Alone with All That Could Happen: On Writing Fiction

David Jauss is the author of four collections of short stories, most recently Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories and Nice People: New & Selected Stories II; two collections of poems, You Are Not Here and Improvising Rivers; and a previous craft book, Alone with All That Could Happen: On Writing Fiction (Revised & Expanded Edition). He has also edited or co-edited three anthologies, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms; The Best of Crazyhorse: Thirty Years of Poetry and Prose; and Words Overflown by Stars, a collection of essays on the craft of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by the MFA in Writing faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts. His short stories have been published in numerous magazines and reprinted in such anthologies as Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards: Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, as well as in The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Stories from the Pushcart Prize. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a James A. Michener / Copernicus Society of America Fellowship, and three fellowships from the Arkansas Arts Council and one from the Minnesota State Arts Board. His collection Black Maps received the Associated Writers and Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction. For many years he taught creative writing at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock and in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.