Alice Elliott Dark traces 1993 origin of 'In the Gloaming' in new afterword

By Elena Vasquez

Scribner will publish Alice Elliott Dark's "In the Gloaming" in 2026, a collection that features the writer's first-person afterword about composing her 1993 short story of the same name. The afterword, copyrighted this year, runs more than 3,500 words.

The story arrived in early 1993. Dark writes that a single sentence cut into her daily mind: "He wanted to talk again, suddenly." She traced the voice to a friend identified only as Ian, who died seven years earlier of AIDS.

What triggered the story's opening?

The sentence arrived while Dark managed postpartum depression, a toddler who had spent early days in a NICU, stalled writing, and worry about aging grandparents. Her earlier self — the "Al" who smoked and danced — had vanished with Ian's death. Then the words returned.

"The words were inside of me, and I was being called to compose a story," Dark writes.

Ian, she recalls, was "the definition of presence, and handsomeness, and elegance, and high spirits." Photos remained from Studio 54 and downtown nights, but "no tokens could bring him back."

Where did Dark write the draft?

In March 1993, Dark wrote on West 97th Street in Manhattan. The two-bedroom faced 96th, where ambulances ran day and night. Below her window, feral cats gathered around tossed cat food and french fries.

She typed on a manual Olivetti at a small table perpendicular to her bedroom window, using two index fingers. The manuscript drafted scene by scene during afternoons spent on her toddler's futon while the child was at a park with a babysitter.

Who reviewed the draft?

Dark's husband, identified in the piece only as Mr. Dark, read each candidate ending aloud. He rejected multiple versions over several weeks. Dark describes growing frustration, then returning to the small desk each afternoon.

"Mr. Dark gave it the thumbs-up" only after Janet, the mother character, accepted her husband's suggestion of bagpipes for the funeral service — a gesture of communion that closed the story.

What is the story's central mechanism?

Dark identifies a craft principle she says she discovered by accident: a story ends well when a protagonist sacrifices a self-centered goal for another person at the moment of critical choice. Janet sacrifices her judgment of Martin and accepts his grief as equal to her own.

"A story moves toward an authentic reversal when, at the moment of critical choice, a character rises above their usual way of responding to stress and instead consciously chooses to do something for the sake of another person," Dark writes.

Janet's reward is communion. Martin's final line, asked of her across Laird's old bedroom: "Please, Janet, tell me — what else did my boy like?" The story ends there.

What role did the sister character take?

Anne, originally Janet's lawyer daughter, appeared in "In the Gloaming" as a walk-on. Dark has since given her a leading role in her new novel "Wherever You Are," also published by Scribner in 2026.

How does Dark now teach this craft?

Dark teaches in the Rutgers-Newark MFA program. She tells students: "If you think you are overdoing it, remember that the emotional upheaval is in your body, likely not in the words on the page."

What did Ian come back to say?

Dark closes the afterword with two messages from Ian. First: "the truth is something discovered within a relationship, and not as a result of our solitary thinking." Second: "our dead are at our sides all the time."

The 2026 collection positions a 1993 short story as the author's most-analyzed craft object — and as the foundation for her ongoing Rutgers-Newark teaching on story endings.