An Index of Guest Posts from Authors of 2015 Short Story Collections

Popular posters: McCann (left), Campbell (top right), and Gornick (bottom right)

In 2015, 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 100 authors, 48 chose to participate. Since 2010, the TSP blog has featured 384 guest posts from 372 writers (some have contributed in more than one year).

According to Blogger's statistics, most 2015 guest posts received 300 or more page views. The most popular post, "Colum McCann's Letter to a Young Writer," went viral (by our standards) and has so far drawn nearly 10,000 page views—the second most ever of any TSP blog post, after "Antonya Nelson's Ten Writing Rules,"  which currently has nearly 14,000 views. The author posts with the second and third most hits this year were "Bonnie Jo Campbell's Confessions of a Story Writer" and "Lisa Gornick Asks: Can Writing Make You a Better Person?"—both with more than 600 page views to date.

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 2015 questions were:

• Describe a good writing day.
• What keeps you going?
• What do you think is the source of your impulse to write stories?
• Where does a story begin for you? 
• Describe your revision process. 
• What’s the best phrase, line, or passage you’ve had to cut from a story?
• Name or describe some hidden influences on your work.
• What surprises you most when you re-read your own writing?
• If you teach writing, how has it affected your work?
• Describe your collection in ten words or less.

We also suggest some possible topics:

• A literary touchstone.
• A letter to a young writer, a la Rilke.
• A list of ten pieces of writing advice.

Contributors also 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 books on IndieBound (unless a book wasn't lised on that site) and the rest of the guest post titles linking to the posts themselves.

A-B

Lauren Acampora's Good Writing Day
Jacob M. Appel Conjures the Impossible
Charles Baxter and the Restored Sentence
Karen E. Bender's Ten Ideas For Revision
Megan Mayhew Bergman's Collection in a Nutshell
Z.Z. Boone Advocates Lying
Mark Brazaitis' Orphan Stories
Austin Bunn's "Plans for Work"
Carole Burns' Free-Roaming, Imaginative Phase

C-F
Liam Callanan Sorts It Out
Bonnie Jo Campbell's Confessions of a Story Writer
Literary Stones Joy Castro Keeps Touching
Bryn Chancellor and the Girl on the Wall
Kelly Cherry and the Hard Work of Imagination
Michael Coffey's Writing Advice: Don't (Necessarily) Eschew Adverbs
Why Saadia Faruqi Turned to Fiction
April L. Ford and the Essential Activation
Kelly Fordon Loses Track of Time

G-L
Jerry Gabriel and the Crux of the Impulse
Lisa Gornick Asks: Can Writing Make You a Better Person?
Toni Graham's Writerly Inclinations

Katherine Heiny Offers Her Apologies
Patrick Hicks: 11 True Things About Writing
Tara Ison and the One Good Word
John Keene's Hidden Soundtrack
Michal Lemberger's Letter to a Young Writer Emphasizes Empathy

M
Rebecca Makkai on What Some Readers Are Missing Out on
Where Margaret Malone's Stories Began Then and Begin Now
Colum McCann's Letter to a Young Writer
What Keeps Helen McClory Going
John McManus Rebuilds from the Ground up
Margaret McMullan Learns the Importance of Seeing
Andrew Malan Milward's 25 Entreaties
Emily Mitchell: Anatomy of a Bad Writing Day

Lenore Myka's Insatiable Curiosity

N-R
Ben Nickol's Shrubbery Epiphany
Sameer Pandya on the Intimacy of “I”
Barbara Paul-Emile and the Insuppresible Urge
Leslie Pietrzyk Gets All the Answers
Kirstin Valdez Quade: All Work and No Play...
Sandip Roy's Act of Remembrance
Mary Rickert's Letter to a Young Writer

S-W
Fatima Shaik Travels into the Unknown
Rob McClure Smith and the Big Fish
Adrian Tomine Cuts a Scene
Johnny Townsend Writes for the Record
Siamak Vossoughi Draws Inspiration from an Unlikely Source
Joanna Walsh Writes Against

Past indexes of guest posts:
2014
2013
2012

Bonnie Jo Campbell's Confessions of a Story Writer

In the 47th in a series of posts on 2015 books entered for The Story Prize, Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters (W.W. Norton), contrasts stories and novels.

I’ve never set out to write a novel. I’ve always tried to write a short story and then if fail in my task, if I fail to wrap it up, I might have a novel, damn it. I’ve told this as a sort of a joke, but it’s true.

A novel, after all, is a dangerous creature, nothing to joke about. A novel goes on and on, exposing rib after rib like one of those escaped pythons clogging up the Everglades. The characters in a novel have to interact with a prescribed world in a plausible way, sentence after sentence, chapter after chapter, slithering toward revelation and resolution.

Give me short stories, glorious short stories that prod and punch and kiss and leave town before everybody sobers up! 

A short story is like dating, while a novel is like a marriage, and we all know how bad those can be. No need to be honest or consistent or thorough on a date—just be interesting. Mysterious is good on a date.

That means a piece of flash fiction (there are three in Mothers, Tell Your Daughters) is like a one-night-stand, something I should have had more of before I embarked upon my marriage, now in its blissful 28th year. I won’t make that mistake in my writing life, of pursuing joy, contentment, and peaceful evenings.

No way. In my writing life, I’ll splash and screw around in any musky, murky, fish-stinking pond I stumble into, and I’ll reach down into the muck and grope for fleshy tubers, serpents, rubber boots. In my stories, I stick a finger into any honey pot, no matter the bees or bears.

Just try pulling a novel up out of the silty bottom by its tail—it will drag you back down, and you’ll be lucky if you escape. 

The readers of short stories do not live in the real world. At least not while they’re reading. I wouldn’t dare generalize this way in a book-length work, but I’m hoping you’ll just go along with me here.

Pickles: Suspended disbelief

Over coffee or wine (red, please, unless you’re afraid I’ll spill on your couch), I could make the case that the reader of a short story lives in a magical world of suspended disbelief. After finishing the story, the reader can put the book down, do the dishes or grade some papers, let the whole story simmer in the brain, ferment like a cucumber pickle, or bob like a baby fetus in a jar of formaldehyde, like the ones I studied at length in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

You can’t just sit down and read a novel. You’ll ease your way into and then dishes will call to you or papers will need grading. You’ll have to cut your way out of that novel, re-enter the bitter cold real world, leaving a bloody wound in the whole experience. Probably you’ll be trailing the novel’s blood all day. (Next to the fetuses in the science museum, there were the slices of head and torso, exactly as thick as book chapters). And worst of all, you’ll track your real world debris back into the novel.

Novels can brilliant, life-changing. But don’t try it at home, I say to students at every opportunity. Especially to my own creative writing students. A joke, but not really a joke. 

When Aimee Bender writes a story about an ogre, we are only a little surprised when the ogre eats his own children. That is one of the risks of being both a father and a child-eating ogre. I would pay a lot of money for that story by Aimee Bender, more than the price of the book. The ogre novel? Nobody needs that.

Let me confess. I do not have a drawer full of unpublished stories. I have just a couple, and I plan to finish them before I die. Stories are not practice for me, are not experiments, not playthings to be abandoned. If I wasn’t serious about a story, I wouldn’t have dragged it out of the muck to begin with. There are a few stories in Mothers, Tell Your Daughters that I worked on for twenty years.

When I tried and failed to date my husband, I admitted defeat and married him. “Gosh, I hope this works out,” I said. And if that’s not commitment, I don’t know what is.

Two Short Story Collections Are Finalists for the National Book Awards

Here's something I don't get tired of: More good news about short story collections. The National Book Awards announced their fiction finalists yesterday, and two of the five are short story collections: Bonnie Jo Campbell's American Salavage and Daniyal Mueunuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. Readers of this blog (who are legion) may remember that in a previous post about summer reading, I pointed out that author and NPR commentator Alan Cheuse had recommended Muenuddin's collection. Well, guess what, he'd also recommended Jayne Anne Phillips' evocative novel* Lark and Termite, which is another finalist for the National Book Awards. While Cheuse is only one of the five fiction judges, in retrospect his summer picks provided a partial preview of the NBA finalists.

As I said in that post, I can highly recommend Muenuddin's excellent collection. Yesterday, Bonnie Jo Campbell's book immediately jumped to the top of my pile and, half way through, I'd have to say it's a brilliant choice by the NBA judges. It's especially impressive because of the huge number of fiction entries (236) they read this year. One of the best things a book award can do is to shine the spotlight on deserving and underappreciated books, authors, and publishers. This group of judges obviously didn't cut any corners and gave their full attention to a university press book (Wayne State) that didn't get widespread attention. Kudos to them. That's why Julie and I make sure we read everything we get. You never know where you'll find a gem.

By the way, one of the other NBA judges is author Lydia Millet, who has a short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys, just out from indy publisher Softskull Press. I wouldn't be surprised if she were a big advocate of Campbell's collection, but that's just a guess.

* Full disclosure, Jayne Anne is a colleague of my wife's at Rutgers-Newark, and a friend of ours.