In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

192 Fred Leebron Growing the Story Fred Leebron’s novels include Out West, Six Figures, and In the Middle of All This. His stories have appeared in the Gettsyburg Review, Ploughshares, Grand Street, the North American Review, the Quarterly, the Threepenny Review, the Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, and Double Take, and are included in the anthologies The New Generation, Flash Fiction, and The Exiled. His essays are included in The Eleventh Draft and Bastard on the Couch. He is the co-author of Creating Fiction: A Writer’s Companion, and a co-editor of Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. In 2005, the Canadian production of Six Figures premiered at theToronto Film Festival and was nominated for the Canadian equivalent of an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Six Figures was also shown at Cannes, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and distributed throughout Canada. In 1996 Fred Leebron was recognized by Discover Great New Writers for his book OutWest. In 2000 he won the Pushcart Prize and the NewYorkTimes recognized his novel Six Figures as a Notable Book, and in 2001 he received an O. Henry Award. Leebron also received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1983, the Henfield Foundation Award in 1986, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in 1989, the James Michener Award in 1990 and the Cohen Award in 1994. Leebron completed his undergraduate studies at Princeton, and he earned an MA in writing at John Hopkins University and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From 1993 to 1994 he was a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Center. From 1994 to 1995 he served as the director of the Provincetown Fine Art Center, where he proposed and helped to develop the summer program. Leebron is an associate professor of English at Gettysburg College and he is also the program director of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program. He has also taught at John Hopkins University, the University of Iowa, Stanford University, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has served on the advisory board of Provincetown Arts since 1996. Leebron, his wife, and three children live in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Fred Leebron 193 Sherry Ellis: In the Middle of All This takes place in Gettysburg, near the graveyards of war. It is a novel that deals with death and loss. “It felt like one long endless slide, as if they’d rolled the wrong number and found themselves tumbling down into a place so far behind that it wasn’t a question of catching up anymore, they were just trying to stay on board.” How important do you think the choice of setting is in fiction? Fred Leebron: I think it’s everything. It’s not only where the story happens , but it provides the impulse for the story. If you really live in the setting, I obviously literally live in Gettysburg, you can grow the story and you can expand, because the setting’s opportunities are limitless. But you can never, ever fully know any one place. There are always pockets of energy waiting for you. Ellis: In both the short-short story “Water” and the novel Out West you develop the premise of a character turning on a gas stove to kill a cheating lover. Which work came first and what made you decide to revisit the situation? Leebron: “Water” came first by three years. I’ve written several short-short stories and I think they’re really fun to write, and they allow for the opportunity to experiment and to really cut to the chase and be as deft as you can be. Sometimes you produce work that you want to re-explore; there’s a lot more opportunity than you thought. So, I went back to “Water” because I thought there was more there to dig out and to learn. I went back and pursued it and it was a really good experience to re-inhabit the situation. Ellis: Charles Baxter once said, “Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after eleven.” In Out West you involve the characters Ben and Amber in a shared, sordid history early on in the book. How did you as a writer develop the dramatic relationship of these characters? Leebron: Benjamin West was sort of the alter-ego for Nathaniel West. I wanted to rewrite the migration of Nathaniel West for the West Coast in a contemporary way. I started with him first and I...

Share