All of these stories are part of a book-length work called The Secret Life of Objects. It is unlike anything else I’ve written (well, for starters, it’s nonfiction) and it came out of a completely different process. I was drinking coffee one morning out of the mug that I always grab from the shelf. There’s a whole cupboard full of coffee mugs at our house, but I always choose this one because it came from my late mother’s house, and, for me, it holds a whole story about my mother and my aunt. I started thinking about this, and about the fact that my house is filled with objects that have hidden stories. Some belonged to family members I’ve lost, others were gifts that seem to encapsulate a relationship, and still others were emblematic of a specific passage in my life. I jotted down a list of about 50 objects that were emotionally charged, and then I wrote about each of them very quickly, without losing momentum. Normally, I die a thousand deaths over every sentence, but these pieces flew onto the page. Their order is entirely intuitive rather than, say, chronological or room-by-room. When I looked at the whole, I saw that these objects told my life story, and that they were also about religion, art, and memory.

My late mother swore that as a toddler, I used to sleep with a book instead of stuffed animals. I remember this only vaguely but I’m guessing it’s true. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a day since then without reading. I have been an editor for most of my adult life, a job that requires me to read large volumes of work quickly, both for information and in order to make decisions. For pleasure, I like to read very, very slowly. I am a happy dawdler. I relish dwelling inside each sentence. That said, the book I love the most—the book I’ve read four times and for which I made a not-very-successful attempt to gain fluency in Russian—is War and Peace.

Dawn Raffel's most recently published book is Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, a collection of stories that came out in March 2010. She is also the author of a novel, Carrying the Body, and a previous collection, In the Year of Long Division. Her stories have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, Black Book, Fence, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, The Brooklyn Rail, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She was a fiction editor for many years, followed by a seven-year stint as Executive Articles Editor at O, The Oprah Magazine and three years as Editor-at-Large at More; she has also taught in the MFA program at Columbia University. She is now Editor at Large, Books at Readers Digest and the web editor at the Center for Fiction in New York, where she edits the journal The Literarian, launching in January 2011. She can be reached at Dawn@Raffel.name