We had collaborated on other projects, never on short stories. We find working together forces us to consider, then reconsider. This time we began by agreeing on six arbitrarily chosen elements: a diary, brothers, April, and so on. We each wrote a story in which these six elements played a significant role. From the resulting two stories we chose six new elements, three from each: specifically, I chose two elements from his story, one I selected from my own. And from these new stories, six new elements. And so on.
"Szanto, a Montrealer, has a great talent for seeing and expressing the subtleties of human emotional transactions, and is a very able craftsman: it's been a while since I've read such consistently precise and fluid prose." —Montreal Gazette