On Literary Awards and Subjectivity

Ron Rash, winner of the O'Connor Award

Congratulations to Ron Rash, winner of the £35,000 (around $55,000) Cork City – Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award for his story collection Burning Bright  (Ecco). In the five (correction, six) years since the O'Connor prize was established (The Story Prize is in its seventh), the overlap of winners and finalists between the two book awards for short story collections has been small. So far, only two of our finalists--Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and Wells Towers' Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned--have been finalists (Towers) or winners (Lahiri) of the O'Connor award. We don't announce our finalists until early January, so that correspondence could increase. But what's clear is that literary prizes are (as everyone understands or should) largely subjective.

The first year I served as series editor for the O. Henry Awards, 1997, I got in touch with Katrina Kenison, then the series editor of Best American Short Stories, and we established a practice of comparing winners, once we'd both chosen. In those pre-social-networking days, there was no announcement. And until the galleys were sent out, few people knew the complete list of stories chosen for either collection. The first year, I think both Katrina and I were nervous as we read our lists of stories to each other over the phone. What if we had too many in common? She was nervous because our collection came out six weeks earlier. I was nervous because their collection routinely trounced ours in sales. Both our fears, however, were unfounded. We didn't overlap a single story in 1997. In 1998, we had three stories in common and two in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002.

One big procedural difference between the annual collections was that I chose the 20 stories myself, whereas Katrina picked 120 or so stories to send to the guest editor, who chose the final 20. We would often both admire some of the other collection's choices, and she sometimes took on a wistful tone. For instance, that very first year, she told me she would have liked Rick Moody's "Demonology" to have made the Best American cut. And I believe I made the better choice of Annie Proulx stories in 1998, when I chose "Brokeback Mountain" and Best American guest editor Garrison Keillor chose "The Half-Skinned Steer." Truth be told, I always thought the O. Henry Awards choices were better. But, then, I would. That's what subjectivity is all about.

The Namesake: Will The Digital Age Favor O. Henry-like Storytelling?

O. Henry: Ripe for a comeback?

On Saturday, I attended a reception for the 2010 PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. It was kind of like going to an engagement party for an ex-wife you've gotten over. I was series editor of the O. Henry Awards for six years, the 1997-2002 volumes, before Anchor Books abruptly decided to make a change. But it's been a while now, and over the last few years, I've exchanged the occasional friendly email with Laura Furman, the current series editor. I even boxed up my collection of about 20 past O. Henry Awards volumes and shipped it to her. So when Laura sent an invitation to the reception, I gladly accepted.

It was a friendly meeting. The low-key party took place at Idlewood books on West 19th Street. Among the hosts were One Story editor (and Story Prize board member) Hannah Tinti and Tin House editor Rob Spillman. A few of the authors in the 2010 volume were on hand. I also saw A Public Space editor Brigid Hughes (another board member) and past Story Prize finalist and O. Henry Award winner Joan Silber.

One thing that hasn't changed about the O. Henry Awards is the series' ambivalent relationship with its namesake. Someone asked Laura Furman if the stories in the book are like O. Henry's, and she quickly denied any connection beyond the name of the series. I always answered the same way.

Literary fiction branched off from the kind of popular magazine and newspaper fiction that William Sydney Porter (aka O. Henry), published at the turn of the last century as other forms of entertainment appeared. And you're more likely to find his formula of clever plots and surprising twists in television and movie scripts than in stories appearing in one of the prestigious annual literary collections, such as the O. Henry Awards, Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize collection, and New Stories from the South.

Of course, stories written as much for entertainment as for craft are still prevalent in genres such as horror, mystery, and romance, and many of them are excellent. However, popular fiction as a genre unto itself no longer really exists. But here (wait for it) is the twist: The digital age could offer such types of stories a second life. Radio, movies, and TV might have stolen a large part of the audience for popular storytelling, but digital platforms such as the iPad, Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader have the potential to bring back the crowd pleasing, O. Henry-style story. These devices lend themselves very well to the short form and will be in the hands of a growing readership. So could popular short fiction mount a comeback in the digital age? I'd say, yes. How would that be for a surprise ending?

Note: May is Short Story Month in the blogosphere. This site is all about short stories, and we'll continue to post on our favorite subject throughout the month.

"Sincerely, Ray Carver"

In 1984, shortly after reading Raymond Carver's short story collection, Cathedral, I wrote a letter to him expressing my admiration for the story, "A Small, Good Thing." One moment in, particular, struck me as being incredibly vivid, real, "cinematic" (which I thought then was quite a compliment). It occurs in the emergency room of a hospital where a couple has taken their young son. The boy, after being struck by a car while walking home from school—on his birthday, no less—later goes into a coma. In the waiting room, the boy's mother encounters members of another family, who have brought another child to the emergency room. What amazed me was the feeling of intersecting narratives. And I could imagine a story about the second family, with this mother just passing through.

I was 25 at the time and had a different last name, Charny. (Long story short: My wife and I both changed our last names to Dark when we married). I sent the note I wrote to Carver care of Vintage and didn't expect an answer. It just felt important to send, no matter what. But a couple of months later, a handwritten letter with a Syracuse postmark arrived. I had just quit law school to pursue writing fiction, and getting a response from the great man himself thrilled me, almost seemed to validate my choice. I swore that when a fan wrote to me, I'd write back, just as Carver had.

The fiction writing career hasn't quite worked out for me—yet—some 25 years later. (I'm now double the age.) But the pursuit of it did, nonetheless, lead me in a direction I couldn't have foreseen. In 2000, I ended up choosing a posthumous Carver story, "Kindling," for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. It almost felt like I was returning a favor. In truth, the letter Raymond Carver wrote me, just as he was dashing off to the airport to catch a flight back home to Washington State, was a small act of generosity that I will never be able to reciprocate.

Richard Poirier's Short Story Legacy

Richard Poirier, who died at the age of 83 on Aug. 15, is probably best known for being the founder of Library of America and of Rutgers' Raritan Review, but he was also series editor of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards from 1961-1965, a title I, too, held for six years, from 1997-2002. In between the two of us came William Abrahams' amazing 31 year reign as series editor.* I met Abrahams once but never Poirier.

In 1998, my then-assistant Scott Conklin and I compiled a complete list of stories included in every O. Henry Awards volume, starting with the first one in 1919, and I had the list posted on the Web, sorted by name and year. The alphabetical list also includes the name of the series editor who selected each story. So my own labors allowed me to get a quick sense of Poirier's short story legacy, via his work as O. Henry Awards series editor. I discovered that:

• Stories by Donald Barthelme (1964), Bernard Malamud (1964), Mary McCarthy ('65), Leonard Michaels ('65), Joyce Carol Oates ('63), Reynolds Price ('61), Thomas Pynchon ('62), John Updike ('61), and Joy Williams ('65) earned their first O. Henry Awards during his tenure. **
• He also included fiction by Gina Berriault, Hortense Calisher, John Cheever, Arthur Miller, Flannery O'Connor, Tillie Olson, Kathryn Anne Porter, Philip Roth, William Saroyan, Terry Southern, Wallace Stegner, and Peter Taylor, among others. Olson's "Tell Me a Riddle" and O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" are among the enduring stories that appeared in O. Henry Awards volumes from 1961-66.

No doubt, Poirier missed the boat on numerous other great writers and stories. I know that in my time I did--that's par for the course. But even without all of his other accomplishments, Richard Poirier contributed to American short fiction through the writers and stories that he did introduce to thousands of readers in his six-year stint as editor of the O. Henry Awards.

* Abrahams also co-edited with Poirier in 1965 and 1966.
** Oates would go on to appear in O. Henry Awards volumes 29 times (25 times under Abrahams who was her editor at Dutton), Updike 13 times, Malamud 5, Barthelme 4, Michaels 4, and Williams 2.