Woodrow and Rita Cunningham’s fifteen-year-old daughter Elaine left home after arguing with her father about the boys she entertained in the house while her parents were away. I turned the pages of “A New Man,” from Edward P. Jones’s collection Lost in the City, betting on a return. She’s gone for twenty-four hours and then forty-eight. Soon Jones writes that it’s “a little more than a year and a half after their daughter disappeared.” Finally it becomes “nearly seven years after Elaine Cunningham disappeared.” The pages dwindled and long before the last sentence, I knew we’d never see Elaine again.

I began reading Jones by dipping in and out of his second collection, All Aunt Hagar’s Children. I read the title story and felt a swirling in my brain as if new parts of it were being brought to life. Since then I’ve read through his work, chasing that feeling. His expansive sentences give the impression of a world alive, a world in motion. I’ve turned to Jones’s sentences from time to time in an attempt to establish that feeling in my work.