fore. The photo depicted the engine, a few of the cars (each one rigged up for a specific purpose), and a ragtag crew that was so diverse in dress and ethnicity and demeanor that I couldn’t help but imagine a story. How did all those people end up in the same place? How did they manage to live together in such an odd, transient community? I often do significant research for my fiction, but it’s usually not formal research. I read. I poke around. I visit small museums, read local histories, collect newspaper articles. I read everything I could find about small railroads, and the stories referred to in “Trainmen” come from oral histories or other documents. There really was a fellow named Boda who hung a card cheat from a wagon tongue. There really was a one-legged Civil War officer who lost at least one fortune at cards. There really was a guy who leased his Victrola to his buddies so they could listen to music. You can’t make that stuff up. And you don’t really need to. For me, it was enough to evoke the crazy energies that must have infused a work train each and every day. Those people had to live together. They had to make it work. And I like to believe they did it with gusto. MM: The book starts (“Border”) and ends (“The Sin Eaters”) with stories about characters on a journey with no clear destination. Why are there so many restless characters in the book? AH: “Border” seemed to be a good place to start because the young man in that story is running away. He wants to start over after bad things have happened in his household in Wyoming. He wants to begin a new story for himself and the puppy he steals. “The Sin Eaters” is long, so that’s a good reason to put it at the end. But Porterfield, the missionary, believes he is heading into the West to save souls. He believes his journey has a very definite—and optimistic—end, just as the boy in “Border” hopes his journey does. Neither of them gets where they are going unscathed. Do any of us get where we hope to go unscathed? Probably not. And America is a restless nation. We are less tied to our pasts than the citizens of other cultures. We tend to move around a lot. I’m a good example of that. I live 2,000 miles from my homeplace. MM: How important is it to select the right order for short stories in a collection? What was your process in putting the collection together? Did the revisions in one story influence changes in the others? AH: Order is important in a collection. Ghosts of Wyoming is my fourth book of stories. I tried something different this time. I wanted to blend the 19th century stories in with the 20th century stories, and I wanted to separate the darker stories from one another to give the reader some space to absorb those pieces. I like dark stories. But a reader ought to be given space to ebb and flow her way through a book. The revisions didn’t really affect the order, although there were lots of revisions. Dozens and dozens. But tone and mood affected which stories I kept in Ghosts of Wyomingand which stories I eventually cut out. theMeadow 77
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