Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade

But when I read his edited version, I almost couldn’t tell what he’d cut. I had worked on that story a long time, and I knew it well. Before he even passed he cut it down by at least a third. “The Five Wounds” was the first story they published. It was such a relief, and I felt so grateful. I thought, “My God, he’s right.” I had gone through so many drafts trying to figure it out. Of the first story I sent them, “Nemecia,” which became the first story in my collection, he said, “We’re not going to take it, but this is your ending,” and he pointed to a spot about two-thirds of the way through.

Kirstin Valdez Quade: If I had three wishes, I would definitely use one on having every single thing I write pass through the hands of my editor at The New Yorker, Willing Davidson, who is such a smart reader. What was it like for you to work with their editors, especially as a young writer? What have you learned from being edited in general? Their editing process is famous for being really exacting. Image: Some of your very first published stories were in The New Yorker. She was interviewed by Image ’s executive editor, Mary Kenagy Mitchell. She teaches in the creative writing department at Princeton. Her 2015 collection Night at the Fiestas received the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, and was named a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the American Library Association. Her other awards include the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Best American Short Stories, O. In the tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro, each of her stories builds to a moment of simultaneous shock and recognition, revealing both the beauties and absurdities of human character. Kirstin Valdez Quade writes short stories that wrestle with the bonds and obligations of family, faith, and place.

Night at the Fiestas by Kirstin Valdez Quade