It’s no mystery that I’m not very great with technical things and apparently it took a very nice person named Tyler C. Gore from Literal Latte to notice that our site had been hacked by pharmaceutical spam. I guess that’s why this site was getting tons of spam emails from people wanting me to improve my size.
Hopefully, our webmaster has fixed the problem. I just approved a bunch of comments that had been lost to the murky mire of Viagra Spams. All those comments are now on the website. Sorry about that.
Please take the time to see what some people thought…a few months ago.
This is also a great time to check out Literal Latte. I remember picking up copies of Literal Latte in bookstores and shops while I was in college. It was kind of like the Craig’s List for the literary because it was distributed for free. And you know how New Yorkers love free stuff. Now the magazine is on the web and it prides itself on publishing new voices. 98% of what they publish comes from the slush pile. You can find their latest issue here.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
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The Christian Science Monitor has announced what they think are the best short story collections published this year. Of course Jhumpa Lahiri is in it, but so are Nam Le, Roddy Doyle, Cynthia Ozick, Elizabeth Strout, Uwem Akpan, Lara Vapnyar and Jane Gardam.
Check it out here and their slideshow of the winning book covers. I know we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I love looking at covers.
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I’ve always liked Stephen King’s short stories. In college, I had a copy of The Night Shift, which had a picture of a hand with eyes on the fingertips. Whenever my roommate saw that the cover was facing up, she’d turn it over.
I think his writing has that affect on a reader–those scary stories have a strange ring of truth to them–and they get under your skin.
In the introduction to his latest collection of short stories, Just After Sunset, Stephen King tells his readers that he was inspired to turn to short stories again during the time he was editing the Best American Short Stories 2007.
So short stories can create other short stories. That’s good to hear.
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It’s Halloween, so I’ve been thinking about Zombies, which always makes me think of Kelly Link. The other day at an editorial meeting, a friend of mine told me a story about a doctor who cured people of irrational fears. One of his patients had an irrational fear of Zombies.
“What I don’t understand is why being afraid of Zombies is irrational?” My friend said. ”I mean, they’re SCARY!”
So I guess that makes it a totally rational fear.
Kelly Link recently gave an interview to The Nation. She was asked if people are always asking her if she is ever going to write a novel:
Yes. Part of me thinks it’s a reasonable question, and I also think, Well, if you like the short stories, shouldn’t you ask for more short stories? I don’t think there’s any guarantee that I would write novels that work in the same way the stories work. I don’t think I have the skill set yet. I would love to write a novel, but mostly because it seems like a shame not to try to do something that a lot of people want you to do. I feel sort of like a coward every time I start a short story. But I think I will always love short stories. I’m more excited by short story collections in general–a lot of the editing or anthology work I do is based around the short story. I love novels. Some of my best friends are novels! But I really love short stories best.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
And you can download her book, Stranger Things Happen, for free on her website.
Happy Halloween!
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The fiction class I teach in Westchester started a few weeks ago and in my search for new books at the library, I discovered that the craft books for short story writing are arranged next to books on the art of fishing. I thought this was sort of appropriate.
My grandfather loves to fish and one time I asked if I could tag along and he said, “Well, if you want to sit around and do nothing for hours and hours in the hopes of catching a fish and getting a few minutes of excitement, you’re welcome to come along. However, I don’t think it will be much fun for you.”
I feel that writing is kind of like that description. You plug away and do the work and most days you might not feel that you accomplished much, but sometimes it’s writing the fifty pages that just don’t work to get to those two awesome pages which lead you into the real start of a story you wouldn’t be completely ashamed to admit came out of your thoughts.
What strikes me about each writing class I teach is that people don’t really understand the commitment it takes to write something worthwhile. No one would ever decide to run the NY Marathon and not work out for months and months. Yet, people feel that they can just pick up a pen and the words will pour forth. All you need is to attend a great workshop/seminar/conference and Voila!
I once overheard someone say, “I could have gotten into Harvard.” This kind of statement always gets under my skin because someone who could utter something like that just has no idea the amount of hard work it takes to accomplish something like that at the age of eighteen. Someone who could actually say something like, “I could have gotten into Harvard,” would never say that because she knows that it was that stupid B-minus in Biology class which pushed her right out of contention. All that childhood sacrifice and summers spent memorizing those stupid 604 vocabulary words for the SAT and weekends cleaning up mouse pee and praying for your Westinghouse project results go right out the window (and, most likely, into a lesser Ivy like Brown or Cornell–if you’re lucky).
So yes, I’ve heard there are some writers who whistle while they work. I think that’s great. But most of the time, it’s awful hair-pulling frustrating work, but you know that if you get up to boil a cup of tea, you might just open up that US Weekly your sister left behind when she stayed over for the weekend and you’ll never get that blob of an idea into any shape at all. So you stay seated. You keep fishing.
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A few months ago, I attended an Amy Hempel reading and someone in the audience asked her if she has “graduated” to writing novels yet. You could see her bristle and she told him very firmly that she just wasn’t interested in writing novels. The novel’s loss is the short story’s gain, and recently Amy Hempel was the winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, a $30,000 prize.
The Rea Award for the Short Story is given annually to a living American of Canadian writer whose published work has made a significant contribution in the discipline of the short story as an art form. Is is not given for a collection of stories or for a body of work, but rather for originality and influence on the genre.
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Steven Millhauser wrote an essay about the short story in the New York Times:
The novel is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What’s left for the poor short story to do? It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box. It can take a course in creative nonfiction. It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn’t forget its place — so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. “Hoo ha!” cries the novel. “Here ah come!” The short story is always ducking for cover. The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.
For all its short storiness, he says that the short story has a “littleness (that) is the agency of its power.” I think we can all agree with him.
Read the rest of it here.
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Almost every short story writer dreams that her work will pique the interest of those in Hollywood and be made into a film, but the audience for a film may be a different type of person than a reader of short stories.
According to an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Annie Proulx shares with us the effect of the success “Brokeback Mountain” has had on her career:
“Brokeback Mountain” has had little effect on my writing life, but is the source of constant irritation in my private life. There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story. They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for “fixing” the story. They certainly don’t get the message that if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it. Most of these “fix-it” tales have the character Ennis finding a husky boyfriend and living happily ever after, or discovering the character Jack is not really dead after all, or having the two men’s children meet and marry, etc., etc. Nearly all of these remedial writers are men, and most of them begin, “I’m not gay but….” They do not understand the original story, they know nothing of copyright infringement—i.e., that the characters Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar are my intellectual property—and, beneath every mangled rewrite is the unspoken assumption that because they are men they can write this story better than a woman can. They have not a clue that the original “Brokeback Mountain” was part of a collection of stories about Wyoming exploring mores and myths. The general impression I get is that they are bouncing off the film, not the story. There’s more, but that is enough, ok?
Proulx shares where she gets ideas for her stories, how she comes up with names for her characters, and why she thinks the short story is the superior literary form.
The interview can be found here.
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kottke.org has compiled a list of links about David Foster Wallace, including interviews and personal remembrances from his ex-students. Harper’s magazine has put up everything Wallace had published in their magazine on their website, including a few short stories. Here are the rest of the links.
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David Foster Wallace, the brilliant writer who gave us “Girl With Curious Hair,” died yesterday. He was 46.
A little over ten years ago I lived with a roommate, a person with such a superiority complex that she made fun of every musician I liked and every book I owned. I returned home one day to find her sprawled out on our ugly green sofa with my copy of Girl With Curious Hair. She looked up at me with her eyes sort of glossed over and said, “This is the first time I’ve ever read anything that describes life EXACTLY.”
There aren’t too many writers I admire more than David Foster Wallace. This evening, as I turned on my computer and I spotted his name on the news tab on Yahoo’s homepage, I couldn’t believe what I had read.
Depression is such a misunderstood disease. I’ve always felt that it should be treated like any other illness. My husband’s coworker has just been diagnosed with lymphoma and she has the complete support of her friends and family. Her bosses have moved her into a cleaner office so that her immune system isn’t compromised. Her coworkers have taken on a lot of her work load so that she has more energy to recover. People should take a depression diagnosis just as seriously.
If you are depressed, please get help. If you know someone who is depressed, please know that they need help, because they do, even if they turn you away. Please don’t turn your back on them. Tell them they are not alone. More importantly, tell them you love them. Take them to a movie. And if they don’t want to get out of bed to go to a movie, bring a television set and VCR to their college dorm room and sit with them through a really stupid science fiction movie. That’s what someone did for me and it has made all the difference.
Now go hug someone and take a walk in the rain just because you can. Life is good.
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