In partial completion of my Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Cornell University, I am writing a short story collection connected by sites of personal, social and structural stagnation meeting moments of incredible change. My concentration on stagnation—at the individual and infrastructural level—comes from what Willa Cather would have called my writerly “parish,” that place I return to find settings and characters: the urban Midwest. Here is a place in flux, perpetually teetering between obsolescence and unrecognizability. Buildings, decades old, crumble when the demands of their occupants outstrip the limits of their materials; suburban sprawl bites into farmland and wild prairies with uniform, clapboard teeth. As much as the landscape shifts, however, as much as it becomes unfamiliar, it is punctuated by hegemonic design. Market forces usher in a new era of young professionals. All of this sprouts from sites of obsolete industry—steel mills gone to rust and bricks, hydroelectric plants stripped for parts—and generational farms in and around The Bread Basket. The people of the urban Midwest, then, are trapped between two competing impulses: to stay, and to change. As the world around us bends towards the future, guided by unseen and unimpeachable hands, we are forced to decide what we will become, or if we will become nothing at all. It is this moment of decision where I find a deep literary richness, that I hope to explore in my stories. My interest in the short story medium comes from an adoration of its utter precision and its capacity to be surprising, structurally and at the line level. Its compressed form demands economical writing, demands cutting your craft close to the literary bone, but it also allows a great degree of poetic license. These principles guide my approach to the short story, and I am always making space on the page for rich imagery and syntactical dynamism. This approach is influenced by the contemporary writers whose work I’ve fallen in love with. From Dantiel W. Moniz’s Milk, Blood, Heat, I found an appreciation for the wickedly sharp concrete image, for lavishing the page in tangible, specific detail. This particular care for the senses of the written world lays a groundwork on which to build character and place, to situate them somewhere illusory, but real. From Manuel Muñoz’s The Consequences, I learned not only how the hidden parts of character can be brought to the surface, but also the cadence with which to do so. The rhythm of the short story—the balance of scene and summary—and when to move from one to the other and back again, when to reveal and when to hold back, are the craft elements I am least comfortable with. Muñoz provides a blueprint. His stories flow effortlessly, weaving from devastation to silence at a pace I can feel in my bones.