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Now available for preorder:
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S T E P H E N   D I X O N .

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Copyright McSweeney's
McSweeney's Internet Tendency
January 2004

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Underway
January, 2004
By Stephen Dixon

I'm presently working on Selected Uncollected Stories. I'm going through about a 100, maybe more, stories of mine that have never been in collections but have been in magazines, and am rewriting each one from the beginning. I'm learning a lot about my early writing—some of these stories are 40 years old. Sometimes it's as if I'm a teacher going over the work of an apprentice writer. I've about 270 pages done and I expect it to be an enormous collection, probably, yes, two collections: Part One and Part Two. It's rewarding work, so much getting done for the time put in, and resurrecting these stories and giving them new life in different ways. Some of them I didn't even know I'd written. I've a bookcase of the magazines with all my stories in them, and am going through them one by one. The stories will be listed in the table of contents in the order that I'm rewriting them. If I tabled them chronologically, I wouldn't have as varied a collection. So far I've discarded several stories because they were, it seemed, repeats, in ways, of other stories, or just didn't interest me anymore. I'm only rewriting the stories that interest and even excite me. All done, of course, on my non-electric manual typewriter.

It feels good—a relief—after writing 3 novels in 5 years, to work in a relatively noncreative but productive way.

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