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.

Christian Winn and the Search for Meaning

In the 55th in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Christian Winn, author of Naked Me (Dock Street Press), shares a story from his collection that exemplifies quest.

I’ve written stories for a long time—expansive narratives, and short narratives, and many in between, about who and how I am in this world, and (hopefully) about who and how we all are—but I didn’t know precisely, in actual words, just how to define this elemental need and practice for many years. What did it all mean?

Hemingway, or Twain, or some wise screenwriter in early Hollywood said if you are going to write, then your highest goal is: “A good story, well told.”

Flannery O’Connor proclaimed: "A story is a complete dramatic action—and in good stories, the characters are shown through the action and the action is controlled through the characters, and the result of this is meaning that derives from the whole presented experience."

Meaning. Meaning. Meaning?

The meaning came to me most profoundly with these words from Tim O’Brien: “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

The remembering makes it now… There’s meaning in that, for me.

I wrote this short-short story below, “Molly Ringwald,” which has ultimately ended up in my collection, Naked Me, about that search for meaning—in time, in lives, in pop culture icons, in my sister and all that life years ago. Thanks, Mr. O’Brien, for letting me understand further just why I wrote this short piece, and why I still love that I did. Thank you all for writing the stories you do, and thanks to the Story Prize for championing this highest endeavor of our search for meaning. Here’s to finding the stories.

Molly Ringwald

Twenty-five years later I’m watching Pretty In Pink on Christmas afternoon while my sister sleeps on the suede couch behind me, our parents gone off to church, her daughter in a side room talking to her new American Doll. It’s raining hard all over So Cal, and the season seems remotely complete—with me here alone, again, and now the television singing and whispering, disappearing the years as I sit up close eating red M&M’s understanding scene by scene that I will never get over Molly Ringwald, or those OMD cassettes, or that fat spray-paint graffiti head shouting at Duckie while he’s down and wading in his love for Molly beside TRAX, the Smiths record store. I mean, the way she bites her lip, and sneers at James Spader in his white linen sport coat. The way she’s smart and precious and a little too thick at the ankles—I love her, too, Duckie, I fucking love her. We’re all still in the middle of it, those Psych Furs and New Order songs and Harry Dean Stanton waving surrender, surrender, I gave my life for you—it’s what you wanted for breakfast, right? 

Somehow I got lost in all that Midwest urbania, lost in the dim hopes of big hair and the tiptoe prom dance where the Pogues played the purest future on a three-string mandolin and nothing was easy, but dying was impossible, and I was with you Molly, walking the looming echo of the high school midway and running hallways past the locker bays where Duckie drew blood for you, Molly, because he couldn’t imagine his future self without you, and we, all of us, couldn’t imagine anything but the joy of the bell ring and the next slow-dance.

Here, the knuckled palm trees sway across the sliding glass, and ocean clouds build towers above the canyons. My sister snores against embroidered silk pillows, and I remember how she wore imitation pearls and checkered Vans and her hair like Molly’s that one year—lopsided and coifed—and I wonder if she ever thinks how I hugged her one morning, told her she was cool, which meant that I loved her, wanted a perfect, kind life for her. I didn’t yet know this was impossible. I wanted it though, more even than Andrew McCarthy does for Molly, who he takes to that shit party where everyone is shirtless, and drinking scotch despite the fact they’re in high school, and Molly’s upset because she doesn’t drink like a rich kid. Molly frowns that round red mouth. Molly tosses insults and takes a stand. And my sister rolls over, ignoring my niece’s back-room whimper, waking only to point at the television and smile above the pile of used ribbons glinting in our dim afternoon. Years fold. And I don’t recognize how the one life became the other. Or, what happened to Molly’s mother? And did Harry Dean ever get that job? What happened to the way we once loved all this bolo-tie menace and our pony-hair shoes?

And fuck, John Hughes is dead, and he left his cities full of taffeta, left his houses’ back doors wide, where someone like me might stumble in to steal his creepers and dance like 1986, live forever on clove cigarettes and mopey antiheroes, and Molly.

But that was only Christmas. It rained all week.

Imagining Character Inside the Beltway: Edward P. Jones and the 20th Anniversary of Lost in the City

By Patrick Thomas Henry

Washington, D.C., seldom comes to mind as one of the world’s literary centers, yet alone a city of neighborhoods. The District is a company town whose business is politics, a city-machine that fuels ambitions but tanks hubris-plagued careers. Literature and film capture this in depictions of the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal, as in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men, the exposé’s film adaptation of the same name, and, most recently, Thomas Mallon’s novel Watergate.

Edward P. Jones, who writes about living inside the beltway, envisions Washington as a whitewashed “unfree world” that neglects its citizens, “black human beings [who] lived full and valued lives, lives that had all the messiness and grandness of white life in small, nowhere towns.” In his PEN/Hemingway Award winning debut collection, Lost in the City, Jones removes the gauze from his readers’ eyes to reveal a vibrant Washington populated not with stuffed-suit politicians but with African Americans struggling in Washington’s neighborhoods. Jones has also authored the Pulitzer prize winning novel The Known World and the collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children. His fiction demonstrates the necessary role of the writer’s imagination in uncovering the stories that political narratives obscure.

Edward P. Jones reads "Marie," from
his collection Lost in the City

Jones read from Lost in the City at Politics and Prose Bookstore, near the intersection of Connecticut and Nebraska Avenues, on Oct. 20 to celebrate the release of the collection’s twentieth anniversary edition, which includes an introduction by the author and the story “A Rich Man,” originally collected in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. To launch the event, David Cohen—whose wife Carla Cohen was a founding owner of the store—introduced Jones and traced the author's connection to Politics and Prose back to the initial 1992 publication of Lost in the City, for which the bookstore hosted a reading. Describing Jones’s fiction as “stories of the imagination,” Cohen likened Lost in the City to James Joyce’s Dubliners, a debt Jones acknowledges in the new edition’s introduction.

In that introduction, Jones writes that his characters, while products of his imagination, inhabit the real geography of his native Washington: “But all the streets and avenues and roads those characters and the other people in this book go up and down are real, or were real once upon a time, when I knew them as a boy.” Jones’s Washingtonians, invisible to the capital’s powerbrokers, navigate their city to gather safeguards against the common dangers of everyday life. This theme manifests itself when the protagonists of “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” and “Marie” accumulate objects to cobble together a sense of security: pigeons for Betsy Ann in “Girl” and everything from Social Security letters to audiocassettes of her oral history to a serrated knife for the title character in “Marie.”

Jones hardly endorses the pervasive myth of America as the land of opportunity. Instead, his writing reveals the complexity of his characters and encourages us to empathize with plights like Betsy Ann’s and Marie’s. This vision infused Mr. Jones’s reading style for “Marie”; he delivered the story in soft yet sonorous tones, absorbing his listeners into Marie’s sensibility, that of an octogenarian who lives and dies by the whims of her Social Security office.

After the reading, Jones fielded audience questions and comments, ranging from process queries to praise. Denny May, an instructor from Northern Virginia Community College, praised Lost in the City as “the one book that never fails to connect with students” because of its portrayals of characters and their hardships. This steered the conversation toward the people inhabiting Jones’s Washington. Pressed to speak on multiple points of view in a single short story, Jones demurred and emphasized the role of imagination in writing fiction. For Jones, fiction speaks to the emotions and values of its characters. As such, the writer’s task is straightforward: Tell the story however it needs to be told. “You just have a mission, a task” Jones said on storytelling, “and you go at it, using whatever tools you have available to you.”

The writer’s imagination is the chest containing these tools, and careful application of a writer’s skills is essential to developing character. Jones stated during the question-and-answer session that imagination allows writers to conceive the full scope of a story before penning a single word. But this isn’t an argument for inorganic plotting: For Jones, the end of a story is the result of a character’s ambitions. He rhetorically asked the audience, “If there’s no outcome, then why begin to write this story?”

If character is at every story’s core, then Jones’s question implies that character and plot must be intertwined, and setting stages the story’s conflict. His status as a D.C. writer, then, extends from his decision to explore the human condition in the nation’s capital. Nonetheless, Jones said, “I don’t see myself as a D.C. writer, but if that’s what I am, I won’t run away from it.” His use of D.C. is certainly a merit to his work, as it alerts us to neglected communities, the uncertainty of dreams, and lurking losses—factors in Jones’s fiction that resonate for readers discovering themselves lost amid the vitriol endemic to American politics.

Patrick Thomas Henry, a PhD candidate at George Washington University and a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark Writing program, occasionally reports on literary events for The Story Prize.

Impaneled

(L to R) Story Prize Director Larry Dark (yours truly) with authors
Susan Minot, Rick Moody, and Elizabeth Strout (via Dusty Spines)

The three authors who participated in last night's tribute to The Stories of John Cheever at the Center for Fiction, turned out to have strong, sincere connections to Cheever's work. Elizabeth Strout read "The Worm in the Apple" and told how important the stories were to her development as writer. Rick Moody read from "The Jewels of the Cabots" and discussed how the late stories in the book convinced him that indirection could be an effective narrative technique for him. And Susan Minot brandished a faded, hardcover copy of the book with her ratings of various stories in the table of contents, ranging as high as seven stars. She noted that the story she was going to read from, "The Sorrows of Gin," only rated three stars back then, but her estimation of it had grown. I, too, brought my first copy of the book—a 1978 mass market paperback with off kilter pages. And Rick Moody had his original copy, as well. He read the very Cheeverian inscription his father had written to him, suggesting that Rick, a mere teen at the time, might never be as good a writer as Cheever—kind of like saying he might not measure up to Chekhov.

The Center for Fiction did a great job with the event, which ended with a panel discussion and questions from the audience. I say we do it again in 25 years.

Happy 100th Birthday, Mr. Cheever

Yesterday—May 27—would have been John Cheever's 100th birthday, and I like to think that I have the day off form work for that reason. In fact, maybe Memorial Day should be an annual occasion to remember writers whose work is, well, memorable. After all, May is Short Story Month.

I would be remiss if I didn't also reiterate that this Thursday night, May 31, at the Center for Fiction, The Story Prize will be co-presenting a tribute to The Stories of John Cheever. Susan Minot will read from and discuss JC's "The Sorrows of Gin." Rick Moody will focus on "The Jewels of the Cabots." And Elizabeth Strout will read from "The Worm in the Apple." If you're going to be there (and I hope you are), I would highly recommend reading/re-reading these three stories.

The 92nd Street Y offered it's centennial tribute to John Cheever, with a focus on the man himself. With the exception of Michael Chabon's spirited reading of "The Enormous Radio," the program was almost entirely dedicated to the writer and not his work. Biographer Blake Bailey read excerpts that focused on Cheever grappling with his fame. Susan Cheever read from her father's diaries, admiring the gorgeous prose that permeated even work that wasn't written for publication. And Allan Gurganus, Cheever's former student and more, read the last few sentences of "Goodbye, My Brother," and spoke at length about personal encounters with his mentor.

I'm glad the 92nd Street Y did this. Now we can focus on the reason we even remember this man 100 years after his birth—his fiction and, in particular, his stories. Call me romantic, but I would be taking note of this occasion even if I'd never seen the photos of John Cheever's handsome, craggy face or heard recordings of his exaggerated patrician accent, or learned about his troubled family relationships and his personal demons. For most of us, the stories transcend the life.

Sabina Murray: Why the Short Story Should Stand Tall

In the 42nd in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Sabina Murray, author of Tales of the New World (Black Cat), compares short stories and chapters of novels.

The short story is a maligned form. Readers distrust it. Editors fear it. Reviewers ignore it. And writers, well, there is nowhere to hide in a short story, nowhere that a writer’s weakness is as exposed, so when the short story comes together and executes its promise, writers adore it. Otherwise, the short story can seem like the quippy, less ambitious relation of the novel. Of course, there are people who have built their reputation on the short story, people like Grace Paley and Alice Munro, so why is the short story seen to come up, so, well, short? One explanation is that the short story is held to the same standards as the novel—and how could a short story equal the breadth and depth of a novel? The truth of the matter is that most writers conceive of their short stories as part of a book, although the story has the added capacity to stand on its own. Novels in short stories come out of this—thematic linkage seems to imply a novel to some people, as if a novel is the only way that collected short stories can achieve the prestige of books. And of course there are short stories that explore the same characters, which is the most typical scenario of a “novel in short stories.” But it’s still not a novel. It’s a collection of short stories with a limited cast, and why would it aspire to anything else?

The issue with short stories is that, as a narrative, a short story really can’t compete with an equally well-executed novel. But that’s not the point. My argument, that the short story is really a unit of a book, would lead us to pit the short story against a more reasonable unit of narrative, I suggest a chapter. Sitting ringside at that event, I would put my money on the short story: having written both, I feel certain that the short story would knock out the chapter in the first round.

Story doctor: Anton Chekhov

I am a writer who admires the power and articulateness of the short story, and I write books. Tales of The New World is a book all about explorers. There is no eponymous story in Tales. I think of the book as a map of cultural-encounter history, much as I think of my last collection of short stories, The Caprices, as a map of the Pacific Campaign of WWII. These stories are brought together in an obvious thematic way, but I believe that all collections of short stories create a wholeness, even when bundled long after their original publication. The Penguin classic of some of Chekhov’s later work, The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904, is a fine and deep exercise in human psychology and, like a sparrow trapped in a tent, manages to frantically touch every limit of what it is to be human. I imagine my uncollected stories in the various files, drawers, and boxes of my house yearning to each other like metal filings to a magnet: if they could, they would say, “Put us in a book.”

Also, fiction in general stands on the shoulders of people who—as is often the case—were most inventive and wild in their short fiction, people like Hawthorne, Conrad, Paul Bowles, and Flannery O’Connor. Their stories caused tremendous spikes in the evolution of fiction. And there are the greats who paid attention to the short form and left some lasting impressions there, people like Joyce and Beckett, James, and Melville. So why isn’t short fiction given the critical attention of the novel? We can blame publishers because that’s where we see art and money come together: a bad marriage, no doubt. But money puts some power in the hands of the consumer, so if short stories were the hot ticket items, the tables at major bookstores would be lousy with them. Clearly, there is no good reason.

If there were reason, or simply justice, the short story would be the apex of fictional derring-do. If there were justice, effort would be recognized. For if labor expended equals accomplishment, my short-story books would win over all my novels. To close, if work is something that daunts you, steer clear of short fiction: The novel is a much kinder taskmaster.

Jay Neugeboren: Love of Story, Then and Now

In the fourth in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Jay Neugeboren, author of You Are My Heart (Two Dollar Radio) discusses what makes the short story such an enduring form.

By the time I wrote my first short story, at the age of 23, I had written five unpublished novels. What I couldn’t figure out until then was how to complete a story in fewer than several hundred pages, for once I began making things up, one thing led to another—one set of events, or characters, led to more events, more characters—up one path and down another: to detours and dead ends and turnabouts, and to characters and incidents that, when I started out, had not, as far as I (consciously) knew, existed. A novel gave me the sheer space I needed to be able to tell a story.

Now, a half-century later, when a fourth collection of my stories, You Are My Heart, is being published, I notice that the stories I’ve written generally take up more space in time—often a half dozen decades of its characters’ lives—than my novels, which usually occupy only a few days or weeks.

During the years I taught writing to undergraduate and graduate students, most writers, I found, worked in an opposite direction: they began by writing stories, and worked their way toward novels; it was as if they believed that in order to write novels they had first to serve apprenticeships in shorter fictional forms. Not at all, I’d suggest, for the short story is as different from the novel as, say, an oil painting is from a marble sculpture. Just as some artists excel and/or are more at home in one form of visual art than another, so too with writers: some notions simply arrive as stories, and some as novels. Many wonderful writers—Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, among others—never wrote a novel, and the most exceptional work by writers who have worked in both forms (e.g., John Cheever, Henry James, Jim Shepard,William Trevor) has often been the short story.

When I started out writing stories, in addition to literary quarterlies and the annual Best American and O. Henry anthologies, there were many large-circulation magazines that regularly published fiction: The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, Playboy, Esquire, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Collier’s, McCall’s,Vanity Fair, Yankee, Mademoiselle, etc. Now, of our large-circulation magazines, only The New Yorker publishes a story in every issue. Most Americans are still brought up, through elementary school, high school, and college, on short stories, however, so that one wonders where, once they are done with formal schooling, unless they subscribe to literary quarterlies or to The New Yorker, they will ever again, in any regular way, come across short fiction. 

Some promising answers: new online sources of short stories (Narrative, Guernica), magazines that are publishing stories for the first time (Commonweal, Columbia University Alumni Magazine), new and adventurous venues for stories (One Story, Tin House, Black Clock), and an abundance of new, often annual short story anthologies (New Stories from the South, The Year’s Best Science Fiction , The New Granta Book of the American Short Story). My own sense—faith?—is that though literary forms change—some fade, others thrive—the love of story remains.

How to Write a Short Story? (Hint: It's Like Baking a Cake)

It's hard to believe people labor so much over writing a short story. Here, in helpful video form, are six simple steps (five by my count) to writing a short story from the good folks at HowCast:


How to Write a Short Story - More bloopers are a click away

Who knew it could be so easy?

Big Payoffs, Prize-Winning Collections, Self-Publishing Heavies, Celebrity Authors

While we wait for the 2010 entries to roll in, here (as we've done before) are some notable news briefs about short stories and short story collections.

A Kiwi Breaks the Bank
The winner of The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank short story award is New Zealand writer C.K. Stead for his story "Last Season's Man." At £25,000, this is probably the largest prize for a single story.

Alexie Wins the PEN/Faulkner Award
Sherman Alexie's story collection War Dances has won the prestigious annual $15,000 PEN/Faulkner Award. Another short story collection, Lorraine M. Lopez' Homicide Survivors Picnic was a finalist, adding to the list of 2009 short fiction titles honored as book award finalists. Alexie's collection, by the way, was not entered for The Story Prize.

A Big Time Literary Author Goes DIY
Author John Edgar Wideman has self-published his latest book, a story collection, Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind (inspired by Kawabata's classic Palm of the Hand Stories), on the Lulu site. Lulu has also brought back into print much of Wideman's back-list. Mark my words, this is one way disintermediation is going to play out, and more authors are likely to go the do-it-yourself route.

Two Actor/Writers (and One Writer/Actor)
Esquire magazine has published a story by MFA student and movie star James Franco, "Just Before the Black." Scribner will be publishing Franco's collection Palo Alto in September. Another actor, Gene Wilder, has a collection just out from St. Martin's Press, What Is This Thing Called Love. And let's not forget Sam Shepard, who earned his rep as a writer before gaining fame as an actor. His book, Day Out of Days, is on shelves now from the good folks at Alfred A. Knopf.

Soon to come: PEN/Malamud and the Pulitzer Prize, which I'm hoping a short story collection will once again win (though I'm not holding my breath).

Gary Vaynerchuk, You Can't Crush Stories

I think Gary Vaynerchuk is great. I love his store—Wine Library—and I admire his energy. His book Crush It sounds truly inspiring. But I don't think his can-doism is the key to success in all areas. And he comes off sounding glib and a bit naive when he shows GalleyCat how to apply his methods to succeeding as a short story writer.



It takes more than time, energy, and social networking to succeed as a short story writer. Vaynerchuk throws out the phrase "creating great content" as if it's purely a matter of will. But talent is something you can't will into existence. And developing talent takes time, patience, a capacity to improve, a certain kind of stubbornness, and a particular sensibility that isn't necessarily compatible with haunting chat rooms and leaving comments on blogs. Would Gary V. say that someone could succeed as a football player by blogging and twittering? I don't think so. You might find a game to get into, but that doesn't make you a pro.

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

Selling Stories on the Web--The Age of Disintermediation Is Upon Us

For the first time that I know of, it's now possible to easily sell an electronic version of a short story online. Scribd.com, which had previously allowed users to post text to its site, has created an online store (in beta release) that allows authors to sell their work, set their own prices, and pocket 80%. That may not sound like a very big deal, but when you add social networking through the likes of Facebook and Twitter--not to mention Scribd's built-in community--this allows writers to bypass literary magazines and offer short works for sale directly to readers.

I could see this being a tempting possibility for established writers of short fiction. Say you've written a very topical story that it would be best to publish as soon as possible or one tied to a holiday or event. The only print outlet that could possibly publish it within a few weeks is The New Yorker. And everyone knows what a long shot selling a story there is, let alone getting it published when you'd like it to. Beyond that, you're likely to wait months if not years for your story to appear elsewhere, even if you place it immediately. So why not put the story out yourself? You could charge $1.25, and pocket $1 for every copy you sell. And you could time publication so that the immediacy of the story becomes a virtue rather than a drawback.

Of course, writers could also bypass book publishers and post an entire short story collection--the digital equivalent of self-publishing. But I think, unless you'd be doing it to also make each story available separately, you'd be giving up too much. In addition to prestige, publishers can offer print and digital distribution and the backing of their design, sales, and marketing teams (not to mention editing that could sharpen the writing). Getting something you published on Scribd reviewed would be nearly impossible. And most readers still prefer books to reading off a screen. More and more, however, are doing their reading on Kindle, the Sony Reader, handhelds, and other devices.

The downside is that this kind of disintermediation does pose a threat to literary magazines, which are an essential part of the literary community. But they can make use of the direct-sale capability themselves by opening their own Scribd stores to sell individual stories, poems, and essays under their respected imprimaturs. To be sure, many short stories are already available on the Web for free on the sites of print and Web only literary magazines. But why not make work available for purchase, instead, and make some money for the publication and author? The Scribd store even opens up the possibility of establishing an online Web 'zine that delivers stories to readers without even having to set up a Web site.

The possibilities are vast. Here's one more: How about fund-raising for a charity or nonprofit by selling stories, poems, and essays on-line? Thanks to Scribd, the logistics have never been simpler.

It's National Short Story Month (Beta Version)!

Ah, May, flowers blooming, sun shining, short stories gaining wide recognition. Okay, the last one may be a stretch, but some of us are rolling out something we like to call National Short Story Month (or Short Story Month or International Short Story Month (you get the idea)) to help make that happen. Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Network is a real force behind these efforts, and he has even managed to get a nifty logo (to the left) designed by Steven Seighman of Dzanc Books and online magazine Monkeybicycle. Dan will be posting often this month on Emerging Writers. I'll try to chime in every now and then. In the meantime, those interested can join the discussion at Readerville (and suggest a story collection for Barack Obama to read).

For now, before we get a full-fledged National Short Story Month off the ground with nationwide events and community-wide involvement (schools, bookstores, libraries, etc.), the best way to celebrate is, of course, to read some short fiction. If you want recommendations for collections published in the past five years (2004-08), you can visit The Story Prize site, where you can find the titles of our 15 past finalists and 61 other notable short story volumes (a feature we didn't add until 2005). The buying links may not work for all of the books, but you can easily find them on IndieBound.org and other online booksellers, if not your local bookstore or library.

And don't forget to read literary magazines that publish short stories (in print and online). There are hundreds to choose from, and you might discover a great new short story writer in any one of them, including The New Yorker.

National Short Story Month: What Next?

The people have spoken (some of them, at least), and the result of our poll so far is that a whopping 90% of respondents agree that yes, we do need a National Short Story month.

When I posted about this a couple of weeks ago, I didn't realize that some had already declared May National Short Story Month, including Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network and Dzanc Books, who put forward this idea two years ago. When we rolled out The Story Prize in 2004, I was making some noise about the idea myself (if you follow the link, please ignore the awful caricature), and it wasn't the first time.

But it's going to take more than a little noise to make it happen. For NSSM to come about and have any impact, it will need to have a strong organization behind it, a real concerted and nationally coordinated effort, and buy-in from bookstores, schools, and libraries, not to mention authors and publishers. Readerville has been kind enough to host a thread to discuss National Short Story Month, so please weigh in if you have ideas about how to make this happen.

Do We Need a National Short Story Month?

April is National Poetry Month, but you probably already knew that. The Academy of American Poets, which has done a great job of promoting it, established NPM in 1996 (though it feels like it's been around even longer) to:

"...widen the attention of individuals and the media to the art of poetry, to living poets, to our complex poetic heritage, and to poetry books and journals of wide aesthetic range and concern. We hope to increase the visibility and availability of poetry in popular culture while acknowledging and celebrating poetry’s ability to sustain itself in the many places where it is practiced and appreciated. "

The question I've been pondering since we started The Story Prize--and even further back when I was series editor of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards--is whether the short story needs a similar boost. Among the goals of a National Short Story Month (NSSM) would be to:

• Highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American short story writers.
  
• Introduce more Americans to the pleasures of reading short stories.
  
• Bring authors and short stories to the public in immediate and innovative ways.
• Make short fiction a more important part of the school curriculum.
• Increase the attention paid to short stories by national and local media.
• Encourage increased publication, distribution, and sales of short story collections.
  
• Increase public and private philanthropic support for short story writers and short stories.
  

This statement is straight from the National Poetry Month FAQ, except I've more or less substituted "short stories" for "poems" and "short story writers" for "poets."*

National Poetry Month seems to have been very successful in enlisting the support of schools, libraries, publishers, and booksellers, among others. And the short story, like poetry, reaches a small audience of readers compared to novels and nonfiction. Could an NSSM change this? Or would creating one in some way be admitting that the form is marginal and needs to enlist widespread cultural support? Sounds like time for a poll.

Should there be a National Short Story Month?
	Yes. It would be good for short stories and those who write and publish them.
	No. Who needs another National Something-or-Other Month?
	Maybe. I'm ambivalent.
pollcode.com free polls

*And while we're at it, how about a single word for those who write stories, something equivalent to "poet" or "novelist"? "Storyist"?

Under a Cheever

I love John Cheever's stories and Flannery O'Connor's, too. But I have absolutely no interest in their biographies, which are racking up reviews in newspapers and magazines. I don't happen to care if J.C. was an alcoholic, abusive husband and father, abused child, closeted homosexual, etc., etc., etc. All I need to know is his work:

"Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming--Diana and Helen--and I saw their covered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched them walk out of the sea."

That's the concluding paragraph of Cheever's story "Goodbye, My Brother." Perhaps he did have a troubled relationship with his brother, as does the narrator, but that makes no difference to the reader; the story would be great even if the author had been an only child.

Of, course, I'm not saying no one should read or write biographies, just that they're not for me. The best thing about the books on Cheever and O'Connor is that they're likely to get more people to read their stories and novels. Let's give Cheever the final words, a passage from his novel, Oh What a Paradise It Seems:

"He felt so lonely that when the car ahead of him signaled for an exit he felt as if he had been touched tenderly on the shoulder by some stranger in some strange place like an airport, and he wanted to put on his parking lights or signal back in some way as strangers who are traveling sometimes touch one another although they will never, ever meet again. In a lonely fantasy of nomadism he imagined a world where men and women communicated with each other mostly by signal lights and where he proposed marriage to some stranger because she put on her parking lights an hour before dusk, disclosing a supple and romantic nature."

Tobias Wolff Stories, Literally Word for Word

A San Francisco theater group called Word for Word stages performances of short stories. The name reflects the fact that they literally--and literarily--"perform every word the author has written." (I suppose without adding any of their own.)
That's the kind of reverence a writer can get behind. In fact, several have. Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Ford, Ellen Gilchrist, Daniel Handler, Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan, and Tobias Wolff are on the company's Authors Council.

Word for Word's current production is "More Stories from Tobias Wolff," which consists of performances of: "Sanity," "Down to Bone," and "Firelight" (pictured above). All three stories are included in Our Story Begins, one of the three story collections that are finalists for The Story Prize. The premier performance of "More Stories" was on Jan. 10 at Stanford University, where Wolff serves as the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. The show will tour the Bay area from March 9-22 and go on to a five city tour of France from March 27 to April 10. We can only hope they bring it to New York some time.

Speaking of New York, you can see Wolff read from and discuss his work onstage at The New School on March 4, as part of The Story Prize award event.

Mix Books Redux: March of the Penguin

Harking back to a September TSP post and a guest post from writer and one-time music industry executive Paul Vidich, the subject of assembling digital custom anthologies has once again come up. As Leon Neyfach reports on the New York Oberver's Web site, as part of Penguin Group USA's Penguin 2.0 initiative, in 2009 customers will be able to choose from stories, essays, poems, and other "standalone texts" to create custom-made collections, then print them on demand. The article goes on to say:

"Taking sites like AnthologyBuilder.com and iTunes as inspiration, Mr. Gomez said, Penguin hopes the 'Custom' program will tap into people's desire 'to remix a little and to shuffle their playlists.' He cautioned, however, that he 'would never want to break apart an entire book' and thereby render the full-length volume obsolete the way iTunes has done to the 74-minute LP."

Surely, he must know that if this catches on, it could well deconstruct short story collections. As I said in September:

"Getting back to the iTunes analogy, I was recently thinking it would be great if you could make your own anthology of your favorite stories, poems, essays, etc., and give it to friends in the form of a bound volume, the way you make a mix tape or mix CD. Call it a mix book (a term already taken)."

Could this be the tipping point? AnthologyBuilder.com seems to offer mostly science fiction stories written by little known authors. Penguin Classics has an enormous backlist, including a lot of short fiction by authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, O. Henry, Washington Irving, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rudyard Kipling, Ring Lardner, D. H. Lawrence, Jack London, Somerset Maugham, Herman Mellville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain, and collections by more contemporary writers including Dorothy Allison, Donald Barthelme, Saul Bellow, and Stephen King. Now that's a list worth reintermediating.

Charles D'Ambrosio: For He's A Jolly Good Lannan Fellow

Short story writer Charles D'Ambrosio has won a $100,000 Lannan Foundation fellowship. Past winners known for writing short stories include: Robert Coover, Edwidge Danticat, Lydia Davis, Stuart Dybek, Deborah Eisenberg, Mavis Gallant, Denis Johnson, Edward P. Jones, Steven Millhauser, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, George Saunders, Joanna Scott, David Foster Wallace, and John Edgar Wideman. It's a pretty impressive bunch, and that's not even the full list.

D'Ambrosio well deserves the honor. His 2006 short story collection, The Dead Fish Museum, which The Story Prize designated as a notable collection, is an excellent book. I particularly liked "The High Divide," "Drummond & Sons," and "The Scheme of Things," all of which first appeared in The New Yorker.

Authors who write short stories seem to do very well garnering literary honors, including the Whiting Writers' Awards and the MacArthur Foundation fellowships, in addition to the Lannan. It's when it comes to book awards for fiction that novels tend to dominate, which is one reason we created The Story Prize. Clearly, practitioners of the short story form (too bad there's not a term equivalent to "novelist") engender a lot of respect, which nobody can deny.

A Play on George Saunders' Words

"Carolyn, remember that RE/MAX one where as the redhead kid falls asleep holding that Teddy bear rescued from the trash, the bear comes alive and winks, and the announcer goes, Home is the place where you find yourself no longer longing for home..."
—from "Jon" by George Saunders

President-elect Barack Obama is not the only show in town in Chicago. At the Building Stage, from now through Dec. 14, you can see a theatrical version of George Saunders' short story "Jon" (pictured above), adapted and directed by Seth Bockley of Collaboraction. The story is one of my favorites by Saunders, who read from it at our award night on Feb. 28, 2007, when In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize.

A lot of stories have been made into movies, and many I've read would be great for the stage, so I hope to see this happen more often. Here's the description of the play, which serves as a pretty good summary of the story, as well:

Jon is a futuristic allegory about teenage love and self-discovery in a corporate universe where television commercials replace life experiences.

Try it, you'll like it. I bet it's M'm M'm good.