When I was asked to write about an angry baby, I thought of an act of toddler ferocity I’d witnessed when a colleague brought her son to work at the University of Cincinnati. The kid was screaming his guts out in the English Department mail room, and when she leaned...

Though my first thoughts when approached with [the Very Angry Baby] assignment were “kitten” and “cancer,” in that order, it’s the mother’s voice that came through the strongest, after I’d written the initial boy-and-kitten caper that opens the story. Every chance we...

“Play Acting” aims to balance several obsessions. Firstly, I am a writer who enjoys experimenting with language as meaning (i.e., narrative, character development, etcetera), language as code (let’s get a beer and talk about semiotics!), and language as art (a.k.a.,...

I wrote the first draft of “Babyproof” eleven years ago, in a single six-hour sitting, as an attempt to make sense of several previous relationships and friendships that did not involve babies or car accidents or infidelity at all. The story’s mischievous “very angry”...

My very angry baby story, “War Games,” emerged during a writing workshop being given by my co-tutor on one of the Arvon foundation’s five-day residential writing courses. Adam Marek, writer of fantastic and fantastical short stories, was talking about plotting. He...

“First Song” (titled after the Galway Kinnell poem) is a much-revised version of one of the first stories I ever wrote. I was twenty-four and pregnant and had just quit the doctoral program in English at Princeton. My husband’s consulting job was taking him west, and...

XXXXOne of the more formally intriguing pieces in the Angry Baby anthology is a hybrid form—“Il ya,” by Aaron Bauer. (There’s also an invented language by Craig McDaniel.) Below Aaron discusses how his powerful piece came about: Babies and writing have been...

Another contributor to A Very Angry Baby: The Anthology provides insight on her story’s conception: I was obsessed with Marie Curie years ago while writing a series of poems about her and her daughter, some of which were part of my collection called Lizzie Borden in...

In the coming weeks, we will present many of the contributors to A Very Angry Baby discussing the pieces published in Acre’s anthology. Today, Josh Russell on “Apple Girl”: Every night for several years I read to my daughter from the 200 stories collected in Italian...