Elegy on Kinderklavier (31 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to the Leah and Robert Hemenway Foundation for Derelict Writers, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Truman Capote Literary Trust, the John C. Schupes family, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the University of Iowa, Baylor University, and the Linda Bruckheimer family. Without their support this book would not have been possible.

Thank you to my teachers, especially Jim McPherson, ZZ Packer, Marilynne Robinson, and Allan Gurganus. Thank you to the poet Bill Patterson for putting the right books in my hand. Thank you to David Platt for taking me around the world, to Alexander Chee for showing me how to trace the line of beauty, and to Kevin Brockmeier for sending me into the next dimension. Thank you to Ethan Canin for being my guide and advocate. Thank you to Dr. David Johnson for helping me find my way home in the storm. Thank you above all to Lan Samantha Chang for giving me chance after chance, for being a tireless reader and dedicated teacher, and for giving so much of herself to her students. Thank you, Sam, for being a patient, kind, and honest mentor, and for being my friend.

Thank you to everyone at Sarabande Books, especially Sarah Gorham, Kristen Radtke, and Kirby Gann. Thank you to Marshall
Rake and Public-Library for their artistic wizardry in helping give this book its cover. Thank you to the editors and magazines who originally published these stories, especially Andrew Feld at
The Seattle Review
, Ronald Spatz at
Alaska Quarterly Review
, Alexis Schaitkin at
Meridian Literary Review
, and Speer Morgan at
The Missouri Review
. Thank you to Deb West, Jan Zenisek, and Connie Brothers at Iowa for all magic seen and unseen. Thank you to Dianna Vitanza and Greg Garrett at Baylor for your continued support.

Thank you to those friends who helped make this book possible for me, in ways both oblique and direct, especially Alan Heathcock, Rebecca Makkai, Rachel Bailin, Quinn Dreasler, Tawny Alvarez, Jodi Johnson, and Jensen Beach. Thank you to each of my classmates at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for their tolerance, help, patience, and kindness.

I wish there were a full enough way to thank Madhuri Vijay and Tara Atkinson, without whose care, love, and faith I (and these stories) would be lost at sea, but this will have to do: with every day of my grateful life, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you to my mom and dad, for believing I could. Thank you to Bluma Hemenway for calling me to the joy of this world.

And finally, thank you to Marissa Hemenway, the love of my life, to whom I owe every word, heart, and hope in this book.

Carmen Maria Machado

Originally from Lexington, Kentucky, Arna Bontemps Hemenway's fiction has appeared in
A Public Space, FiveChapters, Ecotone, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, The Seattle Review, Meridian Literary Review,
and
Bat City Review,
and has been named a Notable/Distinguished Story of the Year in both the
Best American Short Stories
and
Best American Nonrequired Reading
anthologies. He has served as the Peter Taylor Scholar of Fiction Writing at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Truman Capote Literary Trust and the John C. Schupes Foundation. He holds a Certificate of Modern Hebrew from the University of Haifa, Israel, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Currently Hemenway lives in Waco, Texas, where he serves as Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing at Baylor University.

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