Jennifer Haigh's new novel, The Condition, was published in July by HarperCollins. Her first, Mrs. Kimble, won the 2004 PEN/Hemingway Award; her second, Baker Towers, the PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, Five Points, Good Housekeeping and many other periodicals. Visit Jennifer at www.jenniferhaigh.com.

Margot Livesey grew up in a boys’ private school in the Scottish Highlands where her father taught, and her mother, Eva, was the school nurse. After taking a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York in England she spent most of her twenties working in shops and restaurants and learning to write. Her first book, a collection of stories called Learning By Heart, was published by Penguin Canada in 1986. Since then Margot has published six novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona and The House on Fortune Street. Visit Margot at www.margotlivesey.com.

Mark Jude Poirier is the author of the novels Modern Ranch Living and Goats, as well as the short story collections Unsung Heroes of American Industry and Naked Pueblo. He is also the editor of the anthology Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us. Poirier also wrote the screenplay for Smart People and is adapting Alice Munro’s short story Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage for film.

Stacey Richter is the author of My Date with Satan and Twin Study. Her stories have been widely anthologized and have won many prizes, including four Pushcart prizes and the National Magazine Award. Find out more about her work at www.staceyrichter.com.

Daniel Wallace is the author of Big Fish and most recently Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. Visit Daniel at www.danielwallace.org.


––Name a memorable road trip

Haigh: The summer after I graduated college, my boyfriend, whom I’ll call J, invited me to drive down to visit his grandparents, who had recently retired to Lake City, Florida. He neglected to tell me that we wouldn’t be traveling in his car, but in a twenty year-old Winnebago camper his grandparents had left behind in Connecticut when the bank foreclosed on their chicken farm.

Livesey: The first summer I visited the States I traveled round first by bus and then hitching. After a rather peculiar bus trip from New York to Chicago - everyone on the bus seemed to be in flight from something - I hitch hiked alone from Dayton, Ohio - I am no longer sure why I was in Dayton - to Athens, Georgia.

Poirier: Tucson to Puerto Penasco, Mexico. (Rocky Point). 1984-1987. During those years my friends and I made this trip several times. In my memory, they all blend together.

Richter: One fall, I convinced my friend Peter to accompany me on a drug-themed road trip from California to Connecticut, where we were in college. I had just read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and was impressed by the way Thompson was committed to being fucked-up all the time, like an athlete, but of dissipation. When I brought up the idea with Peter he just said okay. This, in retrospect, seems strange. Peter was more easy-going than most of my friends, but he was also less bored and seemed to have more to live for than a lot of us (me), and what I was proposing had a sort of suicidal tinge to it. But I guess it sounded fun. And at that time, we saw no reason why we wouldn’t live forever. We hadn’t read the chapter on Thanatos yet.

Wallace: I took a year off between high school and college. There were a lot of good reasons to do this, but the main one was that I didn’t get into any of the colleges I thought I wanted to go to: Columbia, Georgetown, Brown. I did get into my backup, Southwestern at Memphis, but I had no intention of going there. I only applied because I knew I could get in and my guidance counselor made me, suspecting, perhaps, that I was over-achieving with these other schools. I was not a good student, and, in fact, just graduated from college this year: I’m a class of 2008 University of North Carolina alumni. It feels good. Anyway, at the end of that year (1978) my girlfriend Mary and I decided to drive through America, beginning in Birmingham, Alabama where we were born and raised, and heading west.