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Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books, October 25, 2016). Her stories appear or are forthcoming in One Story, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Ecotone, the Common, the Kenyon Review online, Hayden's Ferry Review and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and have received special mention in The Best American Short Stories 2013 and The Pushcart Prize XXXV. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and she blogs for Ploughshares. After teaching high school English for six years in Falmouth, Mass., she moved with her husband and daughter to Pittsburgh, Pa., where she teaches creative writing at Saint Vincent College and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
On your nightstand now:
My nightstand is always piled with things I'm reading, re-reading, meaning to read and reading to my three-year-old daughter. Also like 17 glasses of water, because I'm better at carrying a new one up each night than I am at ever carrying them back down again. Braving the chaos right now are Kirstin Valdez Quade's Night at the Fiestas, Mavis Gallant's Paris Stories, Bonny Becker's A Visitor for Bear, Thom Wiley's One Sheep, Blue Sheep, Kate Bernheimer's anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, John Matteson's Eden's Outcasts (research for the novel I'm revising) and Donna Tartt's The Secret History.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I loved those sisters like I knew them, and the book's ruminations about the differences in their characters were irresistible to me--I couldn't get enough of thinking about which one I was most like.
Your top five authors:
So I'll preface this by saying that I thought seriously for a while about going to get a Ph.D. in English Literature, and my personal pantheon slants in a not-so-contemporary direction. My top five ever-ever, the ones who've mattered to me over many years: Shakespeare, for that feeling that your brain and heart are actually expanding while you follow one clause into the next. Alice Munro, for incredible richness and lushness of character, and stories that feel like whole lives. Kelly Link, for opening up a new kind of magical possibility. Edith Wharton, for rendering a world that's (mostly) gone, and for writing so terrifyingly about female entrapment. Virginia Woolf, who just seems impossible.
Book you've faked reading:
There was a period of years where I'd nod and smile when The Odyssey came up, like I knew what people were talking about, even though I'd never read it. Then the universe punished me, because the book ended up being part of the curriculum at the school where I taught ninth grade English for six years, so I've now read The Odyssey I have no idea how many times. I could probably recite parts of it, bard-like. 
Book you're an evangelist for:
Two I have to mention here: first, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. To me this book does what fiction set in the past should do: it makes the past just as immediate, weird and full of life as the present. And second, Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision. This was actually the first book my publisher, Lookout Books, put out--my love of it was one of my initial reasons for wanting so much to work with them--and they've been masterful evangelists for it and don't need me at all. But this is such a deep and funny and odd and moving story collection, full of people who are real to me, and I can't help it.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital. The cover has an official-looking building bobbing on waves. It made me feel like the book would take me floating away on some strange sea--which turned out to be accurate.
Book you hid from your parents:
My parents were actually pretty amazing about my reading whatever I wanted to read when I was a kid--which meant I stumbled across plenty of things I didn't understand, but which also made for an amazing sense of freedom in this one area of my life, at least. I did realize when I read John Irving's The World According to Garp when I was maybe 12 that I had questions of a kind I wouldn't be asking my parents.
Book that changed your life:
I feel like every book I love changes my life a little. But the biggest game-changers were probably the books that made me a reader in the first place--the first books I really fell all the way inside as a kid. Roald Dahl's Matilda, C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Egypt Game, many books by Lois Lowry. These books made me love books, and without that love my life would be very different.
Favorite line from a book:
This is hard, and I think I'd say something different depending on what day you asked me, but here's today's answer, from Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: "Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life." Gives me both good and bad chills.
Five books you'll never part with:
A copy of an English translation of Les Misérables that my dad gave me after we saw the musical; I was 10 and I decided I wanted to read the book (with, not surprisingly, less than perfect success). A first edition of Edith Wharton's A Motor Flight Through France, from my husband. My high school copy of Wuthering Heights, full of my very enthusiastic marginalia--lots of wows. A copy of The Secret Garden that's inscribed to my mom from her oldest sister, who died a few years later. And the copy of Charlotte's Web that my grandmother gave me when I was a kid, and that my husband read to me and our daughter just after she was born during those early, endless hours of nursing. (Turns out this is a very vulnerable time to read Charlotte's Web.)
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Probably Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. That book was such a revelation to me in the way it captures the movement of a mind on the page. I love re-reading it, too, but I would love to live through that first encounter again.