Chris Bohjalian is the author of eleven novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind, and Midwives. His work has been translated into 22 languages and twice become movies. Visit Chris at www.chrisbohjalian.com.

Joshua Henkin’s first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, was a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year. His second novel, Matrimony, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Book Sense Pick, and a Borders Original Voices Selection. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College. Visit Joshua at www.joshuahenkin.com.

Perrin Ireland’s most recent novel is Chatter (Algonquin Books). Her work has been published in AGNI Magazine (fiction and poetry), The Boston Globe (book review), and Post Road (nonfiction). Visit Perrin at www.perrinireland.com.

Aryn Kyle's award winning first novel The God of Animals (Scribner) was a national bestseller and has been translated into nine foreign languages. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Best American Short Stories 2007 and elsewhere. Aryn lives in Missoula, Montana, with her boyfriend (writer Kevin Canty), two neurotic cats, and the cutest corgi puppy in the world. She is currently completing her short story collection, You Belong To Me. Visit Aryn at www.arynkyle.com.

Kelly McMasters grew up in Shirley, Long Island, also the subject of her new book Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Newsday, Metropolis, and Time Out New York, among others. She teaches writing at mediabistro.com and in the undergraduate writing program and Journalism Graduate School at Columbia University. She is also the co-director of the KGB Nonfiction Reading Series in the East Village. She lives in Manhattan and northeast Pennsylvania with her husband, the painter Mark Milroy. Visit Kelly at www.kellymcmasters.com.

––Where did you go on your first date, and with whom?

Bohjalian: My wife and I have been together since we were eighteen years old. We met when we were just beginning the second semester of our first year of college. It was February 2nd, a Friday night. She went to Smith, a women’s college, and I went to Amherst. Amherst had once been all-male but had become coeducational a few years before I arrived. Nonetheless, the college was still figuring out what it meant to be a school with women as well as men, and not merely a massive fraternity with scholarly grownups encouraging us to read a little Pushkin and Frost once in a while.

Henkin: I was in a high school graduating class of eighty, and many of us had known each other since kindergarten, and I had the good fortune, subsequently, to spend the vast majority of my years as a single person living in college towns, where people don’t go on dates. You just hang out, and well … your intentions are made known, if often too drunkenly. All of which is to say that I’ve never really been on a date in my life. But if pressed, I’d say my first date took place freshman year of college, when the girl I had a crush on was brought back to the dorms by my roommate, who also had a crush on her. Trivial Pursuit was played, and deciding that I cared more for this young woman than I did for my roommate, I chose to stick around. So our first date, of a sort, was a date for three—me, my roommate, and this girl playing Trivial Pursuit (a game I hate!) in the dormitory common room. Our real first date (also of a sort) took place a week later when, the Friday afternoon of freshman parents weekend, I ran into her outside her dorm. “What are you doing tonight?” she asked. “I’m having dinner at Hillel with my parents,” I said lamely. “I’m Jewish, too,” she said. Or some such thing. So. My first date. Me, this girl, and my parents at Harvard Hillel.

Ireland: We walked to the outdoor movie theater on the naval base at Pearl Harbor where we lived. I wore a green and blue muumuu and bare feet; he wore a yellow and red aloha shirt and bare feet. He was the boy next door, or, technically, the boy one room over, since we lived in a two-family, L-shaped duplex and our bedroom windows were catty-cornered where the wings of the building met. The sounds of his wars with his younger brother offended my pacifist sensibilities.

Kyle: It was a pretty big deal: I was in seventh grade, and Randy Scotting and I met at the mall. We had a romantic dinner of Sbarro pizza and Orange Julius under the florescent lights of Café Court, then went to see King Ralph at the mall’s movie theater. Afterwards, my mom picked us up in her minivan and took us to the Dairy Queen drive-through on the way home.

McMasters: His name was John and I can see his face perfectly. Curly black hair, brown eyes fringed with dark lashes, and translucent white skin with a smudge of freckles across his nose (funny, now that I think about it, he looked a lot like the man I married). He was a bit of a toughie, whatever that means for a third grader, and I remember clearly trying to impress him by being as much of a tomboy as possible. This included not crying when I walked straight into a steel rung on the jungle gym at recess, which cracked me so hard across the face I blacked out. Apparently, it worked. We went to the Halloween dance at our public school.