The Divide: Stories, Cornerstone Press, February 2026
Date of Interview: February 21, 2026
Conducted by Maria McLeod, associate professor of journalism, Western Washington University

Maria McLeod: The title of your newly published short story collection, The Divide, represents a central theme, divisions and divergences most often related to romantic relationships in conflict due to affairs, threats of an affair, or a previous relationship that seems unresolved. Also, many of the stories take place in or near the Rockies, a physical divide. I’m curious, how did this issue of division—fidelity versus infidelity—become central to the collection? Was this thematic an intentional choice that you wrote toward as you composed your stories, or did it surface more unconsciously?

Evan Morgan Williams: Those unifying themes are definitely there, but they were not planned. I didn’t compose the stories towards any theme. That surfaced later. What the stories did have in common, though, was, for lack of a better word, a Hemingway voice; they’re straight-up realistic fiction, with spare language, broken dialogue, and a flow in real time. The length of the time it takes you to read the story is the length of time of the action of the story. They also contain a big Hemingway trait which nobody talks about: a self-contained set of symbolism and imagery within the story that generates the possibilities of the story. So, I have these stories lying around, and I see they have a unity, but I needed to narrow down to a single theme. First, I noticed they had a unity of region. A lot of them take place in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, up in the Rockies. I also noticed a lot of these stories have snow. Snow is almost becoming like an endangered artifact, right? I also noticed that a lot of the stories take place in the aftermath, the time after certain consequential choices have already been made. In fact, for a while, the working title was Aftermath, but the Rolling Stones already stole that title. Anyway, The Divide seemed to speak to both the theme and the setting, so I went with that.

MM: So, when you talk about aftermath, I think about your story, “The Clear Blue Sky,” the one where the couple are in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The woman, Emily, keeps chiding her husband, Paul, about his earlier love interest, Kimberly, many years ago when they’d worked in Jackson Hole. Emily feels like she was his second choice, that maybe Paul would be with Kimberly if she hadn’t left Jackson Hole. So that’s an aftermath story, their relationship taking place at the result of the loss of the relationship that preceded it. I could see that in a lot of your stories. I thought, also, of Raymond Carver related to conflicting romantic relationships. I don’t know if you feel that he’s any kind of influence.

EMW: As you know, we write in conversation with the things that we read. I love Carver’s stories, but he has a spacious style of writing that I find difficult to write from. I mean, he’s been described as economical, but now we find out that Gordon Lish was the one who made him that way. When I read Carver’s stories in his preferred version, there’s this spaciousness to them that I can’t write from, as opposed to the Hemingway style, which I can. Hemingway does this thing with language, and I’m still figuring it out, where he creates the potential for a story that doesn’t exist before the story is being told. There’s a proposition, and then the inevitability that flows from that proposition. The climaxes in the stories are, in a way, inevitabilities.

MM: In Hemingway’s work, place seems important to the story. I feel the significance of place in each of your stories, too. It’s funny you mentioned snow because, finishing the collection, I felt like it had taken place in a cold climate. In your story, “Anasazi,” there’s a couple with a baby whose car becomes stuck in the snow while they’re winter camping. They end up relocating to a cabin. But it’s interesting to me how often there is an echo of a former relationship. In this case, the location of this cabin was something the husband knew of from a former relationship. And the woman, his wife, is privy to that former relationship. There’s this back-and-forth that plays out in dialogue, and the structure of the story is built around that tension, their need for shelter and her conflicting feelings about his former relationship. I wonder, in terms of the arc of the story, what is the significance of conflict in your writing?

EMW: One of the things that I find with conflict is we sometimes assume a conflict is just this side versus this side. But in that case, you get what’s called ping-pong dialogue, or action and reaction, and that’s not interesting to read. So, what I often find is the real conflict comes when there is a third element. The third element is usually another person—for example in the case of that couple trapped in the snow—the third element is a woman who’s not even there, an ex-girlfriend from the past. And, in “The Clear Blue Sky,” with the couple who are dancing in Jackson Hole, the third element is also a person in the past. And in “Costume Party,” where the two women are sitting at the piano, the third element is either the husband, or perhaps the piano teacher the women knew in high school. Once you have that third element in there, the tension for the characters becomes less predictable, the choices more interesting. It’s more propulsive in terms of where the story can go.

I was lucky to be at Tin House one summer, and my workshop leader was Anthony Doerr. He gave a presentation to our workshop, calling it opposition. He wasn’t very explicit about what opposition meant, but, in a way, that’s a good thing, because you could take it to mean whatever your story needed it to mean. You can pull different possibilities out of that. For me, I remember that he talked about A versus B not being opposition. If you just have A versus B, you’ve got a static moment. That’s not interesting. In order to have that movement, you need action or dialogue or plot movements that create propulsion, escalation, or the collision of new elements.

MM: That’s so well put. So, this leads nicely into this next question I have about not just the story structure but the structure of the entire collection. I was intrigued by your splitting up of “Buena Vista” into six parts spread throughout the collection. In some ways the story provided me with scene-by-scene microcosm related to an overarching theme of regret and romantic love and betrayal and fidelity. I also experienced it as a means of providing a throughline for the collection. It becomes an episodic serial to which we return. I’m curious whether you wrote it as single story, or whether you wrote it to serve a specific function related to the structure of the entire collection.

EMW: I wrote “Buena Vista” as a standalone, continuous story. It got published in a literary magazine as a continuous story. But here, in this collection, I felt like it worked better when I broke it apart. I’ve been struggling to understand why it feels better broken apart. As you say, it definitely serves the collection as a thematic throughline. However, for me, I think the reason it works in this broken-up form is that it creates time for the characters to think about what they’re about to do, i.e., cheating on their spouses. So, the story is not just, oh, they’re at the work party, next thing you know, they’re ditching the work party, next thing you know, they’re hooking up. Each of those decisions is consequential. So, it’s useful and tense to allow some time for those things to happen. It’s one of the only stories in the collection that has line breaks, so, instead of erasing those line breaks, I leaned into them and literally broke up the story into different episodes as the characters moved through the evening.

MM: My favorite story in the collection is “Noise,” which is a masterful piece featuring a hospitalized woman who’s engaged in an unsentimental conversation with a pastor. I kept thinking of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who doesn’t hesitate to humanize the ordained. I’m curious how it developed, especially because it’s lengthy but takes place in one setting. The story masterfully holds tension through dialogue and her internalized thoughts with very little physical action, except for this clicking heart valve. I wondered about that story. What or who inspired you to write it?

EMW: Well, there’s a couple of things. One, it’s just a little nugget I noticed at one point in my life. My dad had told me about a friend of his who, by pure coincidence, had a horrible car accident right in front of a hospital emergency room, and his aorta was torn like the woman in the story, which normally is fatal, right? Princess Diana had a ruptured aorta. You bleed out immediately. But it was right in front of a hospital, and they got him into the ER in time. So, I had that little nugget. Also, because I’ve had some heart issues, maybe I’m here processing a certain hyperawareness of my own heartbeat. Then there’s a Hemingway story called “The Gambler, The Nun, and the Radio.” It’s an underappreciated Hemingway story, and I always wanted to play with it. Maybe because it’s set in Wyoming and I’ve been to those places? I don’t know. Anyway, there’s the main character, a man who is laid up in a small-town hospital. There’s a nun who works at the hospital and functions in the story as a sounding board. And there’s a patient down the hall, a gambler recovering from a shootout. Remember what I said about a third element? There he is. Also, they’re listening to the radio, another third element. I’m thinking, okay, I could use those elements. I’ve got my main character, the older woman in the hospital. Then let’s make the nun into a priest. And down the hall there’s a kid who’s been shot. And instead of the radio, they’re watching TV. Because that’s what you do nowadays in the hospital, right? So, I played with those intersectional elements to see what I could come up with. Beyond that, there’s not a lot of intentionality on my part; there’s a point in writing a story where you have to listen to the characters. What is this woman going to tell me about what’s important to her? She’s talking a lot with the priest, and the priest is angling for her to process her predicament a little more religiously. She’s not going to go there with him. She’s just not really into that. But on the other hand, she’s afraid of death. So, she wants the comfort of having the priest around, but not on his terms. That’s me trying to listen to what the characters are saying. My favorite moment in the story is when the patient and the priest are surreptitiously smoking cigars together. I didn’t tell them to do that!

MM: Interesting. I wrote a story once that includes a lot of pigs, my friend asked to me afterwards, “How do you know so much about pigs?” I told her that I made a lot of that up. So, I wondered if there was something you’d read about an insertion of a valve in a heart that made noise or if you made it up. Where did that come from?

EMW: I got that from my dad. He was a doctor. He said the first models of heart valves literally had a little ball that clicked back and forth, and you can hear it. You know, when you go on an elevator, everybody is quiet on an elevator. He had a colleague whose heart valve could be heard clicking back and forth. She said when she got excited or nervous, you could hear it clicking faster. So, I went on YouTube and there are people just like you and me, who are posting demonstrations of their heart valve. They’re holding the microphone to their chest, and you can totally hear it.

MM: That is wild. I almost googled it, but I thought, oh, I’ll just ask Evan, because I really wanted to know from you. But, how horrible. If you were not wanting people to know that you’re excited or that you’re nervous, your heart’s giving it away because it’s going click, click, click.

EMW: Yeah. What do they do during sex? Now the other risk with these early heart valves is they tend to clot. So, you have to take a lot of blood thinners. In the case of the woman in the story, she eventually—a spoiler—she dies of internal bleeding.

MM: My next question is a little long. I apologize. The women in your stories are often described in sexualized terms, sometimes pointing to their victimization as sexual objects. The story that stood out to me in terms of female agency, however, was “The Stickup,” where a young mother, Hannah, is trying to pass construction workers pushing a stroller. She’s anxious they’re going to make unwanted comments, when she comes upon the Ukrainian nanny, Lyudmila, who is also pushing a baby in a stroller. She invites her for coffee. So, in this middle of this conversation about love and the role of men in their lives, a man enters the café and holds it up. I love the moment of the robbery. You have the nanny pick up a coffee mug and clock the guy. I have to say, I almost leaped out of my chair and cheered. Then he kind of wobbles, and then she clocks him again. How lucky, two strikes and he goes down! The people he’s robbed are able to collect what he tried to steal from them. How did you arrive at this moment where you decide you’re going to have this nanny take this guy out with a coffee mug? Also, I don’t know if the way I experience ending is how you meant it, but there is something in the way she leaves and doesn’t look back, something utilitarian about her. There’s no lingering. It’s more, I just clocked this guy, and this is my life, and I’m moving on to the next thing. I wondered, were your conscientious about giving her this agency? Is that how that story came about?

EMW:  I try to be a noticer. Often stories start with a little proposition, something I had noticed and filed away. In this case, as a teacher in a public school with a fair number of Ukrainian families, I noticed that the Ukrainian girls tended to have a lot of agency, which made them excellent students, but their agency was constrained within rather narrow cultural boundaries. The Ukrainian girl in the story, as you can see, is breaking those constraints in a very physical way. But then she apologizes for it, of course. Utilitarian, as you say.

You ask about female characters and their sexualization. In a writing group I was in, it was once pointed out that the female characters in my story were described physically, but the males were not. I thought, okay, that’s an error. That’s an oversight. That’s like a new Bechdel test. Did the writer provide descriptions of each gender equally, or is only one gender being sexualized? To an extent, you have to do this within the character’s point of view. Is the character’s point of view doing the sexualizing, or is the author doing it? And is the sexualization a flaw of the character’s point of view? How are they projecting onto the other? Why do they need to do that? In this particular story, “The Stick Up,” it’s two women, and I would argue that the main character, Hannah, is self-sexualizing, then projecting that onto Lyudmila, the Ukrainian nanny, and Lyudmila is not having it, as the saying goes. She even makes a cynical comment that boys do nice things for her, but that just gives her power over them. But that story has a chiasmus structure, where Hannah’s arc is going down, while Lyudmila’s is going up. At some point, those arcs intersect, and the power is exchanged. And right as they intersect, that’s when the robber comes into the coffee shop. The robbery is kind of random. Remember, I said earlier that a conflict needs that third piece? The third piece can come from left field. It often makes it more interesting when it does. So, the robber comes in, and, at that point, you have one character who is now thoroughly in power. She’s chucking two thick coffee mugs at the robber. Then, she even says, “Next time, I throw three mugs.” Meanwhile, Hannah is so disempowered that she literally cannot remove her wedding ring when the robber demands to have it. At that point, it’s a complete reversal. Hannah gets to walk home from this situation with a very different point of view and outlook on life.

MM: I’m enamored with your endings—all your stories’ endings—the way the last lines become a means to understand the story. The ending line to the final story, “Somalia,” seemed to provide a metaphor for how I came to understand the entire collection. In that story, you have this gathering of old friends, married and with children together at a beach house. The men are around the fire. The women are at the water’s edge with the kids. The men are having this very macho, almost cliché kind of conversation where they’re chiding each other about their masculinity and their sexual prowess. Something to the effect of, “Are you going to get laid tonight with your wife?” One of the men’s wives has had a relationship with one of the other men prior to their marriage. So, there’s tension around that. But, at the night’s end, one of the men decides to light off fireworks. I love this ending: “The rocket shot up, exploding in the air, bright as day. Lighting faces where sadness and regret and joy and wonder equally played.” Amazing. What, for you, is the significance of endings? What should an ending provide for the reader? What rules, if any, do you impose upon yourself when you’re composing the ending?

EMW: Well, thank you for pointing out the ending of “Somalia,” because that’s probably my favorite ending I’ve ever written. That’s why I put “Somalia” at the very end of the collection. I met a woman in a writing group who had a habit of looking at the final paragraph of a story and then comparing it to the opening paragraph of the story. The idea was that there should be a thematic continuity. Not necessarily that there had to be foreshadowing, but the elements and the potentiality at the opening of the story should be recognizable all the way through to the end of the story. I love that notion. As the story works through its potentialities to settle into an inevitability, the climax of the story is a stress test of what’s happened up to that point. So, for example, in the “Somalia” story where the husbands are talking on the beach, there’s a lot of tension building. There’s an allusion to the woman, Caroline, who may have had a relationship with the point-of-view character, David. So, things are escalating there. Then David has a soliloquy where, instead of playing along with the guys doing their performative dialogue, he breaks the mold and he lays it out in a way that becomes like a stress test for everything that’s happened up to that point. To me, it’s very redemptive because, clearly, he and his wife have a grounded relationship—not perfect, but it’s filled with intention and commitment toward each other. That’s where he lands at the end. He says, “I’m going to go up to that cabin. We’re going to make love, right. And this is what you’re going to do, and this is what you’re going to do. And then after we make love, my wife is going to tell me all the things that the women have been saying while they were out on the sand, watching the kids play in the waves. And this is what they’re going to say…” To me, it’s a redemptive speech, even though it burns everything down. That’s the character cashing in on all the elements that have built to that point. The only thing I don’t like about that metaphor is that it’s talking about money and a bank. I don’t think it’s the perfect metaphor. I think it’s bigger than that. We get to ask, at that point, has all the imagery and potential of the story earned what’s going to happen next?

MM: Which reflects the emotion of the characters, which is the important part here and throughout the collection. It’s been so great talking to you about The Divide, Evan. Thank you.

Evan Morgan Williams is the author of four collections of short stories, most recently The Divide, published by Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (2026). He’s been the recipient of several writing awards, including the Chandra Prize at BkMk Press, in addition to being long listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize.

Maria McLeod, associate professor of journalism at Western Washington University, has authored oral histories, articles, scholarly research, and creative works. Her poetry and prose have been published in literary journals in the U.S., England, Germany, India, and Scotland. She’s been nominated for six Pushcart Prizes and has published two poetry chapbooks, Mother Want and Skin. Hair. Bones.