Save the Short Story

Penguin UK launched a digital writing project that married reality games to short story writing. The site is called We Tell Stories and the ambition is to create new forms of the story for the internet age.

I browsed through the site and it’s interesting, but I don’t know about its literary merit. “Fairy Tales” by Kevin Brooks is kind of like an internet version of Mad Libs. You choose the name of the princess and king and what type of characters they come across. This might be fun for grade-school kids.

“The (Former) General In His Labyrinth” by Mohsin Hamid is a very slow-moving choose-your-own-adventure story. And once you go on a tangent, you have to click back (and back and back) in order to get to the original story, which slowed down the action.

I thought that all the interactive clicking bogged down the actual “story” part of the experience, but I think Penguin may just be doing this to launch their contests and push the books they’re selling. I think that this idea could have been executed better, and I’m sure we’ll see more sites like this in the future.

Unfortunately, the contests are only open to residents of the UK (darn!) - but the website is fun games for all.

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Whenever I read the slush for One Story, I usually don’t make comments or suggestions. My reasoning is that in the time I could spend to write up one helpful letter to one author, I could have handled twelve slush responses. Therefore, I send out the ubiquitous form rejection letter so common to all of us. In fact, I got one today! Although it did have my name on it. (Thanks American Short Fiction!)

However, I came across a literary magazine that promises they will not send form rejection letters. Our Stories is a lit mag that does something different:

At Our Stories, we don’t just send a rejection slip or an automated email that says, “Thanks, but no thanks.” At Our Stories, first, you get the shot at publishing and, second, if it doesn’t work out, you get a professional review for your piece. It’s something different, and we think it makes sense.

There are two types of submissions. If you want to submit during their free submission period, Our Stories editors will send you feedback and suggestions on how to improve your story.

But during the Contest Submission period, for a fee of twenty dollars, you will get general feedback, a page-by-page breakdown of your piece and what worked and what didn’t. You can click here to view some of the samples - one sample goes into 4 pages of details! I didn’t get this much critiquing during my time at my MFA program!

Okay, I know I got carried away with too many exclamation points, but actual comments on stories? Feedback from a lit mag? This is huge, people! And of course, if you submit there, you just might get yourself published.

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All of us who read the slush at One Story do so in the hopes of finding that new, unique voice. Sometimes it’s just the luck of the draw. When I first started as a reader, I found Patrick Somerville’s story, Trouble and the Shadowy Deathblow. A few years later, when his short story collection had been published, he told me that he owed it all to his appearance in One Story.

When aspiring authors approach me, the most popular question is: “Do you really find stories from blind submissions?”

The truth is, yes. We read every submission hoping to find a great new writer.

I found this blog entry today about a book I had never heard of before. It’s called First Fiction, and it’s an anthology of the  first published short stories by famous writers. We never think of people like John Cheever and Eudora Welty as new writers, sending out that first story into the world, hoping to catch the attention of an editor. I quickly ordered the book, which is out of print, but I found it here and here.

It will be an interesting exercise to see how I would have judged these stories. And I think it’s an interesting book for anyone who enjoys short stories.

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Jhumpa Lahiri talks with The Star, Toronto’s newspaper, about the short story.

“In the wider world, there is a terrible hierarchy that people have between stories and novels. There is a sense that bigger is better and smaller is a diminutive, lesser thing. It’s maddening to me because I don’t understand it. I just think that if one is a serious reader of fiction, that argument doesn’t really hold very much water because some of the most remarkable works of fiction are short.”

I know I’ve already written about Jhumpa Lahiri, but I find it interesting that reporters everywhere have been asking her about why she writes short stories instead of novels and what the short story means to her. She speaks so beautifully about short stories that I hear myself saying, “Yay! Short Stories!”

The rest of that article can be found here.

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This year at AWP, several of my friends urged me to check out Subtropics, the lit. mag. published out of the University of Florida. I remembered reading and liking one of their stories, “Gringos,” by Ariel Dorfman, in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2007, so I picked up the latest issue.

Then, a few weeks later, I gave Rachel Carpenter a ride in my orange Honda Element (the half-SUV/half-Clown car) after a reading. She saw the current issue of Subtropics on the backseat and said, “You’re reading this magazine? I love this magazine! I’m in their second issue. But that’s not the reason I think it’s a great magazine.”

And just this week, Court the Jesters published an interview with Subtropics editor David Leavitt under the subject heading: “The Dire State of Fiction’s Not a Myth.”

For those of you writing short stories, he recommends reading them:

“…we’re told that fiction is on the skids, is tanking, that no one buys novels or story collections any more. There’s a paradox here, and a problem that reveals itself when you actually read these stories by people who don’t bother to read fiction themselves. At the very least the MFA programs preserve the idea that writing is a craft and that established writers should train younger writers as established musicians train younger musicians and that writers should read great literature in order to learn from it.”

The rest of the interview can be read here.

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While I was a graduate student at NYU, one of our assignments was to present a short story of our choosing to the fiction seminar class and lead a discussion on the story’s structure. It was kind of the equivalent of a dress-making class, where the teacher asks you to deconstruct a dress and explain all the different pieces and why they all work.

At the time, I had been carrying around a story I had found in a magazine entitled, “A Temporary Matter.” I carried it around with me because I found myself rereading it over and over again and discovering new ideas after each reading. Most of the class chose pieces written by established writers, so when I presented this one to my partner, I was afraid he would veto it.

Instead, he called me up later that night and said, “Where did you find this? It’s the perfect story.”

The very next year the author of that story, Jhumpa Lahiri, won the Pulitzer Prize for her short story collection.

Her new collection is entitled, “Unaccustomed Earth.” I read an interview with her and she was asked if, as the mother of two young children, she couldn’t find the time to write a novel so she had to resort to writing short stories.

Her answer:

I don’t think of short stories as a secondary option, ever. I happened to have some ideas for stories, that I had on the backburner when I was working on The Namesake and it was all very natural to return to those ideas when I finished that novel. In a sense, when life is very overwhelming, working on stories can be slightly more manageable because they are single pieces you can wrap your head around a little more effectively. But having said that, I felt I wrote these stories over a period of many years. It was not that I wrote one, and went on to write a collection.

The rest of the interview (along with her glam photo) can be found here.

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