I grew up on a hog and corn farm in western Iowa in the 1970s, the third of four children, on a gravel road eleven miles from a town of nine hundred people. I came out when I was twenty-three. I'm thirty-four now. I'm a reference librarian in Kansas City, Missouri, and I've lived for six years with a patient man named Grant, who reads every one of these before anybody else does and tells me where I've gone on too long.

When I was fourteen, my mother drove to town every other Saturday for groceries, and I rode along so I could spend the hour in the county library. I read everything. I read the whole shelf of farm novels and the whole shelf of sports novels and a good deal of the encyclopedia, and I was looking, though I couldn't have told you so, for one book with a boy in it like me: a farm boy, who knew how to load hogs and walk beans and drive a tractor before he could ride a bike, and who also knew, in some quiet back room of himself, that he wasn't going to grow up and marry the girl from the next farm over. I never found him. I didn't dare ask the librarian. Now I am the librarian, which I think about more than I probably should.

So these stories are for that boy. They're quiet. Nothing much happens in them, the way nothing much happens on a farm, except everything. They're not exactly about me, and they're not exactly not. The people in them are made up, but the counties are real, and so is the weather.

There's nothing in them you couldn't read in church. There are feelings in them, and a crush or two, and some people who say hard things, but I've kept the hard words off the page. I don't think the boy I was needed to see them spelled out. He'd heard them.

I'm working on a fourth, about a hired man in 1964, but it's slow going. Librarians have the same problem as everybody else: the day job.