These selections — four stories and four essays by the authors explaining their origins — appeared in our Fall 1998 issue, along with nine other stories and essays. The issue was the inspiration of Thomas E. Kennedy, a TLR advisory editor and a good writer himself. Fortunately, he knows many other important writers who were willing to allow their stories to be reprinted and to write pieces that explore the sources of those stories. They all appeared to have enjoyed the opportunity, and we can profit from the results.
      The stories of stories present their own fascinations. If the house of fiction has many rooms, the sources essays in this issue help us understand why. The architects behind each structure and design are all such different people, working with such varied materials and seeds of inspiration. No wonder that each time we open a new door, we enter a new reality.
      Stories start in the lives of their writers but then take on a life of their own. Even when most of the details match "what really happened," they are not autobiographical portraits or reports. The shaping into fiction transforms the material through the rhythms of language, word choice, selection, and sequence. Experience becomes art because the root events—as much as they may appear to dominate the page—are only one part of the creation. And by reading what's on the page, we participate in the conception and make someone else's story ours. Of course, exploring the raw stuff of stories helps us understand what goes on in the heads of writers, the many ways in which they come up with ideas for new fictions, but not the mysteries of the art, how those ideas become works that matter. Sources are beginnings, first steps, not outcomes.
      In this era of hidden cameras and behind-the-scenes exposés, peeks into origins do contain a degree of gossip value. At a certain level writers and artists share the celebrity value of public personalities, and though the traumas of their lives rarely make the checkout counter scandal sheets, revelations of their personal secrets can get our attention. But, ultimately, the true value of these essays comes from what they tell us about the stories the sources engendered.
      As insights into writers' ways of making, these essays offer pleasures parallel to the stories themselves. They allow us to re-experience the fictions from another perspective, echoing and enriching the initial reading. This time we view the story from behind the scenes, watching the maker go about his or her business of discovering material and linking ideas. Learning how stories are made is quite different from an exposé of the magician's bag of tricks. Rather than feeling cheated by a slight of hand, we come away enriched, filled with admiration at the writer's ability to turn raw material into something wonderful.

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