An Index of Guest Posts from Authors of 2014 Short Story Collections

Hit parade: Antonya Nelson (top),
Ben Marcus, and Hilary Mantel

In 2014, we once again invited each author of a collection we received as an entry for The Story Prize to contribute a guest post to this blog. Out of 125 authors, 71 chose to participate.* Since 2010, the TSP blog has featured 337 guest posts from 328 writers.

According to Blogger's statistics, most 2014 guest posts received 300 or more page views. The most popular post, "Antonya Nelson's Ten Writing Rules," went viral (by our standards, at least) and has so far drawn more than 12,000 page views—by far the most of any TSP blog post and nearly five times as many hits as the next most popular we've ever had. The author posts with the second and third most hits this year were "Hilary Mantel's Ten Observations About Writing" and "Ben Marcus' 'Dear Writer' Letter"—both with more than 2,300 page views.

When we ask the authors if they'd like to contribute, we give them several options. One is to answer any or all of a series of questions, which we change somewhat each year. The 2014 questions were:

• If you weren't a writer, what would you be doing?
• Describe an unusual writing habit of yours.
• Do you ever borrow characters or situations from real life, and has anyone ever confronted you about it, been angry or pleased? 
• What's the worst idea for a story you've every had?
• What's the best story idea you've had that you've never been able to write to your satisfaction?
• What one story that someone else has written do you wish you had written?
• Where do you do most of your work?
• What do you do when you're stuck or have "writer's block"?
• What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
• What else (beyond books and writing) informs or inspires your work?

We also suggest some possible topics:

• A literary touchstone (e.g., a book or books you have reread many times and return to often).
• An aspect of craft you struggled to learn, and how you learned it.
• Your publishing experience.
• A letter to a young writer, a la Rilke.
• A list of ten pieces of writing advice.

The last topic was a popular one this year, with about a dozen authors offering their advice. Contributors also, of course, had the option of coming up with their own ideas.

This index is in alphabetical order by last name, with author names linking to their book on IndieBound (unless a book wasn't available on that site) and the rest of the guest post titles linking to the posts themselves.

A-D

Kim Addonizio "Borrows" from Real Life

Molly Antopol Embraces Solitude
Jacob M. Appel and the Door to Eternal Life
Vanessa Blakeslee Hits a Nerve
Michael Blumenthal's Unusual Habit
Catherine Browder and the Unmet Mentors
Kelly Cherry Makes a List
Judy Chicurel and the Atmospheric Aura

Mark Chiusano on Finding the Right Cover
Diane Cook Writes from a Place of Fear
Tracy Daugherty on Walker Percy's Thought Experiments
Halina Duraj's Ruthless Story-Brain

E-G
Sean Ennis Puts in the Time
Elizabeth Eslami Embraces the Mess
Why Ali Eteraz Stopped Trying to Be an American Writer
Murray Farish's Writing Advice from Other Writers

John Henry Fleming's Writing Tips for the Tip Averse Writer
Amina Gautier Says: "Remember Who You Were"
Joseph Gentile: Eight Things All Writers Should Do at Least Once
David Gordon Talks to Himself
Nicholas Grider's Ten Pieces of Advice
If David Guterson Weren't a Writer...

H-L
Arna Bontemps Hemenway's Walk into the Otherworld
Jennifer Horne Wrestles with Her Conscience
Alden Jones's Writing Advice: "Don't Listen to My Advice"
A.L. Kennedy Gets Out of the Way
Laurence Klavan and the Sense of Unease
Phil Klay's Middle School Stint
Doretta Lau Does the Work
Peter LaSalle Considers John Cheever Across the River
J. Robert Lennon and the Sweet Spot
Deborah Levy and the Essential Obstinacy
Karin Lin-Greenberg: Notes of a Failed Cartoonist
Sara Lippmann Gets Over It
Jack Livings on Dealing with Rejection
Shelly Lowenkopf's Good News and Bad News

M
James Magruder and the Boyhood Tribulations
Hilary Mantel's Ten Observations About Writing
Francesca Marciano's Ten Writing Mantras
Ben Marcus' "Dear Writer" Letter
Elizabeth McCracken's First 21st Century Short Story Collection
Monica McFawn and the Pursuit of Clarity
Kseniya Melnik's Competing Passion
Jen Michalski Starts with a Dream
K.D. Miller Works with What She Has
Kyle Minor's Unwritten Time Travel Story
Dolan Morgan's Treatment for Writer's Block

N-R
Antonya Nelson's Ten Writing Rules
Kent Nelson and the Quest for the Right Cover
James Nolan and the Singular Element
Tom Noyes Keeps the Faith
Kathy Page Encounters Other Places
Vikram Paralkar and the Agent's Letter
David James Poissant's Letter to His 25-Year-Old Self
Nick Ripatrazone's Sacramental Vision
Eliza Robertson Rocks
David Ryan and the Crowded Room

S-W
Diane Schoemperlen Works with Words and Pictures
Aurelie Sheehan Sneaks up on Plot
Susan Sherman on the Significance of Place
Heather A. Slomski Prepares Herself
Justin Taylor and the Unwriteable Idea
Johnny Townsend Wrestles with the Truth
Lee Upton Breaks the Ice
Anne Valente on Fiction and the Language of Film
Marek Waldorf Paints a Picture
John Warner's Unlikely Inspiration

D.W. Wilson's Headspace Thing

Christian Winn and the Search for Meaning
Kathleen Winter and the Scary Fat Boy Story
Jonathan Woods and The Hard-Boiled Tradition

* Whether or not someone contributes a post has nothing to do with the books we choose as finalists or for our long-list. We received 129 books, but some authors published more than one this year. One 2014 contributor to TSP, Jacob M. Appel, published two short story collections in 2014, but we only invite each author to contribute to the blog one time in any year. Appel's other book is Einstein's Beach House (Pressgang).

Antonya Nelson's Ten Writing Rules

In the 33rd in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Antonya Nelson, author of Funny Once (Bloomsbury), tells writers what they need to figure out and some of the best ways to do it.

1. As a fiction writer, learn early whether your temperament is more suited to the novel or the short story. Rarely does a writer do each equally well.

2. Learn how to revise. Your original impulse to tell a story is to be trusted; it's the follow-up that generally lacks diligence and labor. Discovering how to be happy in the revision process is a giant breakthrough.

3. Figure out how to read the work you love in a way that teaches you how to write better. Craft books, in my experience, are far less important to the writer than the literature you admire. Own the stories you love by committing them to memory, by studying them, by unearthing the care with which they are made. The process of re-reading is not unlike the process of revision: You are mastering the methods behind the artwork, complicating and texturizing and making it, inasmuch as you can, bulletproof.

4. Discover your own best process. Sprinter? Or marathoner? Wait for inspiration to build to a boiling point? Or labor every day at the precise same time? Subscribe to the method that works for you. Do not feel threatened by not being of the other type.

5. Locate three trusted readers to give you feedback when you're no longer able to improve the work. Return the favor. (That last is very important.)

6. Do not write to please everyone. Your first audience is yourself—and if you aren't charmed or amused or enlightened by what you're writing, nobody else is going to be, either. Do not hope to publish in every journal in the country. Instead, locate a few who get you. And be loyal to them. They will return the favor.

7. Write into the mystery. Write what you do not know. Write without having any eyes looking over your shoulder. Write the way you would dress for a party: utterly naked and alone, at first, and then, finally, stepping out and asking a trusted companion "Do these shoes go with this romper?"

8. Be tolerant of dry spells. Understand that being a writer is not illustrated solely by the act of typing. Mulling, reading, meditating, lollygagging, cooking, joking, traveling, watching television—all activity, as pursued by a writing sensibility, is potentially the stuff of writing.

9. Do not participate in the Writer Biz. That is, do not check Amazon ratings or PW triple-digit deals, or waste time being jealous of success or gleeful at the failure or humiliation of others. The only real way to be happy as a writer is to enjoy writing. To find in the solitary process some kind of succor. If you aren't satisfied with that, you will never be satisfied with any part of the life.

10. Report truthfully the world as you find it. Name it honestly, freshly, and put yourself on the line. A reader can tell if the work isn't revealing a genuine self behind it. It's the only kind of work that really matters.

Meet The Story Prize Judges: Stephen Enniss, Antonya Nelson, and Rob Spillman

The Story Prize, now in its 10th year, is pleased to announce this year's judges: Stephen Enniss, Director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; award-winning author Antonya Nelson; and Tin House Editor Rob Spillman. 

In January, Larry Dark, Director of The Story Prize, and Julie Lindsey, the Founder of the award, will select three story collections as finalists out of more than 90 entries. Judges Enniss, Nelson, and Spillman will read those three books and decide the winner of the $20,000 top prize—still the most of any annual U.S. book award for fiction. We will announce the three finalists in January, along with the second ever winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award. At the end of an evening of readings by and interviews with the finalists on March 5, 2014, at The New School in New York City, we will announce the winning book and author.

The National Book Awards made news earlier this year when it announced that it was expanding its judging panels beyond groups of authors. The Story Prize, from its inception ten years ago, has included judges from a variety of fields associated with short fiction, including: writers, editors, booksellers, librarians, critics, journalists, and academics.* Why? Because a book award serves its readers, and while, in our case, that includes those who write story collections, it also includes many others who are avid readers and support the form.

ABOUT THE JUDGES

Stephen Enniss is Director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has responsibility for 42 million literary manuscripts, nearly one million rare books, five million photographs, and more than 100,000 works of art. He previously served as Eric Weinmann Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library and, before that, Director of Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. He held a Leverhulme Fellowship at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. In 2005, he co-curated the Grolier Club exhibition: “No Other Appetite: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Blood Jet of Poetry." He is currently completing a biography, After the Titanic: A Life of Derek Mahon.

Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound and six short story collections, including Nothing Right. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a USA Artists Award in 2009, the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Houston.

Rob Spillman is editor and co-founder of Tin House, a fifteen-year-old bi-coastal (Brooklyn and Portland, Oregon) literary magazine. Tin House has been honored in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. His writing has appeared in BookForum, GQ, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Rolling Stone, Salon, Spin, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, among other magazines, newspapers, and essay collections. He is also the editor of Gods and Soldiers: the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, which was published in 2009.

* Past judges have been: Authors: Sherman Alexie, Andrea Barrett, Dan Chaon, Edwidge Danticat, David Gates, A.M. Homes, Yiyun Li, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Hannah Tinti. Booksellers: Ann Christophersen, Marie du Vaure, Mitchell Kaplan, Sarah McNally, and Rick Simonson. Librarians: Patricia Groh, Bill Kelly, and Nancy Pearl. Editors: John Freeman, Brigid Hughes, Daniel Menaker, and Meghan O'Rourke. Book bloggers: Ron Hogan and Carolyn Kellogg. Critics: Jane Ciabattari and James Wood. Professor Breon Mitchell and reading series curator Louise Steinman (both with library affiliations).

The Short Story Collection Oprah Winfrey Can't Put Down

Oprah's Book Club has chosen a summer reading list: "25 Books You Can't Put Down." As I've previously observed, Oprah Winfrey has never chosen a short story collection for her book club. So it's great to see that one of the 25 books on the summer list is a book of short stories. (You go, girl!) At number 19 (I'm not sure what the order signifies) is Robert Boswell's The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, published by Graywolf Press. We haven't received this collection as an entry for The Story Prize yet (ahem)*, but it's definitely on our radar and looks like an excellent choice.

Boswell is not exactly an unknown, but there are other new short story collections I would have been a little less surprised to see on Oprah's list. One, would be Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson, who is Boswell's wife. Another would be Jean Thompson's Do Not Deny Me (we're still waiting for an entry for this, too), which I've seen on other summer reading lists. I also think The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (ditto) would appeal to Oprah's audience. But perhaps my view of Oprah's, her staff's, and her audience's tastes are too narrow.

In any event, Oprah sells books like no one else. And having a short story on the list is all good. How about several next year?

* I feel duty bound to note that The Story Prize deadline for books published from Jan. through June is July 15.

Addendum: O.: The Oprah Magazine also has a list of 20 beach reads, which includes Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and Phillip Lopate's Two Marriages. Given the lists, I'm not sure what the distinction between a book you can't put down and a beach read is, but at least Oprah is pushing reading.