Story of the Week

Alethea Black was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard in 1991. Her debut story collection, I Knew You’d Be Lovely (Broadway, 2011), was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program and as Book of the Week on Oprah.com. A finalist in Narrative’s Spring 2009 and Winter 2011 Story Contests, and the winner of the 2008 Arts & Letters Prize, Black lives in LA County, California.

Photograph by Ian Lennart Surraville.

Essay to Be Read at 3 a.m.

An Essay

by Alethea Black

I don’t know why I write at night. For some reason, it’s when my corner of the Earth is turned away from the sun that my inner fires blaze. I’d say more than 80 percent of my first book was written after midnight. My editor jokes about receiving emails from me with a 4:15 a.m. time stamp, and my agent—a passport-certified morning person, as perhaps all agents must be—has known from our first correspondence that I’m available “any time not before noon.” I know it smacks of ingratitude to question the peculiar demands of one’s muse; I realized years ago it’s preferable just to go wherever your process leads you rather than have an opinion about it. But I can’t help it.

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