We recently published Phebe Jewell’s stunning “Squint.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the way you use implication to tell this story! Each reader will come away with a different idea of who the boy is (and who the narrator is!) based on their own experiences; each reader will come away with their own version of this story. And every version of this story will be the real story. What do you think is the real story here? Or does it really matter?

Well, I do have a sense of what the story is and who the boy and narrator are, but because the story centers so much on memory and the meanings we make from shards of memory, I don’t think it matters what story a reader creates as they read.

2) There is something very cyclical about this story, the way it begins with an ending and ends with a beginning. When you created this story, what shape did you envision it taking?

This story started as a free-write when I was going through a bad period of writer’s block. It started with a visual and as I wrote, that visual became more vivid, and eventually I knew that the story would need to be centered on the barn and the narrator’s fascination and revulsion with that scene. As I wrote I saw the story taking the shape of a Mobius Strip, with no beginning or ending.