Save the Short Story

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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I came across this interview with a Nepali author named Ramesh Vikal. It’s cute because he starts the interview by talking about this book he’s translating from the English language, an interesting science fiction novel written by a 19-year-old girl named Mary Shelley. At no time during the interview does it come up that this girl wrote this book 200 years ago!  But I guess it will be new to the Nepali, once it’s translated, of course.

It’s interesting to think that a novel that is required reading for every American high school sophomore, with all of its film adaptations, is getting a fresh reading somewhere in Nepal.

When asked about the current environment for the short story, he said:

Well the environment for writing stories is in progress. But it is too little I should say. The number of dedicated short story writers is very few.

And when asked if he’s working on any stories:

I haven’t been able to write any stories at the moment. It is in crisis.

I’m not sure what he thought was in crisis, his writing or the short story.  Perhaps both?

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I remember the first time I read the Tobias Wolff short story, “The Liar.” The story is told in first person, but there is one scene where the main character describes his mother going to church. I always use this story in creative writing classes to show how a first person narrator can effectively describe a scene he does not take part in. And the beauty is that the reader doesn’t even realize it.

Here is an article from the LA Times Book Review by Marianne Wiggins about the book. In it, she writes:

“…the short story. When it’s done well, the economy, the rigor, the precision that the form demands are hardly noticed by its consumer. But it is more difficult to write, in its line-to-line execution, than any other narrative conceit. And Tobias Wolff is a genius at it.”

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Glen Pourciau is the winner of the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award for his collection Invite. Molly McNett’s One Dog Happy is the winner of the 2008 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. They were selected by the final judge Charles D’Ambrosio, author of The Dead Fish Museum and Orphans.

The Iowa Short Fiction Award is given to a first collection of fiction written in English and are administered through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been given since 1969. The John Simmons Short Fiction Award was created in 1988 to complement the existing Iowa Short Fiction Award.

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Cantaraville is a literary magazine that has an interesting publishing format. All of their issues are delivered as a printable PDF download, which is great because you can store them on your computer and it doesn’t take up any space. I’m always giving away journals I like ( in other words, building the One Story literary magazine library) because I need the space in my apartment.

You can download Cantaraville’s 60-page sampler of their first issue here and they accept short story submissions of 1,500-5,000 words.

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Toward International Peace through the Arts is hosting “Short-Short Stories from Around the World” on March 28 at St. Peter’s Church in midtown Manhattan. Stories by Hemingway, Chekhov, and other short story masters will be read by Jim Dale (reader of the Harry Potter audiobooks) and actors Brian F. O’Byrne, Tammy Grimes, and Frances Sternhagen.

This event is free and open to the public.

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Any day that a writer wins $20,000 for writing short stories is a good day. Jim Shepard won for his short story collection, Like You’d Understand Anyway. Not only did he take home the prize money, he also got a silver bowl with his name on it. And we all know that silver is the best type of bowl.

Each of the authors read from their books and talked a bit afterwards with Larry Dark, the prize director. During the Tessa Hadley interview, she was asked what it was that turned a loving couple in one of her stories into two people who didn’t care anymore. Her answer was, “Children have something to do with it.” You could hear about a hundred people sucking in their breaths.

And when asked about the short story in particular, she said that for a person who is starting to write, it’s difficult to work on a long piece, like a novel, because of “finding out halfway through its died.” And she writes short stories because, “I love them.”

Vincent Lam, who is also a medical doctor, shared how he managed to write and pursue his medical license at the same time. Basically, he said he didn’t have kids yet at the time. (Why does everyone blame the kids?) But also, that emergency medicine is shift work, so he would work on stories when he was off his shift — and his wife was in her residency at the time, so she wasn’t able to spend time with him. When pressed further, he said, “It was important to me, ultimately.”

Jim Shepard discussed how he came up with his story, “The Zero Meter Driving Team,” by taking big piles of oral histories about Chernobyl from the library just because he was interested in it. “It shouldn’t be called Research, ” he said. “It should be called Jim Should Get a Life.”

During his interview with Larry Dark, Jim Shepard was very jokey, so it was a surprise when he got very emotional as he accepted the prize. He turned to his fellow nominees and praised them to the audience. “They compel our interest in lives other than our own.”

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The Story Prize is an annual award given to books of short fiction. This year, three finalists were selected from 78 short story collections. The winner will be announced on February 27 at The New School in New York City. The prize is $20,000 and a silver bowl with their name on it. Don’t all writers want a personalized silver bowl? I know I do.

The three finalists are:

Sunstroke and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam

Like You’d Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard, who just read for One Story last month. Click here to listen to the reading.

The three finalists will read selections from their work, followed by an author interview. The two runners up will go home with $5,000.

If you’re in the NYC area, you can get tickets to the show. The event will be held at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium (66 West 12th Street) at 7:30 pm on Feb. 27, go to SmartTix.com and search for “story prize” or make a reservation by calling the New School box office at 212-229-5488 Monday through Friday 1-7 pm or e-mailing them at boxoffice@newschool.edu.

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Today I discovered a new type of short-short story called a drabble. And by new, I mean that it is new to me, because apparently, the drabble has been around for decades, mostly in the world of science fiction fandom. What will those guys come up with next?

A drabble is a very short story that is exactly 100 words in length.

100 Word Stories is a site that posts a new topic every day. People can post their drabbles online and the prompts are pretty interesting.

Yesterday’s topic was: What’s wrong with the blood?

Today’s topic is: Red or White?

I say white. (And now I have to come up with 97 more words).

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Esquire.com publishes Last Line Articles, which features discussion topics chosen by a different author each week. This week, Chimamanda Adichie, author of One Story’s issue #27, Transition to Glory, discusses how she writes her stories.

“Big things” like race inspire me, but I am interested in writing about them in the smallest, most oblique way. I’m happily old-fashioned in my literary tastes, very keen on social realism, on fiction that is strong on character and place and has something to say about real things and real people without being preachy. Some of my favorite stories about race — by Brock Clarke, by James Alan McPherson — are serious and funny and sure but aren’t self-righteous.

The rest of Chimamanda Adichie’s article (and her super-adorable picture) can be found here.

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