“The Pitiless Kind” by Jeff Bond appeared in Issue 34 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
About four years ago, a mutual friend passed a much-longer draft of this story on to my favorite writer, Joy Williams. She mailed it back to me, stuffed into a small envelope covered in stamps. The piece was completely marked up—entire sections crossed out, the margins littered with comments like, “Never do this,” and “Sometimes this works, here it doesn’t.” She included a note, saying that, with all the markups, it might seem as if she didn’t like the story, though she did. I was stunned—not just by her generosity but also because she’d crossed out much of the writing that had received praise elsewhere. (Next to an elaborate simile for an unhappy face someone was making, Joy wrote, “She frowned—or something simple!”) Naturally I kept every one of her edits.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
Because certain aspects of it are personal, it was hard to settle on the configuration that put the right amount of distance between me and the story. In the first draft, Bryce and Devon were brothers; later drafts had them husband and wife. In my heart, they were always a same-sex couple, but it took many revisions to get to a place where the emotions belonged to the characters and not to me.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I’m on record as saying that, if Joy Williams asked me to run away with her, I would do it—if I could bring along my husband and my dog. I ended up attending two workshops she led at Juniper at UMass Amherst. After class, she’d offer to meet whoever was up for it at the Lord Jeffrey, where she’d order a Boodles martini and we’d talk and listen for what felt like hours. I would never pass up the chance to do that again.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I’m pretty sure I’d sound obsessed if I recommended something by Joy Williams, so I’ll keep quiet.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
For some reason, I always find myself working on several things at once. I’m halfway through a first draft of a novel, a darkly absurdist take on a lonely woman’s uneasy relationship with surveillance capitalism. I’m working on some new stories; I’d love to have enough to shop around a collection soon. At the same time, I’m revising a 30-year-old stage play whose author died young; I was approached by the writer’s best friend (now a friend of mine) whose dream is to see the project fully realized at long last. Like “Pitiless Kind,” the story deals with grief.
Our thanks to Jeff for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “The Pitiless Kind”here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-the-pitiless-kind.
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Jeff Bond’s stories have been published in the Carolina Quarterly, Fatal Flaw, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Bridge Eight. He lives in New York City, where he was for many years a staple of Manhattan daylife as a Happy Hour bartender. He also creates and edits video, which can be found on his website, jeffbond.nyc. He serves as a reader for the Masters Review.