The stories that most influenced me as a younger writer begin, like many good jokes do, with the interruption of a world I recognized by some striking incongruity—the discovery of a very old man with enormous wings (Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”); the encounter between a prickly woman named Hulga and a deceptive Bible salesman (Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”); the decision of a swimmer to traverse his neighborhood via backyard pools (John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”).

In both jokes and stories, these conceits pulled me in; I wanted to know how the premise would play out, how the juxtaposition between the reality I was familiar with and the absurdity I wasn’t would (or wouldn’t) resolve itself.

Antonya Nelson has written on the similarities between a good joke and a good short story, arguing that an understanding of the aesthetics of the former provides the writer with useful tools for creating the latter. While Nelson is primarily drawn to the parallel between a punchline and an epiphany, I was intrigued by the potential both forms hold in exploring the absurd.

In a joke, the premise remains simplistic throughout, serving only as a vehicle to deliver the punchline; in the stories I most admired, however, the absurd premise matures to both mirror the complexities of reality, and to recontextualize the mundane world in which the story takes place. What impressed me most about these stories was that in their patent fictionality, they inspire genuine emotional reactions—pity, longing, delight, or wonder.

I’m still drawn to those types of blatantly disruptive, deeply absurd stories, though less exclusively than I was in the past. Although really, I think it’s more that I see that power to radically recontextualize in all the fiction I enjoy, both in the sensational, and in quieter, more realist modes.

However it does it, I want fiction to show me that the world is different than I thought it was, or could become something different than it is.

T.I.M. Wirkus (they/them) is the author of the novels The Infinite Future (Penguin Press, 2018) and City of Brick and Shadow (Tyrus Books, 2014), which was a finalist for the Shamus Award and the winner of the Association for Mormon Letters Best Novel Award. Their novella, Sandy Downs, won the 2013 Quarterly West novella contest. Their short fiction has appeared in The Best American Non-Required Reading, Subtropics, Emerald City Review, and elsewhere. They hold a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California. T.I.M.’s third novel is forthcoming from Type Eighteen Books in 2026.