Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Christopher Boucher is the author of the widely praised novels Golden Delicious, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, and Big Giant Floating Head. He teaches literature and writing at Boston College and is the managing editor of the literary journal Post Road.

Raymond Carver (1938 — 1988), whose fiction reinvigorated the short story, has become an important influence on writers across the globe. Born in Clatskanie, Oregon on May 25, 1938, The London Times called him “The American Chekhov” for his attention to detail and intimate portraits of working-class people struggling to attain the so-called American Dream. He was also a prolific and accomplished poet. He began writing fiction and poetry in high school and studied fiction under the novelist John Gardner at California State University Chico. He attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1963–1964. Carver’s fiction garnered numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award in 1983, which allowed him to write full time for the next five years. His collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please was nominated for the National Book Award, while Cathedralwas nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1984. His final story collection is Where I’m Calling From. He met the Northwest writer Tess Gallagher in 1977. She would become his closest companion and collaborator for a decade. The two married in Reno in 1988. His work continues to be adapted to the stage and film world-wide. Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) featured nine Carver stories and premiered to critical acclaim at Lincoln Center. Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” became the basis for the play inside Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2015). Carver died at his home in Port Angeles, Washington on August 2, 1988 at the age of 50, having just completed A New Path to the Waterfall, a book of poems now included in his posthumous All of Us: The Collected Poems. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.

Donna Lynne Champlin is an OBIE, Drama Desk, Princess Grace and Gracie Award–winning actress best known as Paula Proctor on The CW’s Emmy award–winning Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and as Barb in Netflix’s Feel The Beat. Her Broadway credits include James Joyce’s The Dead, By Jeeves, Hollywood Arms, Sweeney Todd, and Billy Elliot. Off-Broadway, she has been featured in First Lady Suite, Almost Maine, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Working, The Qualms, and As You Like It and The Taming of the Shrew in Shakespeare in the Park. On screen she has been seen in The First Lady; The Good Doctor; Blacklist; Another Period; The Good Wife; The Good Fight; Birdman; Downsizing; and Yes, God, Yes. Champlain was trained at Carnegie Mellon and Oxford Universities. Most recently, she starred alongside Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber in Netflix’s The Perfect Couple.

Jane Kaczmarek is best known for her role as Lois on Malcolm in the Middle, for which she received 7 consecutive Emmy nominations as well as nominations for the Golden Globe and SAG awards. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Yale School of Drama, Kaczmarek made her television debut on The Paper Chase and Hill Street Blues. On stage, she has appeared on Broadway and off, and for 6 seasons at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Her recent theater credits include Long Day's Journey Into Night with Alfred Molina and in a co-production of Our Town with Deaf West Theatre and the 2023 Tony Award–winning Pasadena Playhouse. Most recently, Kaczmarek appeared in The Changeling on AppleTV+ and the short film Now I Lay Me Down. Her favorite job is raising her three kids and reading/hosting Selected Shorts across America.

Wendi Kaufman (1964 – 2014) was a writer whose fiction appeared in The New Yorker, Fiction, and Other Voices, and her stories have been anthologized in Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops, Elements of Literature, and Faultlines: Stories of Divorce. She received a literary fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, was the winner of a Mary Roberts Rhinehart award for short fiction, and a Breadloaf Scholar in Fiction. From 2005–2009, Kaufman curated "The Happy Booker," a prominent Washington, DC–based book blog, and was a frequent contributor to The Washington Post and Washingtonian magazine. Helen On 86th Street and Other Stories was her first full-length collection.

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. The winner of The Frost Medal, as well as both the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap, she is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the winner of many other awards and honors, including the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. Olds teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of Isidor Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her latest collection, Balladz, was published in 2022.

Corey Stoll recently starred in the 2023 Broadway revival of Appropriate alongside Sarah Paulson, for which he received Tony and Drama League Award nominations. Additional theater credits include Julius Caesar, Othello, and his Joe A. Callaway Award–winning performance in Troilus and Cressida for Shakespeare in the Park, leading the Classic Stage Company’s 2019 production of Macbeth, Plenty at the Public Theater, and A View from the Bridge on Broadway. On television, he is best known for House of Cards, for which he received Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice, and Satellite Award nominations. Other on-screen work includes roles in series The Strain, Billions, Ratched, Transatlantic, Girls, and Law & Order: LA, and the films Midnight in Paris, in which his performance as Ernest Hemingway earned him a Spirit Award nomination, Ant-Man and its sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Black Mass, Café Society, First Man, and Steven Spielberg’s 2021 adaptation of West Side Story.

Rob Yang recently wrapped shooting a major role for Nick Rowland’s feature film She Rides Shotgun, in which he stars alongside Taron Egerton. He can be seen in Season 2 of American Rust on Prime Video, where he starred opposite Jeff Daniels. Yang can also be seen in the Paramount+ series Rabbit Hole opposite Kiefer Sutherland. Additional credits include the nine-time Emmy Award–winning series Succession as the role of Lawrence Yee for HBO, on Fox’s The Resident and The Americans, and Netflix’s Living with Yourself. He starred in the 2022 film The Menu opposite Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Fiennes, and Nicholas Hoult, reuniting him with Succession director Mark Mylod and producer Adam McKay. On stage, Yang most recently starred in Catch as Catch Can at Playwrights Horizons.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing and Literature Program at The Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a one-year, non-credit intensive for emerging novelists. Wolitzer, who was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, is the radio and podcast host of Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts.

CREDITS

“The Space,” by Christopher Boucher, from Electric Literature (January 3, 2024). Copyright © 2024 by Christopher Boucher. Used by permission of the author.

"Why Don't You Dance?" by Raymond Carver, from Where I'm Calling From. Copyright 1980, 1981, and 1988 by Raymond Carver, renewed 1991 by Tess Gallagher. Used with permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

“Helen on Eighty-Sixth Street,” by Wendi Kaufman, from Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories (Stillhouse Press, 2014). Copyright © 2014 by Wendi Kaufman. Used by permission of David Kaufman.

“Last Look,” by Sharon Olds, from Stag’s Leap (Knopf, 2012). First appeared in The American Poetry Review (November 1, 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Aragi, Inc.