Sorry that the postings have been very light this past week, but I just found out last Friday that I had to move out by the end of the month! So I’ve spent the last few days packing and labeling boxes. I’m sitting in the corner of my new living room surrounded by boxes upon boxes of my stuff. Add to that, my husband and I picked up a stray cat (actually, she picked us) who is not getting along with my two dogs. Things are a bit hectic here. Does anyone want a very nice black-and-white kitty? We can’t decide on a name yet. I suggested Emily Mortimer, but my husband hates that so right now we’ve been calling her Meow Meow a.k.a. The Unnamed Emily Mortimer Project.
With all this going on, I haven’t been able to search the internet for short story tidbits. Luckily, Jenny Shank from Books and Writers newwest.net sent me a link to her interview with Steven Wingate, the winner of the Bakeless Prize last year for his story collection, “Wifeshopping.” He used his tax refund to enter a variety of short story prizes at literary magazines and won several of them. He sent his collection around eighteen times before he won Bakeless.
Let’s all use our tax refund this year to save the short story!The interview can be found here.
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Opportunity, a collection of short stories written by Charlotte Grimshaw was awarded the Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry. The judges stated that the book was:
“By turns touching, funny, dark, and redemptive, this is a book for reading through then re-reading in a different order, for following clues, for setting aside and thinking about, and for getting lost in.”
Grimshaw is the daughter of CK Stead, another New Zealand writer.
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A few days ago I was trying to compile a list of short stories which were adapted into movies. The first one that came to mind was “Brokeback Mountain.” Then I came up with a couple of great Stephen King stories –”The Body” (into Stand By Me) and “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (The Shawshank Redemption) from his collection, Different Seasons. And of course there’s “Secretary” by Mary Gaitskill, but the short story is so different from the movie that I’m not sure it counts.
I did a google search and found this book and this other list.
Some of the ones in the book are:
The Minority Report
American Splendor
Memento
All About Eve
Rear Window
Rashomon
2001: A Space Odyssey
Bringing Up Baby
Meet John Doe
All About Eve
Psycho
Does anyone know of any more recent ones?
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If America is the land of the short story, then why is the largest prize for the short story awarded on the other side of the pond?
The BBC National Short Story Award is an annual award that celebrates the best contemporary British short story. The author gets 15,000 pounds, which is about $30,000. For one story! This year there were 600 submissions. I’m actually a bit shocked that the number isn’t higher. One Story gets about that many submissions in two months and we’re not giving away nowhere near that kind of money.
Clare Wigfall’s story, The Numbers, is the story of a woman with a preoccupation with the number 8 and was inspired by the American anthropologist Margret Fay Shaw, who visited the Outer Hebrides in the 1920s and stayed until her death at the age of 101.
You can listen to an excerpt online here.
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I met Nam Le at the last AWP and the thing that struck me as kind of cute is that he’s an Asian guy with an Australian accent. I have relatives who live all over the world, including Africa, so when they come to visit, I get to hear all sorts of crazy accents mixed in with their Chinese accent. Most of the time it does not work, but for some reason the Vietnamese/Australian thing seems to be a good combo, even though I generally don’t like Australian accents. Go figure.
Nam Le has a book of short stories out entitled The Boat and I found an interview with him on laist.com. When asked about how he came to write this collection, he said:
“…I can tell you that I never imagined, as I was writing these stories, that they would end up in a collection… I was writing these stories just as I started seriously reading short stories, and in part the diversity in this book is attributable to my having become simultaneously smitten with so many stories of all shapes and narratives stripes. I wanted each of my stories to work completely on its own terms, to answer solely to its own aspirations.
As for how they came to be published – a couple of years ago I holed myself up for seven cold months on the top floor of a barn in Provincetown to work on a novel, but found myself compulsively returning to and rejigging these stories. Finally I set the novel aside, knuckled down on the stories, collated them and sent them to my agent to hold in escrow. (He too was waiting for my novel.) I told him not to let me touch the stories again. He read them, then told me he thought they were ready. At that point I realized how conventional wisdom in publishing works – it doesn’t really.”
Check out the rest of the interview here.
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Peter Cole from Keyhole Magazine has started a postcard project. Every month they’re printing a short story (or a poem) on a postcard with some artwork and passing them out in different cities. This month it’s Nashville. They will also send the author (and any other willing volunteers) postcards to pass along in their hometowns.
The short stories must be really short, about 200 words. I really like the idea of guerilla publishing. Let’s decorate the world with short stories.
Check out their guidelines here.
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Today I searched for something newsworthy on the short story and came across this article from the Northwest Florida Daily News. It’s a shorts story. I hope this doesn’t happen to any of you.
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I found a book at my local library the other day and it is a must read for every writer who is submitting to literary magazines and getting rejected. It’s called “The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile,” written by Noah Lukeman.
I’ve been getting several of those sad little slips of paper lately and thought that this book couldn’t hurt. To be truthful, I don’t read very many “How to Write” types of books because many of them seem to be 120 pages of fluff and only 2 pages of any real advice. But this one is different. There’s a good chapter on adjectives and adverbs — basically, a lot of writers use tend to use too many of them — it’s a huge red flag that the rest of the manuscript isn’t worth reading.
In the short story world, you could say that the first five paragraphs are the most important ones. Many literary journals don’t have enough of a staff to read your whole story, so it must grab a reader right away. One important point Lukeman made is that:
“Agents and editors don’t read manuscripts to enjoy them; they read solely with the goal of getting through the pile, solely with an eye to dismiss a manuscript — and believe me, they’ll look for any reason they can, down to the last letter.”
That’s pretty true, which brings me to a pet peeve I have. There’s an area on the submission manager where most people write a note to the staff and about 15% of people write “enjoy!” in this space. When I told my sister about this, she said to me:
“I bet you hate that because you immediately think — I will not enjoy!”
This is so true. I hate when people tell me what to do. I try to remain neutral, but you’ve already annoyed me with that little, “enjoy!” (It’s especially annoying with that exclamation point.)
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Personally, I think that the short story is closer to a… short story. Why do people constantly need to define the short story “as” something else? Is an orange closer to an apple or a tomato? Hmmm? Let’s debate that everyone.
According to the Russell Smith article about Caroline Adderson’s latest short story collection:
“People want novels. Actually, they don’t even want novels, they want biography and self-help. Actually, they don’t want books at all, they want reality TV shows about losing weight - but okay, of those who do want to read books, and of that small number those who want to read fiction, most want novels.”
“At a panel discussion in a public library, she (Adderson) said she thought that the pleasure of the short story did not lie so much in its story as in its language. This caused some raised voices in the question-and-answer period. In a second discussion, she expanded on this: The short story, she said, was closer to the poem; the novel was closer to drama (plays and films).”
The rest of the article can be found here.
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I suppose it was inevitable that a short story about two gay cowboys would eventually be set to music. Apparently, Annie Proulx’s short story, Brokeback Mountain, which had been made into a movie a few years ago, has been chosen to be re-written as an opera and scheduled for City Opera’s 2013 spring season. This is what we in the biz refer to as a story that’s “got legs.”
You can read more about it here.
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