“There Is No Leslie Forever” by Evan Morgan Williams appeared in Issue 47 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
This may sound crazy, but this story actually began as a wildly expansive retelling of the 23rd Psalm. You can still find bits and pieces of it in the story. And overall, the narrator persists in seeing himself in the situation as a beneficiary, although the degree to which he sheds this self-concept is kind of the major movement within the story.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
The most difficult part of this story was narrating the consensual versus nonconsensual sex (this is not a spoiler; it’s pretty obvious what’s at stake by the very first page). I’d like to think the story shows respect for all the characters, even as the consensuality of the sexual encounter is ambiguous.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Cahokia Jazz, an alternate-history noirish novel by Francis Spufford, was my favorite read of the year.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I’d love to have a drink with Maile Meloy to talk about our shared Montana stories.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m working on a collection of stories based on, or inspired by, my many years of teaching in a distressed public school. Back when I was actively teacher, I avoided this subject matter; it felt too much like appropriation or exploitation of my students’ lives. Now that I am retired, I have begun to write those stories, and I am learning that the difference between what constitutes a student story versus what constitutes a teacher story actually becomes THE story. Every one of my stories has tension around that question.
Our thanks to Evan for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “There Is No Leslie Forever” here.
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Evan Morgan Williams is the recipient of a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellowship. He is the author of four collections of stories: Thorn (BkMk Press, 2014), Canyons (2018), Stories of the New West (Main Street Rag, 2021), and The Divide (Cornerstone Press, 2026). He has published over 75 stories in journals including Kenyon Review, Witness, and Zyzzyva. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana (1991). A member of the Deaf/HOH community, he is retired after 29 years of teaching in a public school.