In each of the seventeen stories included in this collection there is a mental line you have to cross before you know you’re on the free side. Then you no longer fear that big mean train rumbling down the tracks, about to render you to bones and pulp for the coyotes to pick over. The IRS can send all the threatening letters they like but it’s only mail. A storm can tumble you down the hill you’ve just climbed up and it’s okay—you kind of liked it down there in the shade of that old oak anyway. You can rest. You are safe now.

Then too, who can resist those free rubber jar-lid grips advertising banks? I’ve even taken cash envelopes and deposit tickets because they were free. Shout the word “free” in a crowd and watch everybody come running for theirs, whether salvation or information. The written word—FREE—jumps out at you in bold print. “Safe” does too.

For Sister in “Vacation Bible School” salvation is safe and free. The devil can’t tempt her in church. They serve free Kool-Aid at Bible school and she gets to ride in an air-conditioned car, even if it is with her picky teacher, Dot, who Sister figures rightly for a fake.

Horses are free, and boys are safe from having to work all summer in tobacco in “Vision Quest” (Habersham Review, 1997). But only if those boys have done something wrong and wind up in a reform school bent on curing them with rewards, such as a wagon-train journey up and down the east coast of the United States.

Food is free for a starving child, safe at her grandmother’s house, in “Once Upon a Summer” (Oxford American, April 1999); love is free in “In a Car Going Nowhere” (Ontario Review, Fall 1997), and in “Name of Love” (Story, Fall 1998). Company is free for an ailing old man in “Sunday Visit,” no matter that the visitor is a mad man. Knot finds a paper sack of stolen money—free—in an alley, in “Sudden Money.” In “Peddling Bub” (Story, Winter 1996) stolen cigarettes are free for Trish, but she is safe only in death.

Other stories in this collection are “Along a Wider River” (The Georgia Review, Fall 1997);“The Odds are Against It” (Ontario Review, Spring 1999); “Black Cloud” (Denver Quarterly, Spring 1998); “Wrong Season” (Ontario Review, Winter 1996); “Lovie’s Baby” (Honorable mention in Story contest, 1999); and “Something Safe, Something Free” (Chattahoochee Review, Winter 2003).

Three recent stories have been included—free for the taker of this collection—“Going to Jackson” (Ontario Review, Fall 2005) “American Breakfast-Mexican Dinner” (The Georgia Review, Fall 2004) and “Dumdum” (Chattahoochee Review, Fall 2004).

When I started writing fiction, seriously, around 1987, I wrote short stories only between novels, the way some writers take vacations, to break the spell of those fictive worlds I’d created, to feel less bound to the bigger realm of the novel, of which I was too weary to bring whole into being again so soon without a rest. I wasn’t quite ready either to be thrust back into the cold stark light of actual living. Novels were long, short stories were short—I could manage that. I didn’t take the short story form seriously, or maybe I figured novels might make money but short stories wouldn’t—and didn’t. Whatever the reason, it was years before I wrote short stories with soul, like my novels, before I began reading the best and the brightest to see how it was done. But even then I wasn’t very good at it—until Lois Rosenthal, long-time editor of Story, got hold of me. She raked me over for my careless research and over-describing; she made me look, really look, at each word, each sentence, each paragraph, then the full story. During our editing session on “Peddling Bub,” she was down-to-business and no talk of weather on the telephone; she shamed me so for my purple prose I wondered why she ever wanted the story in the first place. “Name of Love”—no different. Rosenthal hammered me on the head for “such a sweet ending.” I got kind of smart, in a sweet self-conscious way, and asked what would she have me do, end with the sister leaving her brother in the woods? “Yes,” she said, “write it and get it to me.” She grumbled on about everybody writing stories with sweet endings; not long after that, she grumbled about everybody writing mean stories. After publication, she praised me, sending notes I held and reread till the edges of the paper softened and frayed. I still have them.

In the fall of 1996, I was reading in Athens one evening for the annual Food Harvest event at UGA. A newly published author, not used to much attention when I read, I was about halfway through my story, “Along a Wider River,” when I spied a man in the audience with a white beard and Santa Claus cheeks smiling and nodding. I figured he was drunk. During break between readers, I was signing novels, when this “drunk” stepped forward and introduced himself as “the” (my word) Stanley Lindburg, fiction editor of The Georgia Review. I had sent him one-hundred-and-one stories over the years and got back for my trouble only form rejections. I felt like an old hussy flirting with a young man. At the UGA event Stan told me he liked my story—I would settle for that, though I preferred “love.” I would hold it in my heart when times got hard and nobody knew me from the woman down the road who raised dogs. During our editing sessions on the phone, Stan was ill and short of breath but spent it graciously on correcting my shoddy writing in “Along a Wider River.” I could hear him wheezing, long pauses. He didn’t have to shame me. I would never overwrite again; I would never again fake the truth of a story.

Shannon Ravenel: what Southern writer doesn’t hope to be included in her annual anthology, New Stories From the South: The Year’s Best? I can boast of having three stories Ravenel liked: “Along a Wider River” (1997), “Name of Love” (1999) and “Dumdum” (2005). I can boast that she bestowed legitimate short-story writing status on me by once inquiring about publishing this collection. I still find myself hoping with every story published that she will see it, that she will like it. Hoping to make it again on her list of “the best.”