How to Imitate George Saunders

The first time I met George Saunders, I got shivers of déjà vu. I’d driven to his house in upstate New York, to, and he’d come out to his driveway to shake my hand. It was a crisp fall day in the wooded hills south of Oneonta, with a hard wind and bright blue skies, and the trees cast sharp, waving shadows on the hood of his Prius. There was something about the way he swung open his front door and ushered me into his mud room, wearing his wide Midwestern grin, that felt eerily familiar. Then I realized why: I was living out a fantasy I’d indulged a hundred times. For much of my twenties, what I’d wanted, more than almost anything else, was to get inside Saunders’s mind, learn how it worked, and steal his secrets, so that I could write short stories that were as good as his short stories. My dream had been to sit