When you spend so much time trying to father well, and failing, and trying again, and hopefully failing better, it's going to seep into your work. And when you give yourself permission to explore the grottiest bits of your psyche (like Louis CK) (who totally stole that move from me) (not really), to exaggerate the edge of the rustiest blades of your IRL mind, you'll occasionally come up with something that holds real power.

I didn't intentionally emplace the raw material needed for political/allegorical readings into any of the first drafts, but sooner or later I saw it coming, and I did intentionally not cut it from some of the final drafts. In other words, I'm not particularly interested in encouraging readers to read certain stories that way, but I want to make sure that route's accessible should anyone be so inclined.

Some writers keep a tighter rein on that than others. For short story collections I'm definitely in the loose-rein camp.

For whatever reason, thus far it's been important to me not to write that kind of collection. Which means that I've spent months playing tic-tac-notecard, trying to get the stories in an order whereby stories that are similar in any given way (diction, narrative stance, setting, plot) are separated by others that aren't.

I start every first draft with voice rather than theme or image or even character as such, so it isn't like I'm ever rubbing my hands, cackling, "The dad is really going to take it on the chin in this one!" Not in terms of any given story, and certainly not in terms of the collection as a whole.

The most basic organizing principle was pretty straightforward, and is frankly pretty common: the shorter of what are by my lights the two most engaging stories goes first, the longer of the two goes at the end, and everything else goes in the middle.

If you're paying attention to human interactions - to the gap between who we are and who we think we are, or the gap between what happened and what we remember - you're going to end up thinking (obliquely or otherwise) about what it means to act ethically, and I think that's all to the good.