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“Coyotes” is set in rural Maine, where I grew up. I originally drafted it in 2007 as part of a short story series centered on a theme that I have returned to many times in my fiction: the pressure of unsaid things. While the family this story describes is fictional, aspects of the plot were inspired by real problems that we had with coyotes in my area when I was a child.

I am probably nine years old, barefoot and balanced on a mossy rock in the middle of the Brandywine River. My two older brothers and I are stepping across the river, rock by rock. Our ears are full of the rushing sound of water, tumbling over and around the rocks in frothing, coffee-colored cataracts, roiling with mud.

I was little when the coyotes came back. They’d been gone so long, people had almost forgotten about them. But they started moving south from Canada again when I was eight or so—shadows, slipping in and out of the woods, elusive gestures of high-held tail and then nothing but the swaying movement of tree branches. We knew they were there.

In this interview, Vestin offers insights on everything from the power of long walks and movement to fuel the synthesis of ideas in one’s writing, to writing’s potential to create intimate understanding. We even delve into organic chemistry for some analogies.

Splinter is another name for distraction between us
when the woodstove’s gone cold.
We wait a year to feed the baby

honey, a few more to give her wine,
deem the green paint too green, that vines
might be stenciled against it, but in the dim

Texas boys in drag walk fast,
wear wide skirts, for running,

say “ma’am” to the woman
who sells them cigarettes

O love, piss on a stick,
sex by the calendar,
our OB’s German porn,
blue pills, and IUIs

The beautiful, the ruined—
what doesn’t end
as stillness after all,

Merrimack frozen over, gulls circling
from the landfill seem lost, reeling across

what flowed only days ago. The old men
huddled beside the boathouse tell tales

Cathedrals rise over cobblestone towns.
Because this life is brief we learn to write
our names in granite. There is elegy
because this life is brief. We make stories
from patterns we come across in the stars