Author Pinckney Benedict wrote his latest work, a book of short stories called Miracle Boy and Other Stories over a period of 15 years. The title story centers on the ramifications of an incident of bullying in which a group of boys steals the shoes of the young Miracle Boy, whose feet were amputated and reattached after a farming accident. After the publication of his first novel, Dogs of God, a reviewer writing for New Statesman & Society stated that “Benedict couldn't write a bad sentence if his life depended on it.”

Benedict’s past works also include two collections of short fiction, Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard. He has published short stories in numerous magazines, among them Esquire and Ontario Review. Benedict says the farm on which he was raised in southern West Virginia is the place he imagines while writing. His influences include his mentor, Joyce Carol Oates, who was his inspiration to become a writer. Benedict currently teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and Queens University of Charlotte. I spoke with him by phone about his new collection of short stories and the craft of writing.

Can you describe your writing process?

Pinckney Benedict: I have a job and a family, so for me, it’s catch as catch can. I wish I had a regular writing schedule, but it’s when I have time and when my family duties allow it.

How would you compare and contrast writing and teaching?

I try to integrate the two activities. If I didn’t make my teaching matter to my writing and my writing matter to my teaching, I would feel too split by the two halves of my life. I approach my students’ stories as if they were my stories in terms of respect and in terms of reading them with a critical eye.

What’s your favorite part of Miracle Boy and Other Stories?

I particularly like the blurb from Elizabeth Strout ("These are amazing stories…not a story here…is not the real thing,"), but beyond that, it is very hard to choose. The beauty of this book is that because it’s from a small press, there’s nothing in it that I didn’t want to be in there. So, I’d be hard-put to choose a favorite passage.

What makes this latest book different from your other work?

It’s called Miracle Boy and Other Stories because that’s the title that speaks to all of the book. The entire collection speaks to the supernatural or the strange, and heretofore, my work has been very realist. Recently, I’ve become more interested in the surreal. My hope for this book is that if it has any effect at all, I’d like it to take the curse off the literary short story. Right now, short stories are only read by writers. When Hemingway was writing short stories, it wasn’t just writers and university professors who read them. I don’t mean for these stories to be these gravestones of seriousness, as the modern short story is thought to be. I would dislike it if my own work were thought of in that way.

Names play an interesting role in the title story. The chief characters, young boys, are all known by nicknames like Lizard, Geronimo, Eskimo Pie, and Miracle Boy. Why?

It would have been a very different story if their names were Jack or John or Todd. Miracle Boy obviously isn’t called "Miracle Boy" by his dad or any of the other adults in the story—only by the other kids. It’s a tribal name. I wanted to convey that this story takes place entirely within the world of these kids. We know them not as the adults would know them, but as they know each other.

Psychological versus physical punishment seems to be a theme in Miracle Boy. Why is that?

The other two kids in the story are able to flush the incident out of their minds because they have been punished and redeemed, but Lizard hasn’t. He still has to find some way to restore himself. When he talks about the shoes to those other kids, they don’t even know what he’s talking about, because they’ve received what, in their minds, is a just punishment. As humans, part of us wants to escape punishment, but part of us realizes that it’s important, both psychologically and spiritually. It’s important to us that we receive what we have earned. I don’t think Lizard’s mother intended psychological punishment; I think she really hopes these kids will get together and become friends. I think she sees Miracle Boy as someone who could really use a friend because of the loss of his feet. She tries to bring about that. I don’t think it’s an intentional guilt trip. I think she’d be very surprised that it had the effect that it had.

How do ideas come to you? How do you then flesh these out into detail-rich stories like Miracle Boy?

My writing always starts as an image or series of images. In the case of Miracle Boy, I had an image of this kid who had his limbs reattached, which is a very common occurrence where I grew up. I grew up on a farm in West Virginia. Now, it’s a pretty routine thing, because farming is an extremely dangerous occupation. It’s more dangerous than being a cop. Losing limbs is a real possibility. But I remember when reattaching a limb seemed miraculous. That image combined with other images, like the shoes and the Jacob’s ladder. I had one of those toys as a kid and I can remember being continually amazed by it because I couldn’t figure out how it worked. Those things begin to kick around in your head as separate stories until you realize they’re all the same story.

Does your taste influence your work and vice versa?

I read a lot of old books, a lot of old, late 19th-century, early 20th-century ghost stories. None of the writers I read are particularly literary writers; they were all popular writers of their day. I’m not particularly drawn to literary fiction. I like stuff that has a lot of story to it, and I think I write that way. My writing is heavily plotted and highly narrated. I reread The Island of Dr. Moreau recently, and it’s at least competently written, if not beautifully written. I don’t worry about the loveliness of the line. I try to keep people interested in a story in the 17 or 20 pages that it runs.

I was in a class of yours in which the topic was the virtue of the flawed novel, a work that is so bad it’s good. Do you think you’ve ever written one of these works?

All of my work is defective in some way. Nothing will ever be what I hope it is when I start out to write. You know, I have a lot of ambition. I want each story I write to change the world, or change my readers’ lives forever, or change my life forever. My stories all end up falling short of these goals—they go astray from their ideal forms.

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Pinckney Benedict's Miracle Boy and Other Stories is available through Press 53, an independent publisher out of Winston-Salem.