[APPLAUSE]
Well, hi, everyone.
It's my pleasure tonight to be introducing
Manuel Muñoz, professor, mentor, and dear friend to me.
Manuel Muñoz is the author of a novel, What
You See In the Dark, and the short story
collections The Consequences, Graywolf 2022, Zigzagger,
and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which
was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short
Story Award.
Stories from his collection The Consequences have appeared
in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Zyzzyva,
and Freeman's.
He's been recognized with the Whiting Writers
Award and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, three O.
Henry awards, and an appearance in Best American Short Stories.
I've been trying for the past couple of weeks
to think of a simple way to describe what I
feel reading his short stories.
I think I have an answer, or many.
His short stories give me that "you are there" effect.
I visualize his settings, feel the heat and cold
with his characters, feel the serenity of a Sunday,
a peach orchard become quieter and quieter,
as if I were the one sitting in it.
Or maybe as if I had been the one sitting in it.
His stories make me feel like I've lived more lives than I
have, like I've somehow known and lived in a deep kind of way
with these characters' perceptiveness, their regrets
and wants, their secret knowledge.
Many of his characters haven't been to college,
but are smarter and savvier in a way, I believe fully,
than many college graduates.
They understand people.
They understand themselves, what it
is to live with little, what it is to feel trapped,
what it is to be desperate, what it is to care for someone else.
These stories make me forget where I am,
a bad day's stresses, and I feel reading them
like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.
Usually, the two words I most want to say to another writer
are simple, keep going.
Tonight I would like to choose those same words, and just
a few others, keep going, please.
Congratulations on this new collection, and thank you.
Thanks, Manuel, for working an improbable miracle,
breathing life into these characters
and making me feel on every page like I've known them,
been them, seen them, and felt them.