“Trouble” by Scott Nadelson appeared in Issue 44 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear a little more about this story.
This story started with a place—a lake in the Oregon Cascade mountains where my family spends a few days every summer. One year we found a stag that had been poached out of season, half in and half out of the lake; the water is so cold, that the submerged part was perfectly preserved, while the part outside was decaying. When I saw that, I suddenly had an image of a character I’d been writing about spending time in this place and finding the stag, and what that might mean for him as he’s trying to find stability after being incarcerated. That state of being caught in-between, along with a hint of menace in this incredibly beautiful place, got my imagination going.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
I struggled for a long time to write about this character, Matt, after he gets out of prison—I kept finding myself bogged down in exposition, trying to cover too much ground. When I finally decided to go very short, to compress everything into a few pages and give a the story a lighter touch, focusing in particular on the place and how it changes when a new person shows up, I felt a huge sense of relief, and the story came together much more quickly.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I’ll go with the first one that comes to mind, which is one I just finished: Eastbound by the French writer Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore. I’m not sure when the original version came out, but the English translation was published by Archipelago Books in 2023. It’s a gorgeous, fast-paced portrait of two strangers in a fleeting but life-altering encounter on the Trans-Siberian Railway—a story of escape and discovery, perfect in just over a hundred and twenty pages.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I already got to live this dream: I had a drink with Edna O’Brien twenty-some years ago, when she was about 70, and I was maybe 28. We talked about insomnia, and she gave me romantic advice. She also kept wavering between complaining about how she couldn’t write anymore, how she was finished for good, and talking in depth about the novel she was working on—and after that she went on to write maybe seven or eight more books before she died earlier this year. I can’t imagine topping that one.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
“Trouble” is part of a story collection I’ve been working on for a while. All the stories are very short, originally drafted in a single sitting and meant to be read that way, and they all revolve around failure in some way or another. I set out to write fifty of them to celebrate (or mourn) my fiftieth birthday and accidentally wrote fifty-one, one more failure among many. I’ve been imagining the collection as my middle-aged punk album.
Our thanks to Scott for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Trouble” here.
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Scott Nadelson is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Trust Me and the story collection While It Lasts, winner of the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, STORY, Five Points, and the Best American Short Stories.