Introduction / Lee Montgomery -- Place / Dorothy Allison -- Hard up for a hard-on / Steve Almond -- When to keep it simple / Rick Bass -- Revisioning The great Gatsby / Susan Bell -- Character motivation / Aimee Bender -- Fairy tale is form, form is fairy tale / Kate Bernheimer -- Material / Lucy Corin -- There will be no stories in heaven / Tom Grimes -- The mercurial worlds of the mind / Matthea Harvey -- Making a scene : fiction's fundamental unit / Anna Keesey -- Le mot incorrect / Jim Krusoe -- Shakespeare for writers : sixteen lessons / Margot Livesey -- Lost in the woods / Antonya Nelson -- Performing surgery without anesthesia / Chris Offutt -- (Mis)Adventures in poetry / D. A. Powell -- The telling that shows : some provocations from inside the story / Peter Rock -- Generating fiction from history and/or fact / Jim Shepard.