We celebrate short stories on selected shorts, as you know, and we've listened to one of your

stories, The Big Cat, which is fantastic. And the theme of the show is homewreckers, marriages

that combust, and that does happen in this story. But before it happens, and then again after,

there's just, to my thinking, so much texture to the way these two people are with each other,

as well as with Alida's extended

family. So I always try to track for myself even as a reader and a writer where a story comes from,

but it may be sort of like figuring out where a dream comes from. I'd love to hear about the

genesis of it. I like your take on stories because I feel the same way. I'm not sure where

they come from. Sometimes I can trace back details. It's set in Minneapolis. Some of the settings are

real. The restaurant where they reconnect the condominiums, which I've seen from the outside, and I just imagined.

And then this relationship, if you can call their, everything that happens, yeah, they're all

relationships. The daughter, of course. For me, I don't know if you feel this way.

As a fiction writer, you can pull things from life and things that are not from life.

I feel like it's our superpower.

To have like a restaurant that you say, is real, but a made-up metallurgic symphony of snoring.

I like to think that you were just really excited when you came up with that.

I was excited by the end, which is violent in a lot of ways, but what's most violent is based on

a man's dream state in which he's surrounded by the noise of women. I feel like the snoring stands in for the

noise we make as women in so many ways that appalls men, appalls partners, you know,

appalls people in the wider sense. That is a great way of thinking of it.

And I'm already thinking of a million things, like women screaming and happiness at a

restaurant, right, at a group of women at the table.

...