Contemporary Authors

• The Subway Stops at Bryant Park ( short stories) Leapfrog (Fredonia, NY), 2017

1. The subway stops at Bryant Park LCCN 2016054399 Type of material Book Personal name Moss, N. West, author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title The subway stops at Bryant Park / N. West Moss. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Fredonia, NY : Leapfrog Press, 2017. Projected pub date 1705 Description pages cm ISBN 9781935248910 (paperback) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

• N West Moss - https://nwestmoss.wordpress.com/about/

  My work has been published in The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, McSweeney’s, Salon, Brevity, Hospital Drive, Lunch Ticket, The Blotter and elsewhere, including on Radio France International.

  I am a fellow at MacDowell, at VCCA in Virginia and at Cill Rialaig in Ireland.

  Me for Faulkner 2014

• Gotham Writers - https://www.writingclasses.com/faculty/bio/n-west-moss

  N. West Moss is the author of the short-story collection The Subway Stops at Bryant Park (Leapfrog Press), and her fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, the New World Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Cahoodaloodaling, The Stockholm Review, Salt, Blotter Magazine, and The Westchester Review, among many others. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Salon, The New York Times, Brevity, Memoir Journal, Sou-Wester, Ars Medica, and Hospital Drive Magazine, among others. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and taught at William Paterson University, Montclair State University, and Passaic County Community College. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, a Master of Secondary Education from Mercy College, and an MFA in Creative Writing from William Paterson University.

• At One Sitting - https://www.atonesitting.com/single-post/2017/08/13/Conflict-Isnt-A-Big-Deal-An-Interview-With-N-West-Moss

  at one sitting
  a personal archive of interviews with contemporary short story authors
  Conflict Isn't A Big Deal: An Interview With N. West Moss

  Every story has conflict. More often than not, conflict is misunderstood. "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water," Kurt Vonnegut once said. His words still ring true today, and N. West Moss, a faculty member at Gotham Writers Workshop New York City, adheres to the writer's advice.

  She passes Vonnegut's advice along to her students when applicable, and she's not afraid to stand her ground, particularly when it comes to their well-being and future endeavors. She penned the following words in an essay to her students, challenging them – encouraging them to be the best they can be at all times: "And that class you hope to avoid? Make every class that class. Be alive and engaged wherever you land, and don’t ever be the first one to give up on yourself again."

  If you're not familiar with Moss, she's had her work published in The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, McSweeney’s, Salon, Brevity, Hospital Drive, Lunch Ticket and elsewhere. Her debut short story collection, The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, hit the market back in May; editors from numerous literary journals and publications have already praised the title. She's currently a fellow at MacDowell, at VCCA in Virginia and at Cill Rialaig in Ireland.

  "I've always, always written," Moss explained. "My mother got me a filing cabinet for my second birthday because I had so many papers everywhere, and my father got me a typewriter for my third. They also got me a chain for my glasses in third grade because I begged them to. It's a wonder I had any friends at all considering what an enormous nerd I was."

  What you may not know about Moss: She's the fiction editor for Neworld Review, an online magazine that reviews books, theater and movies. If you're waiting to hear back from her, here's a tip – she wakes up bright and early to read submissions; however, this isn't always the case, so don't be surprised if she doesn't get to reviewing submissions until later on in the day. (Come to think of it, this wasn't much of a tip, so feel free to move on and ignore this part of the entry.)

  "I find that walking is great for my writing, so I will walk the 2.6 miles from Port Authority down to where my class is on Prince Street, and I will walk the 2.6 miles back when the class is over," she said. "When I get into bed tonight, I'll make my writing to do list for the morning."

  Moss answered some questions before going away for a few days. Topics of discussion included the following: criticism, and when it's appropriate to reject it; common mistakes when beginning to write short stories; and the connection authors with their characters (and why that's the case).

  CJ Arlotta: In a previous interview, you mentioned a former professor of yours being very critical of "Omeer’s Mangoes," a short story of yours that went on to win The Saturday Evening Post's Great American Fiction Contest of 2015 as well as a Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal. Despite your professor's criticism, you went home afterward and didn't change a single thing in the manuscript. How does a writer go about sifting through criticism to find out what's worth listening to?

  N. West Moss: I should note that I still love that professor and value his feedback. As a professor myself, I am certain I've given feedback from time to time that students ought to have ignored. I hope they did.

  One of the best things I learned from getting my MFA was to be semi-porous in terms of feedback. It's an odd set-up, the writing workshop, where we are compelled to give one another feedback, even if we aren't great writers yet ourselves. So being semi-porous helps, meaning I listened to all feedback but only took in some of it. And after a while, I knew which students were meaner than others, and I admit that by year two of my MFA, I stopped even reading their feedback at all, as a self-preservation technique. That being said, if everyone is confused over the same passage, I take that sort of thing into account.

  Good writing comes from a place I call "radical self-acceptance" in that we have to embrace who we are and what we obsess over, or our writing becomes flaccid. By the same token, at a certain point, we must consider our readers, if only to edit for clarity. So it's a balancing act. And that moment with my beloved professor was a turning point for me with my writing. I knew he was technically right about the story – it was a weird little beast, which wasn't even in chronological order. When I went home that night and didn't make one change, I was nervous. When it won two big awards, I knew I had been right.

  Arlotta: Many of the stories in The Subway Stops at Bryan Park revolve around aging and loneliness. Interestingly enough, your characters oftentimes find comfort in Bryant Park – an outlet away from their solitude. In a way, you connected your characters via the park. Would you say there's always something larger out there essentially connecting all of us?

  Moss: It seems to me that the power of literature is that all human beings love stories – no matter the culture, the language. Rich or poor, kind or cruel, everyone tells stories to themselves and one another. It's how we digest the world, and it is how we develop empathy. I remember reading The Kite Runner a few years back and how that book make Afghanistan blossom for me. Instead of picturing it as a pile of rubble, as I'd seen it on TV for years, I saw it as one little boy saw it. I could smell the food, feel his bare feet on the floors of his home, see the colors of the tiles in the wall. The truth is, I guess, that we are all connected, anyway, by our humanity, by our shared needs on this planet. Good literature makes that obvious.

  Arlotta: I'm sure you could find bits of yourself in each one of your characters, but if you had to pick one, who would you connect with most on a personal level, and why?

  Moss: Oh, I'm the kind of writer who loves all of her characters. I am in love with Omeer actually, his guilelessness, his enthusiasm, touch me deeply, even with his considerable flaws. My favorite story currently is "Dubonnet," and as rotten as the title character is in some ways, I feel her humanity down in my bones. When she talks about being afraid when her husband was late for work, she means it, and I almost cry every time i read that passage. And Benny, the guy with the chicken – well, I love him the way I love all people who are devoted to their work, whatever it is. He sweeps up leaves in the park, and does it with care and pride. He is the kind of person, reticent, dedicated, never a show-off, that I love. I write about the people I love, or maybe i fall in love with the people I write about.

  Arlotta: I believe you teach as well, correct? What are common mistakes students make when it comes to writing in the short story form? Where do they typically go wrong?

  Moss: Beginning writers sometimes think they have to include giant conflicts in their stories, so they put in murders and explosions. I try to show them that a character who is looking for his lost keys is enough conflict to drive a story forward, and it much easier to relate to than, say, World War 3. I also like beginning writers to see that their creativity is a bottomless well, that they need not fear running out of stories, but should write with a feeling of abundance. We all have hundreds of stories to tell. In fact, I can think of three I could write from this morning alone.

  Arlotta: What's next on the horizon for you as a writer?

  Moss: I have written an illness memoir that is currently being read by an agent. I am also working on a play, which I've never done before, so I'm learning as I go, and I also have a short story collection in the back-ground. They're linked short stories, also set in NYC but circling around two women, an elderly mother and her middle-aged daughter.

  What she's reading:

  "I loved Olive Kitteridge, which is both short stories and a novel. I love some of John Cheever's work, "Reunion" and "The Swimmer" to name two. Junot Diaz is great as is my friend David Ebenbach and his excellent new collection, The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy. I like to read The Best American Short Stories anthologies every year or so. Oh, and I recently finished a book called Grasses and Trees by A. L. Snijders – translated into English from the Dutch. He changed me. And you can't even find the book (I got it while in Holland this year), but you can see some of his very short stories at the journal Asymptote."

• Fiction Writers Review - http://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/a-great-and-heartbroken-love-for-the-world-a-conversation-between-n-west-moss-and-david-ebenbach/

  INTERVIEWS | MAY 10, 2017

  A Great and Heartbroken Love for the World: A Conversation Between N. West Moss and David Ebenbach
  "I am much more interested in the people who are not forever trying to be known": N. West Moss with David Ebenbach, discussing their new books The Subway Stops at Bryant Park and The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy and other stories.

  by DAVID EBENBACH
  “Reading and writing fiction is so much about wanting to have a window into other lives.” Writers West Moss and David Ebenbach discuss compassionate fiction, writing beyond the boundaries of oneself, the seriousness of humor, and getting away from the writing desk to go for a run.

  West Moss’s first short story collection is The Subway Stops at Bryant Park (Leapfrog Press). All of the stories are connected in some way to Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere.

  David Ebenbach is a transplanted Philadelphian living in Washington, DC, with his wife and son. He’s the author of six books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, including, most recently, the story collection The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy and other stories, which won the University of Massachusetts Juniper Prize and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in January.

  David and West met at a really lovely artist colony called the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where they became fast friends and mutual admirers and also became somewhat competitive with one another about the game of Scrabble.

  This conversation, the one you’re about to read, happened over email.

  Interview:
  David Ebenbach: You know what I admire about your work, West? Well, a lot of things, but one of the things I admire the most about your writing is how compassionate it is. You take on an enormous range of characters in your short story collection The Subway Stops at Bryant Park—men and women; elderly people slipping into dementia and young folks trying to get their lives together; glamorous mothers, crazy bosses, and workers quietly waiting tables or managing an apartment building or collecting the trash. You approach all of these characters with, it seems to me, a very open heart; even when you’re funny—and you’re funny a lot—it’s not at the characters’ expense. The result is that the reader can’t help but fall in love each time. I think that’s one of the best things that can ever happen in a short story. Are you conscious of trying to make that happen? How do you do it? Do you find that you fall in love with the characters yourself?

  West Moss: My stories tend to start with a character, usually someone I’ve seen on the street or the train, who sticks with me. I begin to develop stories about them in my head. It turns out that the people I notice are vulnerable in some way, or maybe that’s what I feel about them, that they are lonely, or misunderstood, or that they are kind in an unkind world. Regardless, they are the ones that drive the narrative. I hear their voices, I see their spouses or children or co-workers, and the story evolves. I don’t try to get readers to love these characters. No, not exactly. But as I get to know them myself, I come to care about them, sometimes deeply, and I guess that comes across.

  I am not a big fan of cynicism in life or in fiction. I don’t like show-offs, and I’m not fond of writers who I perceive as being mean to their characters, if you know what I mean. While I am essentially an introvert, I have a great and heartbroken love for the world and the people in it.

  I feel like this is something you and I maybe share. You, David, are never mean to your characters, and I found myself really feeling for them, even the ones who were quite different from me. Many of your protagonists seem so vulnerable. They want to belong, but they’re uncertain about the social rules of any given situation. You really allowed them to be funny and tender—such great traits, and maybe that’s why I was so engrossed. I cared about these characters.

  So my question is about the diversity in your stories. In the story “Hunting, Gathering” in The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy and other stories, you write from the point of view of a woman in a way I found startlingly true. I was sort of shocked at the end when I came back to reality and remembered that you had written this. But in other stories you write from the point of view of an African-American man, a teenage boy working at a theme park, a sex-worker, and on and on. Can you talk about that a little bit, about your take on diversity in your writing?

  You and I feel the same way about writers who write out of a place of contempt. I don’t have any patience for that, either. On some level, I don’t even understand how a person can write about a character at any length without coming to feel some sympathy for that character. Take your story “Dubonnet,” for example—the main character of that story is not completely sane, and actually isn’t nice a lot of the time, but you, as the author, spent enough time with her for her full humanity to reveal itself.

  That’s one of the reasons I write about people who are not like me in some ways. I think fiction—the sharing of stories between people—is an opportunity to reach beyond oneself, to enlarge one’s circle of empathy, and I want to take that opportunity on. Writers do have to be careful, though. When we write beyond ourselves, we have to work extra hard to get it right. And then there’s the history—people like me (straight, white men) have been telling other people’s stories forever, to the extent that other people have had to struggle to find a forum to tell their own stories. So there’s a lot to keep in balance. On the one hand, literature is dead when people only write about themselves. On the other, writers have to be extra respectful when they’re crossing boundaries, and we have to work to make sure there’s room for a lot of different voices. And there’s plenty of room for disagreement on how much boundary-crossing is okay.

  But of course the self is bigger than we usually give it credit for. I write a lot of female main characters, for example, and I think that’s probably because I grew up in a house with my mother and my sister—just me and two women. Or when my characters are African American—well, the neighborhood I grew up in was mostly African-American. None of this makes me an African-American woman, obviously, but what I’m saying is that the experiences I’m writing about are not from the other side of the universe or anything.

  You know, I’m interested in your comment that you’re an introvert. You’re also a really fun and warm person, so that’s interesting and complicated. But I see it in your stories. The reader gets wonderfully close to your characters, but the characters themselves tend to be on their own. The main characters in a number of these stories work alone; many of the characters are distanced from their families by geography, misunderstandings, neglect, or even death. Earlier you said that you tend to notice lonely people, and they become the drivers of your stories. Why do you think that is? What draws you to lonely characters?

  Your comment about Dubonnet struck a chord. Certainly her son and daughter-in-law wouldn’t say she was a nice person, but she’s based on someone I saw in Bryant Park only once, for maybe 3 minutes. She had bags with her, as Dubonnet does, all wrapped in Saran Wrap, and her lipstick went way up right to her nose, and she was being very tidy about how she arranged all of her bags. Well, I couldn’t get her out of my mind. She understood so much about being out in the world—about cleaning up after herself, about her clothes being laundered and some of the social norms. But there was also this whole swath of things she didn’t seem to understand about how odd she was. I felt for her, but I didn’t pity her (pity, as an aside, seems to me to be a kind of contempt), but I wanted to try to imagine her day. Why did she bring so many things with her to the park? Why did she wrap everything up in Saran Wrap? Why did she have a little rain kerchief on even though it was sunny? What would it be like to live with her? Reading and writing fiction is so much about wanting to have a window into other lives, which is what you referred to when I asked about the diversity in your own writing. I guess it comes from a place of wanting to peek inside the minds and lives of other people. It’s one reason that I love so many of your stories—they give me a glimpse into the private thoughts of people I want to know.

  What draws me to lonely characters? Hmmm. I can best answer that by telling you who I’m not that interested in writing about. I don’t have much interest in the brash, show-offy, successful types who seem like they really want me to know them. I remember back when I was dating in my 20s. A guy came up to me at a party and said, “Guess how much I make?” He pushed and pushed until he finally just blurted out his salary, which was a lot. I guess he wanted me to be impressed, but it had the opposite effect. If he ever ended up in one of my stories, he would probably be a “flat” character because who wants to get to know that guy better? Not me. I am much more interested in the people who are complex and subtle and who are not forever trying to be known. In fact, I could say that about friendships in life and not just about the characters I tend to write about. So maybe it isn’t really that I am drawn to lonely people, but to reticent characters who are nuanced and complicated. The guy with the big salary was not someone I cared to get to know.

  To go back to your collection, I noticed in many of your stories that you explore the worry that we’ve all had that there is something really cool happening, and we are not invited. That’s pretty front and center in the title story, but it’s there in other stories too. In “Eleven Girls,” for instance, there’s this sense that Josh has to pick the “right” girl, or that having the right girl pick him would answer a lot of questions, would settle things. He thinks it’s a high-stakes question, but it seemed like you were gently making fun of all the weight we put on these things. In the end, what many of your characters come to understand is that “we are the same,” as you write in “Everyone around Me.” In fact, that line, “We are the same” is like a prayer, almost, a profound resolution to the isolation many of your characters seem to feel.

  That is one theme in your collection that I loved—the fear that we are the odd-person-out, resolved by the eventual understanding that “we are the same.” The collection has such a powerful and cumulative effect. In “The Shy Birds of Hope” towards the end, Paul has the feeling that “he was finally part of a larger conversation, one he’d wanted to join all his life.” That sentiment seems prevalent in several of your stories, the wanting to belong, and yet the already actually belonging. My question then is two-fold. First, how do you see the connection between these stories, and second, what do you think you know now with this collection, that you didn’t know with your earlier collections?

  The collection got started when I found myself in this very cliquish social environment (I’m not going to get any more specific than that, in order to protect the innocent), and I constantly had this feeling that something amazing was happening nearby but that I wasn’t there and wasn’t invited and could never get in. It was a very alienating experience, but it provoked a number of short stories, including “The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy,” the title story, which is of course all about leaving someone out. And the funny thing about that story is that, whenever I read it at a reading, people are always coming up to me and telling me that they’re that guy—the guy who isn’t invited. What’s funny about that is that everybody says it; everybody is the not-invited one. Maybe even the guy who asked you to guess how much he made for a living. Maybe especially him! And I think that means that, first of all, there is no orgy, and maybe we should let go of that idea. And second of all, we are all the same; we all imagine some paradise that’s always happening somewhere else, never here; we all feel a little left out. That’s what I learned in writing this book, and it moves me deeply. This truth about human experience—our certainty that we’re each outsiders—is poignant and it’s funny and it has the chance to save us. We’re all in it together, even if we usually can’t see it. I want to help people see it.

  You know, speaking of funny—segue alert—you’re really hilarious. As a person and as a writer. Your stories unearth lots of humor in your characters’ experience, and of course humor is not a light thing; humor deepens and strengthens your stories, it seems to me. The conversations between the daughter and her father in “Sky View Haven,” for example, are shaped by the father’s progressive dementia, and are therefore simultaneously ridiculous and heart-wrenching. The attempts to catch a restaurant-basement rat in “Lucky Cat” are so entertaining that they’re almost what you could call hijinks, and at the same time there’s this very tender story there about a person coming of age. That blend is in so many of your stories. I wonder if you could talk a little about that—as a writer, what relationship you see between the comic and the serious/tragic, and what you think you’re saying about it in your work.

  Humor is a funny thing (no pun intended). I laugh a lot, and I am drawn to funny people. Also, people who are funny are usually smart. It takes game to make people laugh, so I enjoy smart people too. But the thing is, I don’t consciously try to be funny in my writing, in the same way that I don’t consciously place symbols in my stories, or artificially insert themes. Some of these things just come to pass as you’re telling a story, and perhaps reveal a bit about a writer’s personality.

  I am aware, though, of not trying to be too sentimental in my writing, even when I’m writing about very emotional stuff. For instance, “Sky View Haven” takes part almost entirely in a nursing home. When I set out to write that, I wanted to avoid the clichés associated with nursing homes—the smell of urine, the overly sad context of people left to die. My father had recently died in a nursing home, and the truth was that over the months that we visited him there, in addition to the crushing heartbreak of his imminent death, there was a lot that was hysterically funny there. There was a one-legged nun, for just one instance, who played poker all day, and hopped out on the back porch to smoke. She’ll be a character in one of my stories eventually. There was just a lot that was funny there, but because of the context, it was the kind of funny that also cut me to the quick.

  We’re all in it together, even if we usually can’t see it. I want to help people see it.
  In the end, I think that if you want someone to feel how painful a situation is, as a writer, you can’t look that squarely in the face. As Emily Dickinson famously put it, “Tell it slant.” You can’t just have a protagonist who is always crying or the reader will feel nothing. It’s the sadness juxtaposed with other stuff, like humor, that I think makes the sadness more vivid. Is that crazy? All I know is that, as a reader myself, if someone is trying too hard to make me cry, I resist. But if an author can make me laugh in the middle of an emotionally painful scene, the scene turns into pathos and becomes kind of exponentially moving.

  But you are also a funny and outgoing guy and I laughed out loud while reading many of your stories. In “Everyone Around Me” for instance, I underlined the line, “My desire for her to fail approached the level of prayer.” It was so funny, perhaps, because I’ve secretly hoped for someone to fail too. But it’s also the flip side of what you describe above—that we all want so badly to belong, but also sort of want to outdo one another, and can be jealous of one another’s success. That humor really amped up the way I felt such tenderness and relief by the end of your story. In “Out of Grapes” humor sort of goes bad. The timing of the joke-telling is just slightly enough off that everyone gets uncomfortable. So, to steal your question, what is your take on humor in your writing?

  I have another, totally unrelated question. I recall that you are a runner, and I’ve started to hike. I find when I go out for walks, I come back full of ideas for my writing. Do you find that running influences your creativity?

  N. West Moss

  You know, I once heard a writer named Dylan Krider give a great talk about humor, and he argued that humor enhances the intensity of other nearby emotions. Sad things become sadder, scary things become scarier. I think that’s true, and that’s why I think humor in fiction is actually a pretty deep thing. When I was just getting started as a writer I didn’t get that. I worried that humor might be low-brow, and so I avoided it and only focused on extremely serious stuff. (My early stories were kind of a slog to read.) These days, on the other hand, I don’t tend to feel great about a story unless it’s got a range of emotional experiences in it.

  But I agree that you can’t try to be funny. When you’re writing a story, you can’t really try to be anything—funny, serious, intellectual, political, clever, etc.—because then the story stops being a story and instead becomes a snapshot of the author caught up in the act of exertion, straining, face screwed up and turning red. Nobody needs to see that. So the story can only be funny if I naturally find the characters and the situation funny. Luckily most things are at least a little bit hilarious, don’t you think?

  Meanwhile, hiking sounds like a great idea; I bet it’s really nice for the writing. Running’s good for my writing, or it can be. Sometimes I have to step away from the desk, and then I come back knowing more about the story than I did when I got up from the desk. Sometimes the rhythm of running—or the music, if I’ve got music on while I run—lets me work through lines and sentences. Or maybe I listen to a podcast—I’ve been listening to a great podcast called Jazz Insights lately—and it gives me ideas for things I can write. (Like how a lot of early jazz musicians died tragically young in car accidents, to the extent that you begin to wonder whether car manufacturers were engaged in a conspiracy against the emergence of jazz as an American art form.) Or maybe running just gets my blood moving faster and juices up my brain.

  Some of it falls apart on the page, though, when I get back, because I can’t really write in my head. I can refresh, and get ideas, and so on, but I can only write on the page itself. Still—some of it doesn’t fall apart, and I guess that’s what stays.

  So—one last question for you: What’s your favorite thing about The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, the thing that makes you the most glad and proud to have written it?

  You wrote above that “when you’re writing a story you can’t really try to be anything” because it ceases then to be a story and becomes about the author’s exertion. Well, that’s a revelation to me, and so totally true, and something I wish I could go back and tell my younger-writer self. It is such a verity that, as writers, we must be wholly ourselves or the writing comes out stilted and forced, and the readers are thinking more about the author than about the story. I think I’ll steal your concept and try to give it to my students all wrapped up in a bow so that they can skip the entire step of trying to be someone they aren’t, and can maybe just get down to the business of being themselves, if that’s even possible for beginning writers.

  What am I most proud of with my short story collection? Publication is a funny thing for me. When I was first getting my stories and essays published, I would get excited, really excited, like it was going to change something tangible in my life, like it was going to change my worth or the respect I’d get, or my sense of myself as a legitimate writer. I’d get so excited, in fact, that I would then get too swept up in that, lose focus on my actual writing, and then feel horrible when nothing actually changed. It got worse when I published in more famous journals, and then I started winning awards, and that really threw me off my game. After an award that I won two years ago, I decided to stop entering contests for a while, and to try to find my center, where I could sustain my own sense of myself and my writings despite the vagaries of the publishing world or the opinions of readers.

  So I’m proud about my circumspection surrounding the publication of this, my first book. I’m excited about it, but I know it won’t change anything in my life. I look forward to readings and to meeting people who read my work. That sounds lovely. I’m looking forward to seeing how the business of publication and marketing actually works. I take enormous pleasure from things like this interview and the ways in which writing can be collaborative and can give me an excuse to spend time with friends. And I’m also proud when I look at those stories and see how much I’ve grown as a writer. Some of those stories feel like real beginner’s stories to me, and I still love them. I can see in other stories where it seems like I’ve begun to hit my stride as a writer, too, and it’s nice to be able to take stock of my growth. I love that my writing is getting stronger. So I’m most proud that I’m continuing to write, that I am already quite happy before the book comes out, that I don’t expect it to change my life, nor do I want it to. I’m glad that that the thrills are now more in the work than in how the outside world reacts to it.

  With this most recent collection, you are the author of six published books, so I’d be interested to hear what you are most proud of as this most recent collection is published. I imagine that what you are most proud of has changed with each of your books. Has it?

  David Ebenbach

  You know, it has changed, from book to book. With my first book my reaction was pretty much purely, Oh my God my book is getting published I’m going to have a published book people are going to read my book Oh my God! Though of course I was also happy with the things that I thought I might have gotten right in that book. You know how you look back at some moments or even some whole stories and you think, Wow—I got that right? It’s wonderful.

  Beyond the first book, I think the big thing for me is that I never want to be doing something easy, something I already know how to do. There were stories in early drafts of this collection that ultimately got yanked because they were too easy, and I felt sure that the reader would feel that, like I had just cranked those ones out of the Story-matic 3000. The stories that stayed in this collection were the ones where I had a really significant chance of failure. A story from the 1st-person plural perspective of a group who didn’t invite a guy to an orgy? A story about a haircut that actually might be about the purpose of existence? I mean, what was I thinking? Well, I always want to be writing at the very edge of what I’m capable of, and I think I did that here.

  West, it’s been a pleasure. Let’s do this again sometime!

  david ebenbach, leapfrog press, short story month, the guy we didn't invite to the orgy and other stories, the subway stops at bryant park, university of massachusetts press, west moss

  CONTRIBUTOR

  DAVID EBENBACH
  David Ebenbach is the author of three books of short stories, including, most recently, The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy and other stories (University of Massachusetts Press), plus a novel, two books of poetry and a non-fiction guide to creativity. These books have been awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Washington Writers Publishing House Fiction Prize, and the Patricia Bibby Award, among others. Ebenbach teaches literature and creative writing at Georgetown University. Find out more at www.davidebenbach.com.

• American Micro Reviews and Interviews - http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/n-west-moss-interview

  N. WEST MOSS
  IN CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH MARTIN
  N. West Moss' work has appeared in The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, Salon, McSweeney's, Brevity, and elsewhere. She was the winner of The Saturday Evening Post’s Great American Fiction Contest as well as two Faulkner-Wisdom gold medals. The Subway Stops at Bryant Park is her first book. For more, visit nwestmoss.wordpress.com Below she discusses finding her characters while sitting quietly with her father in Bryant Park in New York City and exploring their hidden vulnerabilities.

  Elizabeth Martin: Bryant Park is less well known in the scheme of Manhattan parks, but you transform it into a place of considerable wonder in your stories. Could you describe Bryant Park for us, as you see it? What is it about this park in particular that holds such magic for you?

  N. West Moss: I am a New Yorker, and as such, I have never cared much for mid-town, a place that is usually reserved for tourists and businessmen. I'm a TriBeca girl, and a Brooklyn girl at heart. About 50 years ago, my parents bought a studio apartment right on Bryant Park. They got it cheap because it was known then as “Needle Park,” a haven for drug dealers. By the time my father was dying in about 2010, Bryant Park had been dramatically altered, and my father, unable to get around easily, spent more and more there because of its proximity. Unable to easily navigate the bicycle he used to use to get around the city, or even taxi cabs, he and I would slowly cross the street and sit in the park, quietly watching the world together for hours, just being together. We made up stories about the people we saw, and I came to understand that even mid-town Manhattan is made up of neighborhoods. This park had, in addition to tourists, regular people living nearby. There were older people, street sweepers, doormen, people who lived in the shelters and came to the park during the day, the homeless. It was a microcosm of city life that I was only able to recognize because I sat there quietly, hour upon hour, with my dying father.

  Without trying to make it so, the park was appearing in almost everything I wrote, as though it was the canvas I was painting on. After it appeared in three or four of my stories in a row, I realized what was happening, and made a conscious choice then to write about the park, using the setting as both a backdrop and a character. If, in my mourning, I could not stop thinking about it, I would allow it into my stories.

  EM: I’m glad you brought up all the people you would see while you were sitting with your father. In addition to the common connection of Bryant Park, your stories interlock as a character we meet peripherally in one story may take the lead role in another. Did you set out to do this intentionally with the collection? What was your process for writing interconnected stories?

  NWM: I did not intentionally try to weave characters throughout these stories. If I had, I think it would have been a different book. There were a few real people from the park who haunted me and kept coming up in my imagination including Omeer, Benny, and Dubonnet. These were each based on someone I'd seen and couldn't forget, and they each got their own story, and some of them showed up in one another's stories. If you sit and watch a neighborhood for long enough, you come to realize that there really are people who show up in every story, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground. Benny, for example, sweeps up leaves and garbage in the park. There's a guy I've watched for years who does that in Bryant Park. He's never looked up, never made eye contact. I've never seen him talk to anyone. I just see him work and work and work, day in and day out. I wanted to know what his life was like at home. Did he sweep up at home too, or was his apartment a mess? Was he a good guy or a serial killer? I wrote his story to find out. So this quiet person got a story of his own, but he also struck me as someone who would prefer to play a supporting part in a story, who would shun the spotlight, and so I let him rest in the background of a few other stories too. When I pictured him there sweeping in someone else's story, I put him in the story.

  EM: Your character's vulnerabilities are often front and center. I think we're often trying quite hard to hide our most vulnerable parts from others, so I wonder how intentional of a choice this was on your part. What is it about the vulnerabilities of people that intrigues you?

  NWM: Hmmm, well it wasn't a conscious choice to look at what's hidden, but I suppose I am not interested in what is most obvious about people. I am interested in what we are all hiding, what we are all ashamed about, our secret hopes and fears. Discovering a character that I want to write about is like falling in love. Sure, I like that their eyes are blue or brown, but I want to know much more than the superficial about them. I want to know what they love, and what they fear. I want to know what's annoying about them and what their own hopes once were, and what they are now that they are grown up and have had to give up on some of their dreams.

  In real life, I'm not much drawn to show-offs or bullies. The people who are pushy and seem to want to be known don't interest me either. I like to go to parties and talk to the people who are sitting in the corners. I like the quiet people with enormous hearts, and I guess that's also who I write about. I'll let other people write about the investment bankers. I'd prefer to spend time with artists and doormen and old lonely women who wrap everything they own in Saran Wrap—the more offbeat the better.

  EM: Many of these stories deal with loss from multiple points of view, across multiple generations—loss of a beloved family member, loss of a sense of self, loss of dignity—but the stories also find space for the characters to deal with and process that loss. Were there challenges, and perhaps also joys, in writing about loss from so many different points of view?

  NWM: When I stand back and look at this collection as a whole, it's as much about my father's illness and death, and the way the family rearranged itself in his absence, as it is about anything else. Dad was larger than life in our family, filled with charisma and exuberance. To watch him diminished by illness into an almost-paralyzed, confused, and shrunken man was shocking. Through his diminishment, I became an adult. I came to understand that even the most vital amongst us wither and die, so the writing of many of these stories was cathartic for me. I was exploring my grief, but also the pain of watching someone I loved suffer, day in and day out. Anyone who has lived through this kind of long-term illness knows the toll that it takes on a family. Watching a beloved person suffer every minute of every day demands a kind of love and stoicism I'd never experienced before. I wanted to look away sometimes, but I don't think any one of us in the family ever stopped thinking about him, and wanting his suffering to end, for all of his final years. I didn't understand, until then, that death could be a relief. I could finally stop worrying for my dad.

  EM: Could you speak a little about the choice to write a story like "Sky View Haven,” in which your father is a character, as fiction rather than creative nonfiction?

  NWM: Sky View Haven is an actual nursing home and almost every detail in that story really happened. The reason I chose to write it as a piece of fiction is that, when I realized what I was trying to accomplish with that story, I also knew it would be easier to do that if I could play with the facts a little bit. If this had been a memoir rather than a short story, I could have left the real story intact, I suppose, but for the more compressed form of short writing, I didn't want to introduce a lot of characters, for instance, so with the permission of my mother and sister, I took them out. It was just too much complex dynamic for an already fraught piece of under 20 pages. I also compressed time and made the story cover a weekend. In real life, Dad was in the nursing home several times, the final time for a full eight months. So with the freedom of fiction, I was able to take the detail of the woman who spoke to her dog, for instance, who was a real, endearing, heart-breaking human being, and pepper her throughout the story, as she was peppered throughout our lives for a year or so. Did I see her every time I went to visit Dad? No. Not by a long shot, but I felt she was important. Did Dad really dream about a tsunami killing people in Bryant Park? He did, but I don't remember when. I thought it would make a powerful final image for the story and so I moved it there.

  On the other hand, "Dad Died" is 100 percent creative nonfiction. It is an exploration of everything that went through my mind in the first hour after I learned of my father's death. So why did I include it? Well, the collection, by some measures is really about the death of my father and that makes the piece a fitting ending, I felt, for the collection. Dad is the reason I ever set foot into Bryant Park in the first place. I'm aware that it doesn't fit as a part of a short story collection because it is nonfiction, but I also felt it wrapped up the collection appropriately, and so I included it.

  EM: Your characters often handle challenging situations with tremendous kindness. Like in "Spring Peepers" when we're presented with parallel stories of grown men urinating in unexpected situations (to put it mildly). The immediate reaction of many people, I imagine, could range from disgust or anger to uncontrollable laughter, but your character does neither. Instead, she simply leaves with grace and allows the men to retain a bit of their dignity. Do you think that if given the chance folks generally respond with such great kindness, or are you taking an optimistic view?

  NWM: That acceptance of awful situations comes with age. Part of "Spring Peepers" that interested me was the difference in the way a 19 year old might view that situation as opposed to a 50 year old. The 19 year old was grossed out. She was disillusioned by this man she had romanticized, and never wanted to see him again. The 50 year old, on the other hand, is heartbroken by the similar scenario. This old man's infirmities remind her of her father and all she'd lived through as he slowly died. Shrinking away from someone who is physically gross, after everything she'd seen was impossible.

  If you make it to 50, chances are that you've watched people you love die. You've suffered through a thing or two yourself. You've probably cleaned up the shit and vomit and blood of someone you loved, and it didn't matter. You've been cruel and had people be cruel to you. You've humiliated yourself and failed at things. All that stuff that seems to loom so large when you’re 20 is absolutely secondary when you're 50. At 50 you would hug the old man who has peed in his pants, because by then you know how to live without regrets, and not hugging him would take a bigger emotional toll than hugging him. That's what I was struggling to convey in that story. I think I could do a better job of that now.

  I am drawn to writing that loves its characters, even the villains. Conversely, I do not tend to enjoy literature where it feels like the author dislikes her own characters. That doesn't interest me much. I tend to be moved by decency, or by people trying to be decent. And perhaps what moves me most is how cruel the world is to decent people.

  EM: What are you working on right now? What culture are you consuming?

  NWM: I am working on a book about some health problems I had recently. It's a memoir of sorts, but it's written in these tiny, poem-like chapters, each a stand-alone piece, but that together, tell a story. I'm also working on what I hope will be an angry, funny novel set in New York City. I'm tired of writing in an elegiac voice. My writing helped me cope with the loss of my father, but I don't feel elegiac anymore. I am busting out of all of that and writing in ways that feel refreshing and fun to me. I trust I'll find an audience when it's all done.

  I read a lot. I read over 50 books last year, and that doesn't include the six contests that I read for, or my friends' writing. I have piles of books everywhere and areas of particular interest to me (such as literary fiction, books about the medical humanities, cultural death practices, social insects, etc. In fact, I just finished, and can recommend the astonishingly beautiful memoir When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, written by a neurologist who learns he is dying of cancer. I read it in one afternoon—fascinating and heartbreaking and beautifully written).

  I try to read broadly and satisfy my intellectual interests without getting into an intellectual rut. Out of the 50+ books I read in 2016, I would say that only 20 or so were great, and so for 2017 I decided to try to up that percentage and broaden my reading horizons by compiling a list of books gleaned from things like the Mann-Booker short-list, The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2016, the Pulitzer lists, etc. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi appeared on several of those lists, so I'm reading that and it is gorgeous. Gyasi's ability to carry us through hundreds of years of history, while telling one long story, and somehow maintaining tension is a feat. I read to understand my world, to understand myself, and to become a better writer. Like all good and serious readers, I know I will never catch up with the pile of books that I long to read. But here's to trying.

  As for other culture, I've taken up the cello this year and have been listening to J. S Bach's cello adagios every morning while I make my coffee. On Tuesday, when I can, I go see good movies with my friend.

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Moss, N. West: THE SUBWAY STOPS AT
BRYANT PARK
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Moss, N. West THE SUBWAY STOPS AT BRYANT PARK Leapfrog (Adult Fiction) $15.95 5, 19 ISBN:
978-1-935248-91-0
A slim debut collection of stories that deftly slip into the lives of everyday New Yorkers.Before it became
the green-grassed oasis that it is today--complete with a skating rink and afternoon piano music--Bryant
Park was crime-infested, run-down, and frequented by the less palatable denizens of the city. In this
collection's first story, "Omeer's Mangoes," an Iranian doorman whose building borders the park witnesses
the beginnings of its gentrification firsthand: "They were planning on lowering the park to ground level.
Astonishing. Impossible....'If it's not at eye level,' Angelo explained to him, 'the police can't look in. It's like
a secret world where all sorts of things can happen. You don't want to know.' " But in the majority of Moss'
stories, which are set post-renovation, Bryant Park remains precisely that: a private, nestled microcosm of
the city in which the vividly mundane scenes of lives play out among the plane trees. In the gorgeously
nuanced "Beautiful Mom," a college-age woman is reunited with her stunning mother near the park's
"aggressively plain" Gertrude Stein statue, throwing into sharp relief both the mother's effervescence and
the narrator's thrumming longing for her ultimately out-of-reach love. "Dubonnet" features an elderly
widow who, encased in paranoia and rigidity, spurns her son's family that lives with her--until the Bach
playing at the park releases untapped sorrow from her husband's death, leading her to view her family and
surroundings in a new light. Moss' first-person portrayal of the crotchety woman, who wraps her porcelain
figurines in cellophane whenever she journeys to the park and nurses an irrational dislike for her daughterin-law--"I
don't even like to say her name (which is Cynthia)"--is both funny and tender, one of the
collection's strengths. "Dad Died," which embodies the collection's preoccupation with parental death, is
more a melancholy love letter than story; it overshadows "Next Time," a somewhat unfocused account of a
woman who must settle her father's estate that never develops its own voice and seems more a synthesis of
thematic elements from earlier, more distinct stories. But overall, Moss' ability to probe the rich,
complicated depths of those the city views as ordinary--its doormen, library workers, waitresses, and benchsitters--and
capture the profound currents of emotion found in the everyday animates this collection and
makes it uniquely illuminating. Definitely worth reading.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Moss, N. West: THE SUBWAY STOPS AT BRYANT PARK." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485105120/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a0e69535. Accessed 14 Jan. 2018.
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• Star Tribune
  http://www.startribune.com/review-the-subway-stops-at-bryant-park-by-n-west-moss/432980833/
  Word count: 568

  BOOKS 432980833
  Review: 'The Subway Stops at Bryant Park' by N. West Moss
  Fiction: A Midtown Manhattan park provides the setting for a series of rich character studies.
  By Maureen McCarthy Star Tribune JULY 7, 2017 — 9:41AM
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  The pleasures of people watching infuse “The Subway Stops at Bryant Park,” a captivating collection of short stories set in and around a Midtown Manhattan park.

  Across from the New York Public Library, Bryant Park welcomes a cast of unusual regulars. The old woman who rolls in on Tuesdays with a suitcase swathed in plastic wrap. The guy with waterlogged shoes and pockets full of coins filched from the fountain. The silent park sweeper who catches leaves as they fall.

  A superb storyteller, N. West Moss lets us get to know a few of these characters, while others slide in and out of view. Sometimes Bryant Park is main stage; sometimes it’s barely mentioned. With cinematic skill, Moss moves the scenes as if she has a camera rolling. In “Beautiful Mom,” the stolid statue of Gertrude Stein leans over the reunion of a daughter and her runaway mother. In “Patience and Fortitude,” the library’s stone lions witness a young woman’s discovery that a happy childhood will not “inoculate a person against the human tsunami of carelessness.”

  My favorite is “Dubonnet,” a coming-of-old-age tale in which we find out why that woman wheels a plastic-wrapped suitcase to the weekly piano concert. “I mean, I’m not naive,” she tells us, “and what with the tourists in the park, there would be criminals too, and I just wanted to be able to relax.” After spending some time in her mind, this makes sense.

  That’s the takeaway from this emotionally rich collection. Moss opens her characters’ minds to us, and we open our hearts to them.

  Many of the stories have been published elsewhere. All have a wistful quality, and there’s a recurring theme of grief, making Ross’ twin dedications to her mother and father more poignant.

  N. West Moss

  N. West Moss
  Altogether, her stories illustrate the importance of a gathering place such as Bryant Park, once a haven for druggies that was reclaimed in the 1990s. West describes the trade-offs of this revival through Omeer, a doorman across the street. The park was an eyesore when he was young and optimistic. Then the bulldozers moved in, the druggies moved out and the park became a pleasant place where Omeer could spend his lunch hours. But in time, his friendly old tenants left and “new, driven ones” hustled past the graying doorman. “As the park and the neighborhood blossomed, however, the kindness of the people seemed pushed to the side, as though kindness was the price that had to be paid for progress.”

  Such observations, set in the lives of vivid characters, promise to enrich a summer day in the park, where you can look up between chapters and contemplate the stories of the people strolling past.

  Maureen McCarthy is a Star Tribune team leader.

  The Subway Stops at Bryant Park
  By: N. West Moss.
  Publisher: Leapfrog Press, 153 pages, $15.95.

• The Literary Review
  http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-the-subway-stops-at-bryant-park-by-n-west-moss/
  Word count: 975

  Books
  A Review of The Subway Stops at Bryant Park by N. West Moss
  Martha Witt

  (Fredonia, NY: Leapfrog Press, 2017)
  The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, N. West Moss’s debut story collection, narrates a series of quiet metamorphoses, each infused with an intimate and understated yearning that leaves no character exempt. Each story, set in or around the small, iconic Bryant Park, examines individual lives that fuel the park’s human bustle.

  “Omeer’s Mangoes,” the first of eleven stories, features an Iranian-born protagonist who, despite his high hopes for a prestigious career in the United States, finds himself contented to work as a doorman in a luxury building facing Bryant Park. Through lavish descriptions in letters home, Omeer lies to his father about his life in the United States, but he realizes that his own true ambitions are actually quite modest. He takes pride in being a doorman. As Omeer stands looking out over the park, he understands the renovations underway there as symbolic of the positive transformations in his own life:

  The park became a testament to progress, to how things got steadily better over time, like the opposite of entropy, where he had read that things naturally fall apart. It made Omeer tremendously hopeful, about the park, about his life.

  Though in many ways this story is about self-fulfillment, independence, and the optimism of those who come to the United States in search of a better life, it is also a story undergirded by yearning, loneliness, and the human frailty that informs every narrative in this collection. As Omeer ages, his disconnect from others, especially his wife and son, becomes increasingly pronounced. Strangely and compellingly, though, the mounting sadness cannot extinguish the resilience at Omeer’s core.

  Each story in this collection shines an unrelenting light into the darkest corners of its characters’ lives. “Spring Peepers,” divided into Part I and Part II, juxtaposes the main character’s narrative at ages 19 and 50, respectively. The unnamed narrator’s young self, bedeviled and flattered by Bobby, one of the regulars at the bar where she works, agrees to a date. The two end up having sex. Drunk and sloppy, Bobby turns repulsive. The evening ends badly, and the next day, when Bobby returns to the bar, she must face the choice of humiliating the man in front of her co-workers or saving his pride. She chooses the latter. Feigning interest in his advances, she keeps his secret safe, an act of decency replicated almost three decades later when she goes to visit a friend of her late father’s. The old man, having drunk too much over dinner, pees on himself. Without any awareness of the urine spot “the size of a dinner plate,” he accompanies the narrator to her room and bids her goodnight. She will not shame him by mentioning the wet spot on his pants, but nor will she stay to witness his decline. When he closes the door to his room, she leaves the house and gets in her car, letting it roll quietly down the driveway. Once again she escapes, but this time it hits her that she cannot forever evade the inevitable: “Her heart was pounding. He would be dead soon, just as her father was now. He was already dying, she realized, fleeing in slow motion down the hill. Everyone was already dying.”

  The book’s thematic concerns with the connection between physical disintegration of the body and the dissolution of emotional bonds reverberate most keenly in “Lucky Cat,” a story about Suzy, a young waitress in a chic downtown restaurant. Suzy immediately falls for Tommy, a bad-boy chef who sleeps with her, but that’s beside the point. Over daily cigarette breaks in the restaurant’s basement, the two of them slowly develop an unexpected and unstated bond that transcends the physical. During one particular cigarette break, as Suzy and Tommy contend with their intensifying and unstated feelings for each other, an enormous rat scampers by. The couple keeps the creature a secret from the rest of the wait-staff, deciding to tackle the problem themselves by adopting a big tomcat they playfully name “Killer.” Not a week later, poor Killer limps into the light, his leg ripped off at the haunch. No one but Suzy and Tommy ever see the rat, a creature that looms as threatening, terrifying, and destructive as the suppressed love between them.

  Moss’s unerring ear allows her to tackle big thematic questions while never breaking away from her characters’ voices. When a near-homeless bag-lady enters a fancy Bryant Park bar in search of the “Dubonnet” she used to drink with her late-husband, she ends up having to settle for a Merlot:

  He put an enormous wine glass in front me with what looked like a tiny little bit of wine in the bottom, but it must have been an optical illusion, because when I finished it and paid (twelve dollars, by the way), I felt just right, light-headed, fuzzy, like I was wrapped up in a down comforter and nothing could touch me.

  The real illusion, Moss reveals, is any sense of invulnerability and its accompanying belief that we can avoid the daily, terrifying task of facing our own decline.

  | | |

  Martha Witt’s novel, Broken As Things Are, was published by Holt (2004) and Picador (2005). Other published works include translations of Luigi Pirandello’s plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author and The License (Italica Press, 2014), as well as Henry IV (Italica Press, 2016). Her short fiction and fiction translations have appeared in several anthologies as well as national literary journals. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at William Paterson University.

• Best New Fiction
  https://bestnewfiction.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/the-subway-stops-at-bryant-park/
  Word count: 813

  ← The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy, and other storiesMorgan’s Eddy →
  The Subway Stops at Bryant Park
  Posted on April 18, 2017 by Clifford Garstang
  subwaystopsThe Subway Stops at Bryant Park
  by N. West Moss
  Leapfrog Press (160 pages, May 2017)

  Reviewed by Clifford Garstang

  The eleven stories that make up N. West Moss’s fine debut collection are linked by both their connection to New York City’s Bryant Park and their nuanced exploration of the many facets of loss.

  We’re introduced to the park in the book’s sprawling opening story, “Omeer’s Mangoes.” Omeer is an immigrant from Iran who is proud of his position as the doorman of an apartment building that overlooks the park. He watches skeptically as the park is redeveloped from a dangerous haven for drug addicts and prostitutes into an improbable, vibrant community asset. And along with the park, Omeer’s own life undergoes a change for the better. He marries, he has a son, he’s promoted, and life is good. But then fortunes change and Omeer begins to deal with loss—his father dies, his wife and son pull away—which he does by seeking comfort in the park that he has come to love.

  Several of the book’s stories involve a woman whose father has died or is otherwise slipping away from her. There is humor in “Sky Blue Haven,” in which one of the residents of the Bryant Park apartment building is moved to a nursing home after a fall. When his daughter comes to visit, it’s clear that he suffers from dementia (he keeps calling his wife a Nazi), made all the more poignant by his anxious apologies during moments of lucidity. Similarly, the protagonists of “Spring Peepers,” “Dad Died,” and “Next Time” are coping with the loss of their fathers, one by ruminating on the problems of aging, one by recalling the most endearing moments of her relationship with her father, one by focusing on the details of settling her father’s estate while attempting to reclaim her past.

  But loss haunts other stories, as well. In “The Absence of Sound,” the protagonist discovers that his cat has died when he misses the sound of her claws on his hardwood floors. In a stunning moment, he connects this absence of sound with 9/11 when the subways stopped running beneath the library where he works. The protagonist of “Dubonnet” is an older woman still coping with the death of her husband, who now is faced with the loss of her home and freedom. She also finds comfort in the Bryant Park, accompanied by her plastic-wrapped valuables. “Milagro” is rife with loss: Benny has lost his teeth and rarely opens his mouth to speak, even when he gets false teeth because he considers them too white; when his wife leaves him, despite the new teeth, his friend Belinda gives him a chicken to keep him company; and when Belinda dies, Benny takes her dog and the two of them mourn the loss together.

  Besides loss, several of the stories deal with difficult relationships. In “Patience and Fortitude,” a young woman realizes that her long-distance relationship is over when she calls her boyfriend and a woman answers. She seeks solace by the statue of Gertrude Stein in the Bryant Park. In “Beautiful Mom,” a young girl sees her mother, a model, for the first time since she walked out on the family, and their conversation is understandably strained. This girl, too, leans on the statue of Stein. In “Lucky Cat,” a college student falls for the chef in the restaurant where she works, but quickly discovers he’s not interested in a relationship. Again, Omeer in “Omeer’s Mangoes” can’t make his marriage work, and neither can Benny in “Milagro.”

  Place is frequently employed as a linking mechanism in story collections, from Winesburg, Ohio and The Dubliners, to Knockemstiff and Later, at the Bar. Here, Bryant Park is used particularly effectively, because the place has much the same effect on the people who experience it. Its renaissance not only rescues the neighborhood, it provides a refuge to those who live and work in its shadow. Plus, it’s an expanding symbol—not only a park, with greenery and walking paths and benches, but also a place with regular classical music performances, public art, chess, a bar, and, as the title of the book suggests, a subway stop, connecting it to all of New York.

  The stories themselves are mostly quiet, without melodramatic conflict. They are about inner demons, rather than external villains, and because of this they are highly relatable. On the whole, the collection is an intimate portrait of real people, characters bound by the park.

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