Patricia McNair's Storied Life

In the 62nd in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Patricia McNair, author of The Temple of Air (Elephant Rock), reveals her sources.

I sit with my husband at a restaurant, and across the way near a large, haunting, abstract painting on a brick-face wall, another couple lean in toward one another, then away. The man leaves his hand on the table between them, palm up; the woman pulls her shoulders back and crosses her arms over her chest. She is weeping.

I lived in a house in a small subdivision between two lakes in Iowa, and the wife of the couple next door was badly scarred. A deep caving in of flesh was where bone and muscle should have been, but wasn't. I found out later that her husband shot half of her face off. A hunting accident. They gave up hunting. She stopped eating meat.

On a huge Ferris wheel—one with swinging cages instead of bench seats—I watch as a father lets his little boy, an infant, crawl around the floor of the ride, putting his head against the bars that are supposed to keep us safe.

When I worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, there were twin brothers who—in their forties, perhaps fifties—still dressed alike and lived together. They were each single, never married. One was the nice one. One was not.

In my teens I babysat for a girl with Down's Syndrome. She was younger than me but actually quite a bit larger, heavier. One afternoon while she settled in for a nap, I dozed on a couch in the den. I woke up when the girl was on top of me, hitting me.

Friends tell me stories: There’s a woman with a double mastectomy and a man working in her house; a mother tried to give up eating in order to find enlightenment; a woman suspected her husband of cheating only to find out he was distracted by his serious (and secret) illness. I listen carefully and store it all away, just in case. One writer friend knows what I am up to, and so she prefaces her stories—the really good ones—with: Now, you can’t have this one; this one is mine.

They are all ordinary moments from my ordinary life, really, but ones that stay with me, draw me to them and through them in search of narrative. I gather these instances, never quite sure when they will present themselves to me, unbidden at times, or at others, dragged out from the murky shadows of memory. I sit with my pen and my journal, or my fingers on a keyboard, and scan through those things I have witnessed, I’ve been told, I’ve noted, and I wonder about still—days, years, sometimes decades after this happened, after that occurred.

Here—in each day I make my way through—is where story lives. The couple pulling apart at the table, the scarred wife, the endangered child, the odd twins, the big girl and her babysitter, the man in the house, the longing mother, and the distracted husband each have found a home in my linked collection, The Temple of Air. They are no longer the people I saw or was told about, they are no longer the people I knew. They have become others, characters created, who populate the pages of the stories I’ve imagined in the lives I’ve discovered.

It is this, this moving from watching, gathering, storing away, to writing it down that changes things. What was real, what really happened, no longer matters, at least not to me. It is an interesting tension, this pull between observation and imagination, this balance of seeing it happen and making it happen. This place that is settled somewhere between what is real and what is imagined is where I come to do my work; this is where I live my storied life.

Joseph Salvatore on Collections with Natural, Subtle, and Sublime Arcs

In the 61st in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Joseph Salvatore, author of To Assume a Pleasing Shape (BOA Editions), Runs through some of his favorite short story collections.

Is there a story collection you consider your ideal of what a collection should be? 

I love story collections. The place that each story takes you to, as well as the chance to take that journey in one sitting, is part of the seduction for me. When I was a kid, my mother took my sister and me to the library every week. There, I discovered and devoured books about Encyclopedia Brown, boy detective.  Each short story was a mystery and had a puzzle to be solved (an answer key was provided at the back of the book). I would read a single story at breakfast, or on the way to school, or in the back seat of the car, anywhere. After that, it was Sherlock Holmes and Alfred Hitchcock mysteries—again, short stories I could inhale in one sitting. In junior high, it was Poe and Dubliners; in high school Hemingway's In Our Time. College was Carver, Beattie, Moore, Ozick, Hempel, Barth, Borges, Barthelme—the whole world of short stories finally introducing itself to me.

So many collections have deeply moved and marked me: Coover's A Night at the Movies, Moore's Self-Help, Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Hempel's Reasons to Live, O'Brien's The Things They Carried, Edward P. Jones's Lost in the City, Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Means's Assorted Fire Events, Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. And on and on. However, there are two about which I feel certain I would allow one of my fingers to be cut off without anesthesia if I could have written either: Joyce's Dubliners and Johnson's Jesus' Son. Both books were never marketed as "a novel-in-stories," but both books have a natural, subtle, yet sublime, classical arc that is, for me, almost more satisfying in retrospect than it was during the reading. While reading Jesus' Son, for example, I never thought "How, by the end of this book, will the protagonist ever get clean and sober and find redemption and healing in a believable way that brings together so many of the themes that the author has woven together so cleverly throughout this entire collection?" No.  Rather, each story picked me up and carried me away, without a concern for the larger whole.  Once I finished the book, however, I understood that something else had happened to me.

In Jesus' Son, we start with Fuckhead (the only name to which our protagonist is referred) on a road to death (both spiritually and physically). We see him engage in all manner of self-destruction. But we sense that something else is going on for him—something more than merely getting high; he is, as William James calls it in Varieties of Religious Experience, a "sick soul." But moreover, he is, dare I say it, a pilgrim on a journey: searching for family, for vocation, for healing and home.  Once we get to "Happy Hour" (one of the least happy stories in the collection), Fuckhead reaches the center of Dante's  Inferno at a bar called Pig Alley: "The cigarette smoke looked unearthly. People ... gave up their bodies ... only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim.... But nothing could be healed." Johnson finishes that paragraph blending indirect dialogue with one of several direct addresses to the reader (who, it may be said, stands in as his Virgil) saying: "And what are you going to do to me now? With what, exactly, would you expect to frighten me."

The next story "Steady Hands at Seattle General" might function, then, as a sort of Purgatorio, where a horrific case of the DT's and an act of brotherly goodwill (a haircut) come together to create a liminal space for our protagonist. And finally, with the last story, a kind of Paradisio concludes the arc. "Beverly Home" brings Fuckhead to the end of his journey, a place where no longer is there the "knife dividing" alienation we've seen throughout, but rather a coming together and a healing: "All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them.  I had never known ... that there might be a place for people like us." (Chills ripple my skin as I type those lines, just as they did when I first read them.)

Dubliners, of course, has that classical arc, too. An arc that takes us from childhood stories such as "Araby" and "An Encounter" to the adolescent "Two Gallants" and, finally, to the impossible-to-praise-enough miraculous adulthood work of art "The Dead."  

Both collections have provided, for me, reasons to live.

Jim Shepard's Literary Influences: Dracula Meets Lolita

In the 60th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Jim Shepard, author of You Think That's Bad (Alfred A. Knopf), lists some of the books and authors that have fueled his writing.

It's hard to identify which books first made me want to write. (I never imagined I would become a writer, since that was something that seemed available only to people from other, tonier backgrounds.) I know I thrilled at about the age of twelve at the sheer narrative drive and invention of Bram Stoker's Dracula – I’d had been a big monster fan as a small boy, but mostly all I’d seen was movies -- and I remember, too, being stirred by how much viscerally charged and fraught material it seemed to be dredging up. I was hugely compelled a year or two later by Jim Bouton's Ball Four, for its breezy way of introducing the reader to an entire and arcane world, and for being so much fun while still making clear that it took itself, in ethical and political terms, quite seriously. Perhaps the biggest impact early on, though, came from a boxed set of J.D. Salinger that a family friend had given me for Christmas. At first I’d been disappointed by the gift – there weren’t even illustrations on the covers – but one day when I was kicking around my room, bored, I cracked one open, and was immediately submerged in those voices. I’d always imagined that people who wrote literature needed to sound like writers like Henry James, though I had only the dimmest notion of what writers like Henry James sounded like. Here was a voice that was urgently and comically colloquial and yet somehow never seemed trivial. That was almost certainly where I conceived of the radical notion that there might be hope for somebody like me.

Acts of grace?

From there I went on to endless other crucial revelations: in high school, for example, Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor. From the former I remember being floored by the extremely cool notion that, as Hemingway himself put it, a hard light thrown on an object softly illuminates the beholder: that you could write about someone that way. From the latter, I remember being dazzled by the dawning understanding that writing could be about an act of grace in the devil’s territory, and about the crucial usefulness of ferocity when it came to comedy, and one’s world view. And from there, in college, to Vladimir Nabokov, and to James Joyce, and Italo Calvino, and on and on and on.

Emma Straub: It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s an Epic Short Story!

In the 59th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Emma Straub, author of Other People We Married (Five Chapters/Riverhead Books), expresses her enthusiasm for big stories.

2011 was the year I fell in love with the epic short story. You know the type—a story that spans years on a single page, a story that somehow does the work that an entire novel might. No kitchen table love affairs here! These are stories that require time and elbow room. We’re not talking flashbacks here, two storylines that dovetail together at the end for a double-barreled epiphany. We’re talking a single-pronged story that starts in one moment in time and finishes at a distant point in the future. I want to spend the cold winter months holed up in my office, reading stories that could easily be three hundred pages long, and yet—miraculously!—are under thirty. Maybe my New Year’s Resolution will be to actually write one.

Here is a brief list of short stories that fit this gigantic bill:

Mavis Gallant’s "The Remission": Mavis is not afraid to subvert the reader’s expectation, and does so here, over and over again. The story lingers like an illness (I mean that as a compliment), where death is looming but still mysterious, its timetable unable to put on a schedule. Can stories about a death in a family be funny, and sexy, and strange, and unusual? Yes. Yes, they can.

Lauren Groff’s "L.DeBard and Aliette": Days pass, weeks, seasons, years, lifetimes. This more than any other feels like a novel to me, a whole truth split open. It is ambitious and ballsy and beautiful. I think that this was one of the first—if not the first—of Groff’s stories to be published, which is a little bit like a newborn child singing Tosca. It doesn’t seem possible, and yet, here it is.

Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist contemplate an epic view

Annie Proulx’s "Brokeback Mountain": Another love story, made famous by the film adaptation. It’s just as moving on the page, the language as rough-shod as the characters, their sweetness only truly visible over the course of their doomed and impossible love affair. The accumulation of time matters here, as it does in life, and the best memories are made even more poignant by our distance from them.

Melinda Moustakis Goes Fishing

In the 58th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Melinda Moustakis, author of Bear Down, Bear North (University of Georgia Press), runs through her writing process and how she put together her collection.

Which story in your collection required the most drafts or posed the most technical problems? 

I’d say that the story "Some Other Animal" was a beast to write. It’s one of the quieter stories in the collection and I usually start a story with a dramatic bang of a first line, or write with a hard-hitting voice, and this one is in third person limited. And the whole story is about restraint, about grieving, about the muffled onslaught of snow in winter. I felt as if I was trying to write it while blindfolded because I wasn’t relying on the usual tricks. "Some Other Animal" went through a long, piecemeal, revision process over three years. I think one of the last sections I wrote was the beginning section introducing the main character. Before finding these two opening paragraphs, I had arranged all of the sections in various orders in an attempt to find a way to keep tension because the pace is more of a slow dissolving, a melting. I asked over and over, “How do I get the reader to keep reading?” And this story went through so many titles, until I sat down and reread it and looked for any phrase or line that could work as a title and focused on this line of dialogue: "They'd make it to the arctic if a bear or some other animal didn't get them first." Finding the title, along with the wise suggestion given to me at a writer’s conference of “More dead moose! More blood!” helped guide me to the final draft.

What is your writing process like? 

I am usually writing toward an image that I can’t shake off. Or the rhythm of a voice takes over my brain. And I have to wait for this to happen. I’m not one of those people who write every day and I don’t write pages and pages and then go back and cut large sections. The thought of having to cut large sections makes me cringe. If the words are going on the page, they’re going to be as close as I can get them to the final draft at that time. When I revise, it’s finagling a word here or there, or moving sections and thinking about structure, adding sections. Some people relish the revision process. I dread it. So I do everything I can to avoid a lot of revision, although, stories often have a mind of their own and don’t cooperate. A teacher of mine once said, “The story is smarter than you are.” I’ve been thinking about this advice quite a lot recently while attempting to write a novel.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection? 

I had a lot of help with the arrangement. Sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes to look at your work and find new connections. Nancy Zafris, editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award Series at UGA Press, spent a lot of time thinking about the order of the stories with me. She was the one who suggested I put the short short "Trigger" as the first story in the collection, a thematic preface that introduces the Alaskan wilderness and the themes of hunting, violence, and the burden of inheritance to the reader. Since the stories are linked, and certain characters reappear, I knew I had to space out the generations of this homesteading family. I also had to arrange all the different points of view—first person, first person plural, second person, third limited, and omniscient. Then I also had to think about structure in the stories. I was told that I needed to create a map for readers and show them how to read the collection, how to read the more experimental stories that use modular fiction. The book begins with the short-short, one module, and builds on this idea of modules throughout the book, with the most challenging story in terms of structure and its dark subject—"Point MacKenzie"—being placed near the middle.

What kind of research, if any, do you do? 

Research

Most of my research is of the scientific kind. Checking on facts about wildlife and bugs and trees. I enjoy finding small, strange scientific details that I can include in my work.

If you dabble in any other non-literary forms of expression, what do you do and how does it inform your work? 

I think fishing counts in this category. I do some of my best listening, gathering, and thinking on the river when I go up to Alaska to fish with my uncle. I have a weakness for fishing stories and I’d say their structure informs my work—the tension of the line literally being informed by the tension of what might be on the end of the fishing line.

Have you had a mentor and who was it? 

I’ve been extremely fortunate and had many fantastic mentors and writing teachers over the years: Susann Cokal, Pam Houston, Lucy Corin, Stuart Dybek, Kellie Wells, and Jaimy Gordon.

Shannon Cain Gets Swept Along by the Flow

In the 57th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Shannon Cain, author of The Necessity of Certain Behaviors (University of PIttsburgh Press), talks technical challenges, story order, inspiration, research, and convergence.

Which story in your collection required the most drafts or posed the most technical problems? 
I worked over the title story pretty hard. For a long while, the ending was different: the question of the absence of children and old people wasn’t given its due. I’d been resisting the very good advice of a fine teacher, who suggested I look at the piece through a more anthropological lens, specifically addressing what was up with everyone in the village being so young and robust. But for a few years I had a particular idea that the story wasn’t at all about family and community but about romantic relationships, sex, and escape. Turns out it was about all of those things. When I allowed myself to explore what had happened, after all, to the kids and oldsters, the ending came naturally and the whole thing just opened wide and settled into itself.

What is your writing process like? 
Erratic and undisciplined and chronically behind schedule. To tell you the truth, I’m a mess.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection? 
Well, you always put the best one at the end, right? Seriously, it’s not that “Necessity” is the best (they’re all the best) but it seemed to resonate with a lot of people. And I liked it as a title for the collection. “This is How it Starts” seemed to demand to be placed first for obvious reasons, but also because it offers a straightforward introduction to the collection’s obsession with unconventional sexual and romantic behavior. Then there were a couple of stories from a male POV that I didn’t want to place side by side... and the rest was just a question of shuffling and puzzling then shuffling some more.

Nancy Drew, girl detective

What book or books made you want to become a writer? 
The Nancy Drew series. When I was about 10 years old I began my own Nancy Drew novel, but didn’t get very far because I couldn’t figure out how it would end. Imagine my relief, 25 years later, when I finally took my first writing workshop and learned you don’t need to know where a story is going before you begin it. This was revolutionary news to me. And as I kept writing, and learning, I learned it worked better for me when I even tried to resist this knowing. I often nibble around the edges of an idea for months before I dig into it, but when I find myself writing too much of the plot in my head, I turn my thoughts to something else. I don’t want to give my brain the opportunity to smooth the edges, remove the accidental directions and strange words and weird events that emerge when you’re being an explorer, swept along by the flow. In hindsight it’s clear the Nancy Drew stories were tightly plotted before the various Carolyn Keenes ever put a scene to paper. No surprise that I lost interest in the project. I’ve never been much of a planner.

What kind of research, if any, do you do? 
For “The Nigerian Princes,” I hung out on counterscammer websites. (Confession: the emails in that story aren’t my words but found art, a pirated and edited amalgamation of snippets from actual Nigerian scammers.) For “The Queer Zoo,” I spent hours with my nose in the encyclopedic Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, examining naughty pictures of same-sex animals getting it on. For “The Price is Right,” I watched reruns. For “Juniper Beach” I relied on my atlas, of course, and my personal experience as a young Auto Travel Counselor who spent her days assembling actual TripTiks. For “Cultivation,” well: I’ll just say that detailed instructions for growing marijuana aren’t so hard to find on the internet. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

If you dabble in any other non-literary forms of expression, what do you do and how does it inform your work? 

Lately I’ve been writing a lot about Occupy Tucson, via online articles and blog posts and essays. For the past five years I’ve been working on a novel set in Tucson, where I’ve lived for 30 years. It’s a political story about land use and water and development (and sex and drugs, of course), set amidst the current economic meltdown. So my writings about the Occupy movement couldn’t be more relevant to my current literary expression. This convergence is pretty neat.

Stephanie Powell Watts' Unrequited Couch Love

In the 56th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Stephanie Watts Powell, author of We Are Taking Only What We Need (BkMk Press), discusses a story she wrote in one six hour sitting that took ten years to revise.

Which story in your collection required the most drafts or posed the most technical problems?
I wrote a draft of “Unassigned Territory” about fourteen years ago in one wonderful evening on one of the couch loves of my life. That couch was a beauty: deep red cotton, flecked with almost imperceptible surprises of blue and yellow, traditional strong rolled arms, firm padded body (not vulgar and overstuffed), real wood skeleton. A couch’s couch. I loved that couch from the day I saw him, needing new upholstery, shoved in the back of a dark Salvation Army like the runt of the litter, whimpering at a frequency only fellow couch people can hear, “love me, I am good.”

I snuggled into my couch and couldn’t stop writing this story. Before I realized it, time had ticked away and flown by and flashed and disappeared in all the ways time does when you are miserable and watching mindless television because no one you love will call and you can’t fake the enthusiasm to call them or when you are deliriously happy because the baby you weren’t supposed to be able to have won’t stop belly laughing at his bunny’s flopping ears. Or you are quiet, the world is quiet and there are no emergencies anywhere, just quiet, harmless people breathing the same cool air. OR when you have written something you suspect may be fantastic, so good, when you re-read it you cry your own fool self. In that one sitting on my beautiful couch, I had a seventeen page draft that I believed was a masterpiece. If you write, you know exactly the feeling I mean. That wonderful, full sensation that you, glorious you, did it and it is very right and every word clicks into place like a combination lock. Tick, tick, all done. Perfect. That happy-making draft took me about six hours. But the revision for “Unassigned Territory” took the next ten years—not every day or even every month, but a tickle on my back on a place I found impossible to reach for TEN YEARS.

It is an understatement to say that my first draft was not perfect. Let’s just say it wasn’t very good. In fact, if there are three words strung together that remain from that original draft, I would be shocked. Though I was wrong about the quality of that first draft, I knew there was something important I was trying hard to say. For me it is significant that the title has not changed in all the revisions. I suspect what I wanted to get across all those years ago had something to do with the desperation of the striving outsider. What is claimed? what is taken in a person? in a life? and what can you, if you have the courage or stupidity, claim for yourself? The girl I wanted to be, still want to be: included, safe and uncompromised, belonged if that is even the right use of the word, was always trying to have a say in that story. Can you live in this world without compromise? And, more to the point of my story, is faith in anything always a compromise?

Oh compromise. Though my red couch was a deep love and a long-lasting one, I had a first and unforgettable. And in the way of these stories, this original couch-love was unrequited. I fell hard for an asymmetrical curving back, orange fur-covered beauty in the Goodwill in Raleigh, North Carolina. Fifty dollars, a lot of money for me in those days (in these days too, who am I kidding?) and I visited that Goodwill just to get a look at his sprawled, angled lusciousness. At the end of the week, when one of my jobs paid me the mere pittance that amounted to a week’s just-over-minimum wages, that couch would be in my own tiny, one bedroom apartment, with the occasional (thank God) cockroach so large the sight of it would take my breath. It has been twenty years since I went to that thrift store, consumed with the worry of how I would get that seven-footer in my Hyundai only to find an open spot where the body had been. The couch, MY COUCH had sold just the day before. I was crushed. Do you understand being crushed? When the body of you, a person, straight and complete becomes compacted into a mass, no blood flow, no errant thoughts, the opposite of hollow, a thick dead cube with useless systems, dead functions. Too much sentiment for a couch, I know, but I fell hard for this one. But what I am hoping to tell you is sometimes THE ONE isn’t really THE ONE. Though I imagined our glorious life together, that couch and I were not meant to be. This is not sour grapes talking. Sometimes you have to search like hell for the real true thing. Loving is so good, and like the soul song says, ain’t nothing like the real thing, but trying again, loving again, revising again and again and a-freaking-gain can sustain you too.

Cathy Stonehouse on Density, Space, and Silence

In the 55th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Cathy Stonehouse, author of Something About the Animal (Biblioasis), talks about how she put together her collection.

What do you think a good short story collection should deliver? 

For me, a good short story has density, which means that a lot happens between the lines. Space and silence in short fiction do a lot of work. In a collection, therefore, there needs to be sufficient space to absorb and appreciate the implications of each piece. I have tired of collections which pack too many stories in, or hit the same note too many times. Some stories that work powerfully alone lose impact when placed beside eight others that do pretty much the same thing. Equally, collections that read like literary portfolios, filled with as wide a range as possible of settings, voices, and forms—as if to demonstrate technical prowess—can feel manipulative and irritating. Personally I admire writers who offer up what they know and push it as far as they can even to the point of failure. Reportage from a front line I will never visit, which can take multiple forms.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection? 

When assembling the stories for Something About the Animal I wanted the reader to experience them as a journey into a particular darkness and then out again. I knew I was expecting a lot of the reader, perhaps too much, but nevertheless this was where my narrative path led. I began to see the book as a linked whole, a series of suspension bridges from which the reader could survey an entire landscape and goggle at the canyons beneath. There was something magical about the way the stories linked territories and when placed one after the other made a bigger journey possible.

I am interested in how “the collection” is quite often an artificial or temporary structure. In this sense short fiction resembles poetry, a form that operates on both micro (individual poem) and macro (collection of poems) levels.

Finishing a book, knowing when it is done, is hard for me. Two of the shortest stories, “Ravenous Hours” and “Freak Waves,” were written at the very end of the editing process to fill what I perceived as gaps, stretches of terrain that required integration into the circuit. I was, however, aware my style was changing and began to feel one book blur into another: This was the time to stop or else the whole rest of the book would become obsolete!

Will Boast on Beautiful Musicians and Unlikely Dreams

In the 54th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Will Boast, author of Power Ballads (University of Iowa Press), explains why he thinks struggling musicians make good protagonists for short stories.

Since high school, an obsession with music—performing, recording, listening, talking about it endlessly with friends—has run right along in parallel to my more private obsession with reading and writing. The two pursuits intersected in the stories I wrote for my collection, Power Ballads. The accumulated force of all the rehearsals I’ve sat through, all the (largely unglamorous) gigs I’ve played, all the beautiful and frustrated musicians I’ve met, and all the unlikely dreams I’ve seen those musicians try to live out needed to find some kind of literary outlet. It wasn’t that I set out to write about music and musicians necessarily, more that the lives of the musicians I’ve known put them in interesting, precarious positions—artistically, financially, and emotionally—that began to suggest to me individual stories.

One of my favorite books of criticism on the short story is Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice. It’s not a scholarly work, nor does it make any claims to objectivity, but for me it compellingly describes what the short story is good at doing. In his introduction, O’Connor outlines his famous concept, the “submerged population group,” using it to describe the sorts of characters he finds in the early masters of the short tale: Gogol’s petty officials, Turgenev’s peasants, Maupassant’s prostitutes, Sherwood Anderson’s lonely, small-town dreamers. (More contemporary examples might be Denis Johnson’s junkies, Tim O’Brien’s soldiers, or Jhumpa Lahiri’s Indian immigrants.)

The novel, that most middle-class of art forms, has long been obsessed with social climbers and world-beaters, their triumphs, their downfalls, their second and third acts. O’Connor says that the short story concerns itself with a different sort of character: those who get swept to the side of society, who the larger world deems unworthy of having their lives told. Put another way, the main character in a novel stands out from the crowd. The characters in short stories are those most people walk by without even seeing. I very much like what O’Connor says about what the novel is good at:

The novel is bound to be a process of identification between the reader and the character…. One character at least in any novel must represent the reader in some aspect of his own conception of 
himself…. and this process of identification invariably leads to some concept of normality and to some relationship—hostile or friendly—with society as a whole.

He is, of course, saying that the novel needs a hero. Half-hero or quarter-hero or anti-hero, it doesn’t matter—the novel needs a central character the reader can see standing in for him- or herself. The reader of the short story, however, is asked to enter into a very different relationship with its characters. As O’Connor puts it, “The short story has never had a hero.”

With my decidedly marginal experiences in the music “industry” and under the influence of O’Connor and some of the story collections mentioned above, I knew what I did not want to write about: rock stars. In the last couple years, there have been some pretty successful novels on this subject. But, for whatever reason, the rock star—both the actual people and the cultural myth—has always bored and dismayed me. Perhaps because of the mediocrity of mainstream music. Perhaps because I hate being asked to follow fashions and pay homage to those who ride them. Perhaps because the narrative of the heroic individual who risks it all, gets everything they have ever desired, only to lose it all again, etc., etc.—that favorite narrative of the movies and VH1—seems so patently false to me. Perhaps because the stories of those who simply have to learn to live with their own lives seem so noble and true.

Alexander MacLeod: Let's Get Physical

In the 53rd in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting (Biblioasis), discusses his efforts to "get into the zone," as athletes do, and write without over thinking.

A lot of the stories I wrote for Light Lifting centre on a single action or, sometimes, just one physical movement that holds the plot together and also threatens to tear it apart. I have a girl who dives off the roof of a Holiday Inn into the dark Detroit River at two in the morning, for example, and I have a pair of world class distance runners blasting down the backstretch of the most important 1500 they will ever race. There are some exhausted parents trying to stay up all night with a sick child, and there’s a work crew of guys who have to deal with that unique up and down grind that comes only from working with paving stone. I have a boy who decides he’s going to have to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a man who may or may not be some kind of sexual predator. In all these cases, I wanted the key movement of the story to be held in one ambiguous image or scene that could be felt as directly as it was imagined. I wanted the reader to experience the panic of the girl who is afraid of deep water or the surge of the runner who is about ready to get up on his toes and unleash his kick. I tried to describe what it’s like to have a blistering sunburn or to live through a car accident or to stand in line in the cold for hours. I wanted the reader to feel what the kid feels as he presses his lips against that man’s mouth.

Newton-John: Body Talk

In order to get close to the sensory core of those scenes, I knew that the writing would need to get out of the way as much as possible and almost disappear so that the intensity of the experience could carry the whole thing. I tried to do this lots of different ways, but I often found myself hemmed in by language and it was difficult to find the words to match up with the actions I wanted to capture. I did not want to internalize any of it, and I definitely wanted to avoid intellectualizing what was happening, but it was difficult, as Olivia Newton-John would say, to “hear the body talk.” How do you write sensation or transmit raw feeling when those things are precisely outside the normal range of the sign and signifier?

I used to be a pretty serious middle-distance runner and whenever my races went wrong—I mean really, really wrong—my coaches used to say: “You’re thinking too much. You need to let it go and just trust the rhythm. You know your body knows how to do this.” Sport and literature usually don’t seem to share much common ground, but I come back to that coaching advice all the time when I’m putting together my stories. If I feel like I’m pushing it too hard and thinking and worrying too much, I try to let go and feel my way through the scene.

Murakami: "Suffering is optional."

As Haruki Murakami teaches, writing and running are actually quite similar: Both require a weird individual discipline that can’t be faked and a person has to put in countless hours alone before there is any public significance to what they do. HM’s best line about running and writing—“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional”—feels just about perfect to me and I think it captures the idea that all aesthetic challenges must eventually come back to real-world practical concerns. Those athletes who hit the effortless three pointers, or fire one-timers into the top corner, or throw a baseball one hundred miles an hour may seem amazing to us, but for them, it’s all part of their routine and they are really just auto-piloting their bodies down roads they’ve travelled thousands of times before in isolation. If everything’s working right and the rhythm is on, I want my stories to feel like that. I want them to go into ‘the zone,’ into that strange place every athlete knows but doesn’t quite understand. I want the story to seem inevitable, as if every action is unfolding exactly the way it should.

Michael Martone on Form, Function, and Fourness

In the 52nd in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Michael Martone, author of Four for a Quarter (FC2), lays out the structure of his collection.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection? 
Arrangement is the story of this story collection. Some might label Four for a Quarter “experimental” fiction, but I never liked that designation. I think Chekhov’s coupling realistic techniques with Freudian ideas of depth of character was a very fruitful experiment. I wouldn’t call my fiction experiments, or I would, I guess, call it experimental in the way I would call every attempt to write fiction an experiment. Writing prose is always an experiment in arranging and/or rearranging the forms and content, words and sentences, styles and idioms of earlier fictions and nonfictions. I think of myself as a very old-fashioned formalist, writing fictions that foreground form. So, in this case, I didn’t write a set of stories and then arrange them afterward as much as I thought of the form of the book before I wrote it and then, wrote the individual pieces to complete the predestined formal structure. Form follows function? Function follows form? Hard for me to say at this point. 

There are 44 fictions here. The fictions are arranged in four sections. The first two sections each have 11 fictions. The third has 10 and the fourth 12. The idea for the book started with the old photo-booth photo-strips. I collect them. I have my students as a final project tell stories by means of a photo-booth photo-strip narrative. What I noticed is a pattern in the four shots. The first and second pictures are polite, staged, planned, arranged, but the third seems to be the anomaly. Mugged. Goofy. The crazy shot where self-consciousness (that one is having one’s picture taken) takes over, revealing the artifice of candid portraiture. It is an attack on the invisible fourth wall of transparent presentation. In the third shot, we break character. The fourth shot then is a kind of recovery. A desire to make sure there is “one good one” in the bunch. An attempt to recompose oneself. I wanted then for the overarching structure of the book to represent this syncopation. The book is a waltz as well as a march. The little skip also allows the author’s bio-note at the very end to be incorporated as the last fiction, another story, and not something that falls outside the “body” of the book.

Fantatsic fourmalism?

Each of those 44 fictions is divided into four parts. Many of the third parts of those four part fictions are also anomalous asides in the flow of the individual stories. But not all. And of course I should say that all of the fictions are also already about a four: the four winds, directions, humours, blood types, horsemen, gospels, questions, corners, Beatles, etc., etc., etc., etc. I do regard the four blurbs on the book’s back cover as a 45th fiction, and perhaps a ligature to the next book I am going to write. I asked my blurbers not to do a blurb but write a very brief story based on the number 4. I encouraged them not to read the book, all the better to help them write a story in the form of a blurb of an imaginary book. And the final story in the collection, “Contributor’s Note” is written not by me but by four other writers I asked to sit in.

Let me say this about all that. I know you are shaking your head. You asked a simple question about arrangement and you get this complex obsession about “arrangement.” Some of those who like to use the appellation “experimental” do use it as a kind of code. We are meant to understand that here in these “fictions” the reader will find cleverness, tricks, games, and riddles but no real emotional content that the “traditional” epiphanic dramatic story is designed and constructed to animate and release. That is to say that this kind of over-realized fiction, fiction that wears its form on its sleeve, has no heart. Oh, that may be true! It quite possibly is true. This book, then, is constructed as just another kind of elaborate amusement, some sort of mechanical booth, say, that takes a series of snapshots of its subjects wearing many highly exaggerated and artificial masks. But I hope that in the book’s architecture and in that dilapidated analog arcade booth there is, yes, a beating heart, a heart of four (four!) chambers, that circulates an empathetic vitality within its conscious anatomical arrangements—a systolic/diastolic stutter, a dub DUB squared, a surprising fibrillation, and, at last, the dénouementic code blue, bluer than the bluest blue.

Diane Goodman: Food for Thought

In the 51st in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Diane Goodman, author of Party Girls (Autumn House Press), discusses how her work has evolved along with her personal and professional involvement with food.

When people ask me what my first book of short stories, The Genius of Hunger, is about, I say it’s about lonely women in grocery stores. I moved down to Miami 12 years ago, I didn’t know a soul, and I spent a lot of time by myself in the markets. I started writing about it, about this peculiar kind of loneliness taking place while I shopped for food, for something familiar and comforting. This book is, I think, also about the universal need for community and for communicating, and then the actual genius of these hungers—how they propel and compel us to fill them.

Once I got myself settled here, I opened a catering/personal chef business, and then something else remarkable occurred to me that created the foundation for my second story collection, The Plated Heart. Cooking, feeding people, is such an intimate, nurturing gesture, but I was doing it for strangers in their homes; I was a stranger in their homes. The dynamics that emerged from that conflict were endlessly interesting to me in terms of writing stories that examined what it was like to prepare and serve food in strangers’ homes—how much you saw of their lives, how little you actually wanted to know, how it seemed as though you were supposed to provide comfort and yet you were not because you were an employee. I was a hero if the meals/parties were a success, a villain if they were not, and much of the time a person whom they talked to and ordered around all day but never really saw.

A hero

But then I became a more accomplished caterer with a thicker skin and my focus shifted from the service perspective to the surprising fragility of my clients. In the world, they were rich and powerful; in their homes, they were insecure and frightened. The pressure they put on themselves to throw the perfect event, the personal issues that arose from merely wanting to throw a party, made me sympathetic to them and made me feel more powerful. My new book, Party Girls, still focuses on food, on cooking and serving and trying to please. But in this one, the focus is on the hostesses—their odd, kind of secret world—and on when a party is not just a party but a pressure cooker (pun intended) constantly threatening to explode.

Peter Markus: Kafka’s Axe for the Frozen Sea (or How I Came to Be the Writer I Have Come to Be)

In the 50th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Peter Markus, author of We Make Mud (Dzanc Books), compares reading a short story collection to listening to a record.

In college, I was drawn to two books of stories written by writers, both dead, whose origins, like mine, were decidedly of the Midwest: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and The Nick Adams Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Both writers, both under the influence of another now-favorite of mine, Gertrude Stein, wrote about the particulars of small-town middle American landscapes in such a way that they seemed to give me permission to turn my own fictional attentions on my own small town backdrop that has, for anyone familiar with my work, a muddy river always running through it: a town and a river where boys—no, brothers—and sometimes men—most of them called Bob— spend the bulk of their time fishing for the river’s fish. 

But it was two other books at that time, too, by writers who at the time were both still alive and living, that really ran their nail of influence through me, their own river of words, mentor-works of fiction that made me want to write and to try to find a way to write the stories that would become my own, my own voice, my own particular landscape in the bigger landscape of American short fiction. The first of these two books was Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, a book whose title alone, not so much its suggested subject matter—love and its failings—but the patterns of its lingual phrasing, its sense of stripped-down musicality and repetition, that made its way to my ears and eventually drove a nail right through to my writer’s heart. I remember opening up the Carver collection at random to find the story “Viewfinder,” a story that I teach at the beginning of every fiction workshop I now teach, a story about a man who has steel hooks for hands, a man who is in a way hand-less, and I remember the feeling that I was holding in my own hands stories whose sentences, like the characters themselves, had been stripped down to the rawest of bones.

Borders Book Shop, Ann Arbor, Mich.

A couple of years later, as I was about to graduate and leave Ann Arbor with the self-knowing that I was going to become, one way or another, a writer, I discovered that second of books that would change the way I not only wrote, but it changed the way that I experienced language both as a reader and a writer. That book, The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard, did violence to the way that I saw what a story was or what a story could be and the way that the sentence itself is the foundation and the source of fiction’s ultimate power. It’s a book that, as Kafka makes the bold point, was the axe that cut in half, that freed, the frozen sea inside of me.

I remember how The Ice at the Bottom of the World found its way to me, much like a fish that leapt up out of the river and slapped me in the face as if to say, Hey, look over here! I’d read a review of it in The New York Times Book Review, a review that talked about Richard’s hard-scrabble characters, fathers and sons, sailors newly home from sea, drunken uncles—get the picture?— stories, too, that, like both Hemingway and Anderson, had driving behind them and anchoring them to the page a strong sense of place (Mark Richard’s place being the American south). I surrendered from my tight fist a twenty dollar bill to the bald but bearded bookseller at the Ann Arbor Borders Books—the headquarter store of the now sunken chain—the sort of frivolous purchase that I rarely ever participated in back then when I was a lowly English major whose first job out of college would be working for five bucks under the table at a used bookstore in Detroit. I took The Ice at the Bottom of the World back home with me to my one-room efficiency on North Ingalls Street with the hope of spending the day with a book that I believed would speak and sing to me.

A day later I was back at Borders to ask for my money back. As I told the bookseller who asked why I was returning the book: “This book,” I sneered, “is unreadable!” The problem, needless to say, wasn’t the book, wasn’t the author, wasn’t the stories themselves. The problem was that I, as its reader, didn’t know how to read a writer whose stories demanded that they be read on their own terms: under their own lingual conditions. I wasn’t ready to read a book that was written not so much in English or the English that I was comfortably familiar with. No, this was a book written in one writer’s singular vision and reinvention of what language can become when we speak it and shape the particulars of our speech onto the page.

A few years later I picked up the book again, this time from a used bookstore for two bucks, but this time I was ready for, I was open to, its rhythms and recursive ways of sentencing a work of fiction. Richard forced me, in the words of the great poet Jack Gilbert, to “unlearn the constellations to see the stars.” I learned, in short, to read Mark Richard the way that Mark Richard demanded to be read: one word, one sound, at a time, taking it slow, savoring every beat, every syllabic bite. It changed the way I read and the way that I wrote and the way that I now write: one word, one sound, at a time. It’s my hope that the mud that I’m now making, with my own words, might also be read, and eaten, in much the same way. I hope you enjoy the taste.

Laura Boudreau on Tenuous and Tangential Connections Between Stories

In the 49th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Laura Boudreau, author of Suitable Precautions (Biblioasis Press), offers a conceptual definition of short story collections.

What do you think a good short story collection should deliver?

There’s an Isaac Bashevis Singer story called “Disguised” that has influenced the way I think about the nature and function of short story collections.

The story is about Temerl, a young bride who is abandoned by her husband. This causes her tremendous problems, particularly because Jewish law doesn’t allow her to remarry unless she obtains a divorce. So, Temerl sets out on a search for her missing husband, and there’s a line or two when Singer writes:

“She gained the kind of knowledge that comes from staying at inns and listening to all sorts of talk... Temerl learned how vast the world was and how odd people could be. Each human being had his own desires, his own calculations, and sometimes his or her own madness.”

I always thought those lines could serve as a conceptual definition of the short story collection — that perhaps we might think of the stories as travelers, brought together by chance or fate or circumstance, but connected, all the same. Although I understand the appeal of linked stories, and the pleasure of that logic, I am more attracted to a collection in which stories’ bonds are tenuous and tangential. In my own book, the stories are wildly different from each other. One story, “Strange Pilgrims,” is about a woman finding a fortune hidden in the attic of her new house; it’s plot-driven, detective-like. Another story, “Falling in Love,” is a series of images, of feelings, and confusions about those feelings. It’s almost a prose poem. I think that what ties the stories together is my voice, my way of looking at the world. And as a reader, that’s what I want — a way to look through the author’s eyes.

Is there a story collection you consider your ideal of what a collection should be? 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver, is about as good as it gets for me. In that one slim volume, there’s something electric and dark that takes on a life of its own. I think Carver’s much-imitated style of colloquial narration is one that contemporary writers can take for granted, or read as ironic or affected, but this particular collection still seems radical to me. I think it has something to do with the fact that the pared-backness of the stories doesn’t seem overly engineered or arrogant; you as a reader don’t feel manipulated. You’re allowed to come to the stories on your own terms, and you leave them that way, too. There’s something very demanding — and potentially alienating — about that kind of collection, but Carver shows the pay-off can be huge.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection?

The process reminded me of making an old-fashioned mix-tape. I needed to figure out what sounded good beside each other, making sure I alternated fast and slow, long and short, without being too predictable or prescriptive about it. The pauses in between needed to feel right.

Or maybe it was more like making a seating chart for a dinner party: if the stories are personalities, who is going to get along with each other but not get bored? Actually, one of my stories, “Monkfish,” is about a dinner party, and the hostess has a rule: “boy girl boy girl, no spouses beside each other.” That’s probably as good a framework as any.

I opened the collection with a short piece that’s part invitation to the reader, part throwing down of the artistic gauntlet. I end with a piece that has more of a novel vibe, in that it’s an exploration of a family across generations. The first word of the book is “Try” and the last word is “love.” I like to think that’s indicative of the arc of the collection.

Maureen F. McHugh and the Earthquake Kit

In the 48th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Maureen F. McHugh, author of After the Apocalypse (Small Beer Press), tries to figure something out.

When I was first starting out people always said, ‘Write what you know.’

Seriously, no one is interested in what I know. I’m not interested in what I know. Unless someone has done something truly, seriously, oh my god amazing, trust me on this. It’s like going to a party and talking too much. Even if someone has done something truly, gloriously amazing, like cloned the first human baby, chances are that a lot of it is about getting grants and doing the same thing over and over with pipettes and petri dishes and yelling at post docs and people really only want to hear the fun parts.

I find that the stories I like best to read and the stories that people like best of mine are the stories where I’m trying to figure something out. Usually what I am trying to figure out is something that bothers me and often it doesn’t actually have an answer.

After I wrote all the stories in my collection, After the Apocalypse, I moved to Los Angeles. After the Apocalypse might be described best as ‘oh my god I’m fifty and the economy sucks and what is going to happen?’ (except that one of the stories has zombies in it. I’m not really that nervous about zombies.) I am anxious about the future because big chunks of it (it is becoming more and more difficult for me to avoid this knowledge) are out of my control. After I moved to Los Angeles, I realized that I had written a book about bad things happening and I didn’t have an earthquake kit. This could be embarrassing—Writer of Apocalyptic Fiction Unprepared For Earthquake. This is exactly the kind of thing I am trying to figure out in my writing. What can I be prepared for and what is basically out of my control and how awful is what is out of my control going to be?

Earthquake. The Big One. Definitely out of my control. Moving to Los Angeles, in my control and maybe incredibly stupid, but already done. Getting together some candles, some batteries, and five gallons of water? Something a moron could do. Then, of course, I worried about where I had stored the water because the water is in plastic jugs and what if the house falls on them and ruptures the jugs? But thanks to writing this collection I at least have an earthquake kit which is an unexpected benefit of writing.

(I was in the grocery store in August and they had back-to-school earthquake kits. Sometimes the problem with being a writer is that reality is so much stranger. Who would make that up? Back to school earthquake kits have those single serve lunch box Jello™ packs in them, among other things. I suppose because pudding snacks would be too tempting to break into before the earthquake.)

Life-like doll

I don’t always know what it is that I don’t know the answer to. I often start a story with two strands—for instance I saw a documentary on television about something called Reborns, which are incredibly life-like infant dolls sold to adult women. I was worrying about what I would do if I had to get a job besides writing (I obsessively note those signs on fast food restaurants that say they’re hiring.) The story that came out of those two things is called “Useless Things” and when I started it I had no idea what it was going to be about.

I would not actually recommend this as a way to write. It means a lot of beginnings go nowhere and a lot of stories get about three-fourths of the way done and then chunks have to be thrown out and re-jiggered. I’ve tried outlining but once I write the outline I already know what’s going to happen. Then I’m already bored. I don’t mind revising, which is mainly about making sure that other people can read the story and feel something or even understand what is going on. But if I’m not finding out something when I’m composing, then the story feels lifeless.

I suppose my next collection could be called Why Don’t I Eat Less and Exercise More but that’s not about questioning so much as it is self-loathing, and frankly, who wants to read that?

Elissa Schappell on the Continuing Conversation

In the 47th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Elissa Schappell, author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls (Simon & Schuster), tells why she put her collection together the way she did, describes a painful writing experience, and names the books and writers that inspire her.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection?
Arranging the stories in the collection was a challenge for me because, unlike a traditional story collection, I wanted the book to have an arc of sorts and thus read more like a traditional novel with the first and last stories serving as bookends. I also wanted the stories to move back and forth in time, overlapping directly or obliquely, so you’d see the character from several different perspectives and distances. So you could see how, say, the experience of being labeled a slut in high school would inform your identity, reverberating, even twenty-five years later when you’re a grown woman and mother. The ways in which we exist only in the imagination or memory of others and how at odds this perception is with reality. My hope is that as the stories progress, each revealing a new side of a character through another lens, the reader will be challenged to confront their preconceived notions of who these women are. Perhaps question the judgments they’ve passed on these women earlier and consider why they were inclined to do so.

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later?
Once. It’s called, "Try An Outline" and it’s from Use Me.

I knew that there would have to be a story in the book where the father dies. And I hated it. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want it to be all sentimental, then-a-golden-ladder-of-sunlight-reached-down-into-the-hospital-room. I wanted it to feel authentic. I was angry at the universe, angry with my father, and confused. I felt like child. Now were I a girl, faced with writing a difficult paper, my father would have helped me. He’d have said, as he always did, “Make an outline.” This always bothered me to no end. I didn’t want to make a freaking outline. I wanted him to help me write this paper on Of Mice and Men.

As it would happen, the day I sat down to write the story, feeling reluctant, angry and full of doubt, I heard his voice in my head: “Try making an outline,” he said. As ever, this pissed me off. “Really,” I thought. “You really think that’s going to help me get through this? An outline? Sure. Right. Fine. You want an outline so bad, well here it is.”

And so it went. It was the most painful writing experience of my life. I was shaking and sobbing, completely rattled. Anytime I started to slow down, or thought, “I can’t do this, I’ve got to stop,” I’d tell myself, “No. Just keep going. Go down. Go down, touch the bottom and then, when you come up, it won’t hurt as much."

For the next five hours I sat and wrote it, and when I was done, I got up, went to the loo and vomited.

Later when I read it, there were parts I didn’t even remember writing, parts I scarcely recognized.

What book or books made you want to become a writer?
I don’t think I ever wanted to be a writer. I’ve just always been one. At this point in my life, I have no other marketable skills, at all. So, I suppose I’m stuck with it.

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV, so I read a lot and wrote a lot in my notebooks. I loved all of Salinger, especially Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories. Although later, I’d carry a copy of Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenter because I liked that, despite the experience of being there [editor's note: *spoiler alert*] when Seymour kills himself in “A Good Day for Bananafish,” I could go back, across this bridge of other books and visit him. The conversation continued. The idea that a book could do that, continue the conversation, is what spurred me to write my first book, Use Me, which is about, in part, the relationship between a daughter and her father who is dying of cancer.

As an adult, Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore gave me permission to take my world and the characters that populated it seriously. To write in my voice, to realize a story needn’t be long to be deep. Length doesn’t equal strength. I own all their books—multiple copies of some—the ones most lined and worn are Amy’s Reasons to Live and At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and Lorrie’s Self-Help and Birds of America.

There was anger and desire and awkwardness in these stories; these women were going into dark places. Their stories were honest in a way I couldn’t be in life, or on the page, and they were using humor as a vehicle to deliver the truth. They made me smarter about the world and myself. They were writing sentences so perfect they demanded re-reading and memorizing. They were able to give up something of themselves without drawing attention to themselves as writers, or ever lapsing into sentimentality. Still, there was always the sense that some part of the story was written with a bone. The humor and sadness, the terrain was familiar to me, so reading them felt a bit like discovering my pack. Although they were bigger and faster and cleverer than me, even if I never made it to the front, I could be a writer, and I wasn’t alone anymore.