Acclaimed short-story writer, inspiring professor

As a child growing up on army bases, Stephanie Vaughn ’65, ’67 MA wrote long letters to friends. “I found myself embellishing them and I found myself lying, and I thought I had inadvertently stumbled into fiction,” she told Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

What she found was a career path as a short story writer and literature teacher. Vaughn, 81, who passed away Nov. 12, published the acclaimed short story collection Sweet Talk in 1990 and taught creative writing and literature at Cornell University for 39 years, retiring in 2022.

“Stephanie was the best teacher of fiction workshops I’ve ever seen,” says Robert Morgan, a poet, fiction writer and former Cornell professor. “She gave every student her best interest. You could feel the attention and empathy she gave every student and their stories. … She created a space for the students to fill.”

Vaughn was born in Millersburg, Ohio. The daughter of a career Army officer, she lived on military bases in Oklahoma, Texas, New York, the Philippines and Italy. The stories in Sweet Talk primarily focused on that experience. It won the Southern Review award for fiction and a New York Times notable book of the year citation.

“Her writing was a window into a world not many others have written about,” says Tobias Wolff, a bestselling author and champion of Vaughn’s work. “[Sweet Talk] was an illumination of that world, and that’s what the best fiction does; it allows us to enter that world.”

Several of the stories in Sweet Talk were initially published in The New Yorker magazine. Vaughn never published another story or book after her first collection debuted, and it’s unknown what she wrote in the ensuing years. “She must have been writing all those years, but that wasn’t something she talked about,” says Morgan, who describes her writing as “very chiseled and polished. She didn’t waste any words and was, in the best sense, unpredictable. You never knew where a story was going.”

Wolff was friends with Vaughn and her husband, Michael Koch, the longtime editor of Cornell’s literary journal Epoch. He died in 2022. “Stephanie was a familiar presence in the lives of our family,” Wolff says. “She was really warm and funny, and [Vaughn and Koch] always had people over for these wonderful dinners. They had a deep and wide circle of friends.”

Wolff says Vaughn showed him a draft of a novel she was working on several years ago, but it’s not known if she ever completed it. “She was shy about talking about a work in progress, that was off limits,” he says. “Anyone who reads her stories would be affected by them. They were so emotionally persuasive and touching. She wrote from the heart.”