David Michael Kaplan is an associate professor of English at Loyola University of Chicago. He has written award-winning short stories, as well as a novel and a nonfiction work on how to improve your writing. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and began his writing career part time while working in Los Angeles. The book begins with the showpiece entitled "Doe Season," which was selected as one of the Best American Short Stories of 1985. A pre-teen tomboy named Andy accepts an invitation to accompany her father on a hunting trip. She wants desperately to prove she is a worthy companion even though she is a girl. However, after reluctantly killing a doe, she runs from the horrible display of the gutted deer butchered by her father and his friends. Later that night, the doe revisits Andy in her dreams displaying the wound that the girl had inflicted upon her. These experiences cause Andy to reexamine her feelings about being a girl.
David Michael Kaplan is an outstanding writer, in which some of his short stories are categorized as America's best Short Stories. In Doe Season which we read in class, Kaplan describes a girl named Andrea, and shows how her feelings of how she wants to do manly activities. In the end she realizes that her female side of her takes over.
