grateful to the Stanford Creative Writing Program, the University of Oregon Writing Program, the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the James Merrill House, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Thank you for the faith.

I have been blessed with extraordinary teachers who, in the classroom and in the splendid pages of their own books, have challenged me and taught me what a story can do. My deepest gratitude to Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, John L’Heureux, and Ehud Havazelet, rigorous and compassionate writers who have pushed me to hold my work and the endeavor to the highest standards. I feel so lucky to have worked closely with them over the years. My thanks also to Adam Johnson, Laurie Lynn Drummond, David Bradley, Peter Ho Davies, and David Wevill, and to the late Charles Terry and Fred Tremallo. For over a decade, Eavan Boland has been a mentor and model for the writer’s role in the world: generous and humane, both in her work and in life.

My gratitude to the members of my workshops at Stanford and the University of Oregon. Thank you also to all my colleagues and students at Stanford and the University of Michigan, who make my job such a pleasure.

So many thanks to Willing Davidson, Carol Edgarian, Tom Jenks, Meakin Armstrong, and Emily Nevins, consummate editors who have made some of these stories worthy of placement in the pages of their journals. Thank you also to the editors who selected some of these stories for inclusion in their anthologies: Laura Furman, Seth Horton, Brett Garcia Myhren, Heidi Pitlor, Elizabeth Strout, and James Thomas.

Particular thanks are due to the dear friends and readers who have left their marks on these stories, whose work inspires me, and whose friendship sustains me: C. J. Álvarez, Molly Antopol, Leslie Barnard, Jason Brown, Harriet Clark, Anna Drexler, Jennifer duBois, Sara Keilholtz, Ryan McIlvain, Kärstin Painter, Brittany Perham, Lara Perkins, Justin Perry, Nina Schloesser, Maggie Shipstead, and Justin Torres. The concept of the painting in “Canute Commands the Tides” was inspired by conversations with the brilliant artist Heather Green, and by her gorgeous series
Tide Cycle
in particular.
Tide Cycle
and her other work can be found at heathergreen-art.com. And I am especially grateful to Lydia Conklin, who has been beyond generous with her dazzling critical energies, and whose work and humor and presence bring me such joy.

Finally, mostly, thank you to my family—my parents, Barbra and Jay, my siblings, Gratianne and Emeric, and my grandparents, both Valdez and Quade—for everything, always.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K
IRSTIN
V
ALDEZ
Q
UADE HAS RECEIVED A
“5 U
NDER
35” award from the National Book Foundation in addition to the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the 2013 Narrative Prize. Her work has appeared in
The New Yorker
,
Narrative
,
The Best American Short Stories
,
The O. Henry Prize Stories
, and elsewhere. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and is currently the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan.

FIRST EDITION

The following stories have appeared, in slightly different form, elsewhere: “The Five Wounds” and “Ordinary Sins” in
The New Yorker
; “The Manzanos” and “Nemecia” in
Narrative Magazine
, “Jubilee” in
Guernica
, and “Night at the Fiestas” in
The
Southern Review
. “Nemecia” was included in
The Best American Short Stories 2013
and
The O. Henry Prize Stories
2014
, and “The Five Wounds” was included in
The Best of the West 2010: New
Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri.