Collected Prose

heart complications. I called my biological mother in the hospital in Iowa and told her of his death. She died that night. I received word that both of their funerals were held on the following Saturday at exactly the same hour—his at 11 A.M. in California and hers at 1 P.M . in Iowa.

    After three or four months, I sensed that a book was going to be necessary to do justice to the project. Too many good stories were coming in, and it wasn’t possible for me to present more than a fraction of the worthy submissions on the radio. Many of them were too long for the format we had established, and the ephemeral nature of the broadcasts (a lone, disembodied voice floating across the American airwaves for eighteen or twenty minutes every month) made me want to collect the most memorable ones and preserve them in written form. Radio is a powerful tool, and NPR reaches into almost every corner of the country, but you can’t hold the words in your hands. A book is tangible, and once you put it down, you can return to the place where you left it and pick it up again.
    This anthology contains 179 pieces—what I consider to be the best of the approximately four thousand works that have come in during the past year. But it is also a representative selection, a miniaturized version of the National Story Project as a whole. For every story about a dream or an animal or a missing object to be found in these pages, there were dozens of others that were submitted, dozens of others that could have been chosen. The book begins with a six-sentence tale about a chicken (the first story I read on the air last November) and ends with a wistful meditation on the role that radio plays in our lives. The author of that last piece, Ameni Rozsa, was moved to write her story while listening to one of the National Story Project broadcasts. I had been hoping to capture bits and fragments of American reality, but it had never occurred to me that the project itself could become a part of that reality, too.
    This book has been written by people of all ages and from all walks of life. Among them are a postman, a merchant seaman, a trolley-bus driver, a gas-and-electric-meter reader, a restorer of player pianos, a crime-scene cleaner, a musician, a businessman, two priests, an inmate at a state correctional facility, several doctors, and assorted housewives, farmers, and ex-servicemen. The youngest contributor is barely twenty; the oldest is pushing ninety. Half of the writers are women; half are men. They live in cities, suburbs, and in rural areas, and they come from forty-two different states. In making my choices, I never once gave a thought to demographic balance. I selected the stories solely on the basis of merit: for their humanity, for their truth, for their charm. The numbers just fell out that way, and the results were determined by blind chance.
    In an attempt to make some order out of this chaos of voices and contrasting styles, I have broken the stories into ten different categories. The section titles speak for themselves, but except for the fourth section, “Slapstick,” which is made up entirely of comic stories, there is a wide range of material within each of the categories. Their contents run the gamut from farce to tragic drama, and for every act of cruelty and violence that one encounters in them, there is a countervailing act of kindness or generosity or love. The stories go back and forth, up and down, in and out, and after a while your head starts to spin. Turn the page from one contributor to the next and you are confronted by an entirely different person, an entirely different set of circumstances, an entirely different worldview. But difference is what this book is all about. There is some elegant and sophisticated writing in it, but there is also much that is crude and awkward. Only a small portion of it resembles anything that could qualify as “literature.” It is something else, something raw and close to the bone, and whatever skills these authors might lack, most of their stories are unforgettable. It is difficult for me to imagine that anyone could read through this book from beginning to end without once shedding a tear, without once laughing out loud.
    If I had to define what these stories were, I would call them dispatches, reports from the front lines of personal experience. They are about the private worlds of individual Americans, yet again and again one sees the inescapable marks of history on them, the