Save the Short Story

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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