Music for Wartime Read online

  Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, Richard Russo, Geraldine Brooks, Dave Eggers, and Kevin Brockmeier kindly chose stories included in this collection for anthologies. I’m still geeking out about this.

  These stories have benefited from innumerable readers and volunteer editors over the years. Notable among them: Rachel DeWoskin, Gina Frangello, Dika Lam, Emily Gray Tedrowe, and Zoe Zolbrod gave me invaluable edits on “The Miracle Years of Little Fork” and “Good Saint Anthony Come Around” as well as writerly friendship as this book came together. A lifetime ago, David Huddle encouraged early drafts of “Suspension,” “Acolyte,” and “The Worst You Ever Feel.” He also made me, in a thousand ways, a better writer. Julie Snyder, Ben Calhoun, and Sarah Koenig at This American Life put a dent in my bucket list by letting me read “The November Story” on air—but more important, Julie Snyder’s edits helped improved the story tremendously. Years ago, before this book looked anything like it does now, someone got me a well-intentioned but premature introduction at Chronicle Books. They wisely turned down what was an inchoate collection, but an editor there named Brianna Smith took the time to write me back and suggest that the stories might eventually coalesce around some of the themes she’d noticed—notably, music or war. Oh.

  Some further debts: The violinist Kathleen Thomson kindly read both “The Worst You Ever Feel” and “Cross” for musical accuracy; remaining mistakes are mine. A childhood friend, Elizabeth Pulbratek Randisi, went and grew up into an estate planning lawyer and gamely helped me figure out the inheritance details in “The Museum of the Dearly Departed.” Any lingering plausibility issues are no reflection of her excellent legal skill. Alex Ross’s 2009 New Yorker article “The Music Mountain” launched my obsession with the Marlboro Music School and Festival, and allowed me to imagine the place that would hover in the background of “Cross.” At a dinner one night, Brian Bouldrey told me a story about the composer István Márta; I went back to my hotel room and wrote “The Singing Women.”

  This book would not exist yet if it weren’t for the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ragdale Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  I was blessed to be born into a strange and artistic family, one that I’m still struggling, in many ways, to understand. But I was handed more stories than I could ever decipher or use, and—more important—I was instilled from the beginning with the understanding that the arts were, while perhaps not the best way to make a living, the best way to make a life.

  Jon Freeman is now married to a busy writer but used to be married to someone with delusions of being a writer. I’m not sure whether my neuroses were greater now or then, but he’s put up with all of them and edited the hell out of every story here. This book is for him.

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