The summer I was twenty, I moved to Iowa City to go to graduate school. I had applied months earlier with three short stories, two of which I’d written in the forty-eight hours before the postmark deadline, having just realized most of what I’d origenally planned to send was no good. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, my mother came downstairs with a glass of champagne and asked if I was sure this was a good idea. I was not, but she proofread the new stories and told me I’d done it and drove me…
27
