Don’t Read Proust. Read Me.

There’s a moment when a writer might have to say it.

A couple decades ago, as an undergraduate, I wrote a short story to apply for a fiction writing workshop taught by Ben Marcus through my university’s English department. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but I wrote a story that seized my own attention and spoke to my own interests in that moment.

At the beginning of class, he told the students he’d chosen us because our stories had fascinated him. “Fascination” was the theme of his lecture that day. The reader…