Lee Conell on Spotting the Extraordinary Among the Ordinary

In the 26th in a series of posts on 2017 books entered for The Story Prize, Lee Conell, author of Subcortical (Johns Hopkins University Press), describes some formative influences.

What influenced you to become a writer?
My father is a building superintendent and my room was right next to his answering machine—so I was often waking up to messages left by tenants. Sometimes, when I couldn’t get back to sleep, I began to tell little stories or to try to imagine myself into the scene behind the tenants’ calls. I am still trying to write about the scenes behind some of these calls, and about the class tensions I witnessed or was part of in that upbringing. A sense of going behind the scenes, not just in an apartment but in someone’s mind, had a definite influence on my interest in writing and storytelling.

City buses also played a role. On long bus rides, my mother would try to keep me entertained by asking me to look out the window and rank on a one-to-ten scale the weird things we would inevitably see on New York City’s streets. I have to believe that identifying the extraordinary in what seems ordinary has something to do with my becoming a writer. I also read a lot on mass transit, although most of the books I was reading (and, yes, rereading) were not short story collections but the YA science fiction series Animorphs. I was really into animals and aliens.

I didn’t really try to write short stories until a boyfriend’s aunt gifted me a brand new copy of Alice Munro’s Runaway. I hadn’t heard of Munro and I definitely hadn’t read many contemporary short stories—but I remember being blown away by all the scope a Munro story could cover, how it felt in some way like riding in an elevator that moved in all directions. Then I became more interested in the short story and discovered writers like Grace Paley, Lorrie Moore, Junot Díaz, George Saunders. I realized that inside a story you could be so funny and so moving and so weird (on a one-to-ten scale, a story could sometimes be a ten in weirdness). I wanted to try that.

Name something by another author that you wish you’d written.
Since it’s around Halloween, I’ve been thinking a lot about Mavis Gallant and her fantastic story “From the Fifteenth District,” where the dead complain about the ways the living keep haunting them. It’s among my favorite ghost stories and the concept is one of those deceptively simple why-didn’t-I-ever-think-of-that ideas (although I’d imagine it seems that way in part because of how well Gallant pulls it off).

How do you get yourself back on track when your writing isn’t going well?
Taking a walk is the best. There’s something about the rhythm of walking that connects to the rhythm of writing for me. But about fifty percent of the time I’m too lazy to put on shoes. I know this will sound made up, but I’ve actually found reading television recaps oddly helpful in terms of getting back on track. Sometimes I’ll even read recaps for shows I don’t watch. It almost feels like backing away from a pool before you take a running start and dive in. Backing away from the difficulty of a scene I’m writing by reading something fun and sharp and analytical and sometimes goofy, but that is also—at least on the surface—pretty detached from the fictional world of my story, has proven helpful. When I return to the story, I know the narrative cadences are probably coming from my characters themselves and not from whatever I read last because, well, what I read last was a recap of a television show. Of course, sometimes this backfires and I end up down a serious Internet rabbit hole, but usually if that occurs I feel guilty enough to return to the story. This is probably not the most efficient way to get back on track. I should really just try to go with the walk taking.

Alice Munro, Nobel Prize Winner!

A speech given at the O. Henry Awards Tribute to Alice Munro held at the 92nd St. Y in New York City, November 19, 2001.

STORIES
by Alice Munro

I wrote my first story during the Easter holidays, when I was fifteen years old. I began to write it, in the back of a school notebook, in the unaccustomed silence of the house, on an afternoon when everybody else was out. I can remember the plot, and one or two phrases which I particularly liked, and am not going to reveal, now or ever. Before I started it I had been making use of the solitude to think about my novel. This was actually the third novel that I had worked out, and was carrying around in my head. The earlier two had been by this time discarded. The plot of this one was fully developed, the characters named, and decked out with their proper hair and eye colour. But I could not write a word about them. Not yet, I thought, but actually not ever. Too much was riding on their realization. It takes nerve, to write a novel.

So in the meantime, I thought, why not write a story. Just for practice, just to get myself in gear. Just whatever comes into my head. And I've been writing stories ever since.

It takes nerve to write a story, too.

To want to be a fiction writer, in the community where I grew up, and in the suburbs where I lived later, as a young housewife and mother, was such an outlandish notion that it never occurred to me to try to justify or explain it. I tried as much as I could to keep it secret. And at the same time, it never occurred to me to give it up, it never seemed possible that I would discard that hope--it seems more accurate to call it a hope, rather than an ambition—not even when the stories I wrote turned out to be limp or over-strained or in other ways—all ways—disappointing.

After a while I began to meet people who were better educated, more sophisticated than the people I was used to, and I learned about some other reasons why I should cease these efforts. One was that women resorted to such—usually second-rate—productions, because their wombs were inactive—in fact mine was very active—and another was that the short story as a literary form was dying or already dead. And Canadians couldn't write anyway.

There was another reason offered sometimes, which was more interesting, and which popped up just recently, in a discussion some writers were having on Canadian television. (I want to call them young writers but they were probably all over thirty.) The question they asked was something along the lines of, "Is it not irrelevant, is it not frivolous and self-indulgent, to be fooling around with stories and poems and novels, in the new world that exists after September 11th?"

When I first heard that argument, I believe it was "in the new world that exists after Auschwitz."

Well. I don't believe that it is irrelevant, or frivolous, or self-indulgent, because I don't believe that it is entirely a new world. The horror that has been recognized recently, in a new and vivid form, has been around in human dealings for a long time. And if a poem or a story has no place and no necessity now, no story or poem was ever necessary.

Yet we go on making them, caring about them, depending on them.

And because that is so, I'm particularly glad, as well as personally grateful to the O. Henry Awards Committee, that this evening's event is happening, and that it is happening in this place. A place which holds the memory of so many writers, a place in which writing has been given its due for so long, that the very thought of reading there, or of having one's work read there, has always seemed a high honour to me. It's like a link in a long chain of vital experience—an acknowledgement of what remains important or central to our lives, what we hope to preserve and never to be without.

So I want to thank you, all of you, for this evening, and to mention just a few of the New Yorkers who have been so helpful to me. Ginger Barber has worked hard for me, boosted and believed in me and given me the delight of her company—she and her husband Ed have sheltered and sustained and entertained me in sickness and in health; Ann Close has managed most wonderfully to be a warm friend and an excellent editor. Wise and tactful people—Alice Quinn, Daniel Menaker, Charles McGrath—have worked with me at The New Yorker, and Anne Mortimer-Maddox, known as Dusty, has performed incomparable feats of checking, making me seem more scrupulous and knowledgeable than I ever was. And I have also to thank Bill Buford and David Remnick for their attentive encouragement.

Dear Alice Munro, Time to Own up to Your Greatness

Dear Alice,

Congratulations on winning the Man Booker International Prize. Your brilliant stories are clearly deserving of this honor. It may embarrass you to hear this yet again, but you are one of the greatest living writers in the English language, and it's quite an achievement to have earned the kind of recognition you have for almost exclusively writing short stories, a notoriously underappreciated form.

You are known for being modest and unassuming, which has its charms, but I think it's time for you to own up to your importance--and the importance of the short story form. Scores of writers nowhere near your equal are more than willing to assert their significance, which in very few cases approaches yours. And I would bet your work will be read long after most of theirs is forgotten. So when you accept the Man Booker International Award (and, who knows, maybe even the Nobel prize some day), please skip the self-effacement, and be proud of your work, your accomplishments, and the mark you've made with your stories.

Best wishes,

One of your many admirers

Alice Munro at the New Yorker Festival

Here, from the New Yorker Festival blog, is a post by Andrea Walker, boiling down to bullet points part of an onstage conversation between Alice Munro and The New Yorker's fiction editor Deborah Treisman, which took place on Friday night, Oct. 4. Munro, despite the praise (deserved) that writers, editors, and critics have lavished on her for many years, remains modest and amusingly self-effacing.