I'm pleased to have been asked to write the forward to this collection of splendid and heretofore mostly unseen short stories, all of which were written from roughly the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s by my longstanding friend and constant teacher Dave Sims. Mostly the stories transpire in what might reasonably be called working-class settings. They're inhabited by a range of peculiar characters, many of them troubled and distressed, some of them near death, all of them ingenuously sprung from Sims' singularly rich and fertile imagination. These are stories that deserve to be read, pondered and, of course, enjoyed. While recently re-reading them, I was struck, as happened often when I first encountered them years ago, by how strange and real and fully alive the characters seemed. I marveled once again at the details and contours of the stories themselves, their beautiful and inventive architecture, the snap and rhythm of the sentences and the keen, restless intelligence from whence they sprang.