Edith Pearlman Plays with Time

In the second in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Edith Pearlman, recent winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and author of Binocular Vision (Lookout Press), discusses stories she has written that range in time from twenty minutes to a lifetime and some unconventional time structures she has used.

What is the shortest narrative time period you have ever contained in a short story? The longest?
The action in “Eighteen Questions” (Alaska Quarterly Review; not yet collected) takes about twenty minutes. The setting is equally restricted: a queen-sized bed. A married couple is engaging in post-coital game of twenty questions. The questions and answers, narrowing in focus and mounting in intensity, reveal a recent tragedy in their lives.
         
“South Market” (Pakn Treger, not yet collected) follows its hero from grade school to nursing home. He suffers from unrequited love throughout his life. Meanwhile he rises socially and financially and becomes an active citizen in the small city that is the story’s setting. The reader learns the man’s history, and also the history of the city’s sociology and architecture and ethnic groups.
         
In “Eighteen Questions” the strict rules of the parlor game – like the demands of an acrostic poem or a sonnet’s rhyme scheme – set up constraints that the story then seeps heartbreakingly out of. The tale could not have borne a longer narrative time period or another page.  “South Market,” padded and stretched and deepened, could probably have been turned into a novel.  However (see below), I don’t write novels; my imaginary, irritable reader wouldn’t stand for such a thing.
         
In two stories collected in Binocular Vision, I’ve used narrative time in a less straightforward way:

“The Ministry of Restraint” relates a series of events in the lives of a man and a woman. They meet as strangers on a train, and together endure its wreck. Then follow silent and accidental encounters, each separated by ten years or so. They yearn for each other, but they do not speak or touch. Some details of their individual lives separate the description of the encounters. In the final meeting one sentence is spoken.  But the story is not yet finished; in its last paragraphs time reverts to the day the two met, all those decades earlier, and tells what happened immediately after the wreck. The reader, plunged again into the beginning of their history, solves the puzzle of the two lovers’ lifetime restraint.

“Lineage,” a few pages long, takes place now, during a half hour in a hospital room. Three doctors stand beside a bed in which lies a very old woman. The woman relates an occurrence that was told to her forty years earlier, an occurrence that itself took place fifty years earlier than that. The old woman urgently describes the ninety year old incident. Then the story returns to the hospital and the present. Circular time here runs counter to circular time in “Ministry”.

The challenge in each work was to convey the urgency of the tale inscribed in its circle – the restlessness of the old woman’s confession, the strength of the lovers’ mysteriously unfulfilled desire. I think that this sense of urgency must exist somewhere in every successful tale what ever its time schema; the sense that this story is begging to be told. As an author I become a small and nearly invisible girl pulling at the coat sleeve of a large and busy man; a man who has no time for novels; a man, say, on his way to the airport. “There is something I must tell you, Sir; please give me your attention for a just little while.” And because I have promised to be brief, I must exercise all my powers of compression and economy while allowing emotion intensely to flow. If I go on too long – if I become slack, if I am profligate with words -- my overcoated listener will shake me off, and you will find me weeping on the curbstone.

The narrative time of the story may encompass twenty minutes or half a century. The writing of it may have lasted a month. The reading of it (or listening to it) may take a quarter-hour. But let that quarter-hour be headlong and unstoppable -- for my busy man has a plane to catch.

Whatever Happened to Eudora Welty?

by Patrick Thomas Henry

Recently, I posted a status update on my Facebook wall and asked if anybody near New York would be interested in tagging along to a June 10, 2011 panel at The New School, moderated by Granta assistant editor Patrick Ryan.  The event, entitled “Truly Yours,” offered perspectives on Eudora Welty from writers she has influenced. An acquaintance from high school responded to my status:  “Does anybody know to whom you are referencing?” In short:  I was flummoxed.(1) Who doesn’t know of Eudora Welty?

Apparently, far too many readers. Ryan opened the panel by saying that he recently had similar experiences, one with an intelligent college English major and another with a voracious, older, lifelong reader.

“Truly Yours” wasn’t exactly a Eudora Welty/new readers matchmaking session; the panel spoke to Welty lovers, not folks like my high school chum.  But the panel’s participants—critic Maud Newton and novelist Sheri Holman—joined Ryan in explicating Welty’s unique importance to American fiction. Dramatic readings of some Welty excerpts, performed by actress Rhonda Keyser, punctuated their discussion.

 “More than any writer I can think of,” Newton said, “Welty captures how people speak and the humor of situations.” Holman agreed, saying that “her dialogue is some of the funniest and truest you’ll ever read.” According to the panel, Welty’s interest in the inner, private life places her alongside Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Holman said that Welty’s concern for characters’ interior lives—their private dreams and desires—moves us “in and out of minds in so many ways.”

We need Welty, the panel argued, because she’s a regional writer whose pitch perfect sense of the human voice eclipses the limits of place. Her control of dialects and everyday language illustrates something essential about our behaviors. Ryan shared Welty’s description of Anton Chekhov’s plays, which describes Welty’s thoughts on conversations:

You know, in Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, how people are always gathered together and talking and talking, no one’s really listening. Yet there’s a great love and understanding that prevails through it, and a knowledge and acceptance of each other’s idiosyncrasies, a tolerance of them, and also an acute enjoyment of the dramatic.(2)

People talking and talking yet never really listening to each other—this is why today’s readers need Welty’s fiction. Smart phones seem to be surgically attached to people’s ears, and the lot of social media—MySpace, Facebook, Twitter—generate channels of emptiness, great voids into which we can shout while choosing to ignore the calls of others, the echoes of our own voices.(3)

Talking-across-purposes muddles relationships in “Why I Live at the P.O.,” even as the reader witnesses how the characters keep missing each other.(4) Voice works, here, in two key ways. First, we hear the snark-fueled appraisal of family life from the first-person narrator—the postmistress. Her Southern dialect rings honest, never farcical.(5) So, we want to trust her—even as we don’t know the others’ take on Stella-Rondo’s failed relationship with Mr. Whitaker. Second, the narrator is posturing herself against the rest of the family as her recently returned sister turns the entire clan against her.  Really:  the narrator and her family put the “fun” in “dysfunction.”

As Holman pointed out to the audience, “Everybody’s about power and position, and who has what on whom.” The whispered insults and misconceptions in “Why I Live at the P.O.” are simply how the narrator and Stella-Rondo keep lunging in front of each other. Yet, we need to be aware of these plays, especially in a twenty-first century where everything orbits around poignancy in 140 characters or less:  “Powerlessness,” as Holman elaborated, “attunes you to what others are saying.” Welty’s characters, in their little power parades, perform the gamut of emotions and beliefs.

Not realizing this results in disaster. Nowhere in Welty’s short fiction is this truer than “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”—Welty’s only overtly political story.(6)  Here, Welty inhabits the voice of a white man who assassinated an NAACP leader, a narrative arc lifted from the 1963 hate killing of Medgar Evers by Byron de la Beckwith. Welty slides deftly into this perspective, at once uncovering the terror of this racist crime while showing us how such a person justify that act. The story’s power stems from precisely this: Welty knows where that voice is coming from—a well of racism and hatred.  And she’s brave enough to confront that attitude, in a way few short story writers can.

Where should new readers meet Welty? Newton directed the audience toward Welty’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), while Holman guided readers toward Welty’s second short story collection—The Wide Net (1943).  Holman promoted The Wide Net because of Welty’s flexibility; the collection was written during the World War II years, and Holman asserted that few other books handle the consequences of shifting realities as powerfully as The Wide Net. Regardless, Welty offers today’s readers a guide to how we should communicate—so readers should unplug for a moment and hear what her stories relate.

(1) I somehow found it within myself to not deride his highfalutin diction.
(2)  The complete interview is available online at The Paris Review Web site.
(3)  My iPod, Kindle, Macbook, and Wii betray this much:  I’m no enemy to our technological overlords.  It’s just far too easy to get sucked into the virtual world they offer.
(4)  The proof, the cliché goes, is in the pudding, and this story backs up Holman’s assertion on Welty:  “Why I Live at the P.O.” goes down sweet, and when I read this story I can hear the syrupy dialect.
(5)  Listen to Welty reading from “Why I Live at the P.O.”
(6)  This story was first published in The New Yorker on July 6, 1963. An online subscription is required to read this digital version.

New Assistants Phedra and Patrick Extend the Reach of The Story Prize

We're pleased to introduce two writing students from the Rutgers-Newark MFA program, Phedra Deonarine and Patrick Thomas Henry, have just joined The Story Prize as assistants:

Phedra Deonarine lived in Trinidad for eighteen years. She then moved to Vancouver where she earned a B.A. in English from the University of British Columbia. Her short story "Pelau" was long-listed for the 2010 CBC Literary Awards. She is currently the Truman Capote Fellow in the Creative Writing M.F.A. Program at Rutgers University-Newark.

Patrick Thomas Henry is a graduate of the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University and has also earned an MA in English literature at Bucknell University. Currently, he attends the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark.  His fiction is forthcoming in Revolution House and The Writing Disorder; he has published review essays in the journal Modern Language Studies, and he is the author of the critical head notes in On Writing Short Stories, edited by Tom Bailey. He blogs about literature and related topics at The Penguin in the Machine.



Sarah Bridgins, who is now a literary agent with the Francis Goldin Agency, served as an assistant for several years, and Brett Duquette, now working as an editor for Sterling Publishing, helped out more recently.

One of the main jobs of our assistants is to contact publishers about short story collections we're interested in reading to make them aware of our deadlines. They also provide another perspective on some of the collections we receive.

This time around, however, we're doing something different: Phedra and Patrick will also be attending literary events in New York City and elsewhere and reporting on them for this blog. Other sites, such as Electric Literature's The Outlet have been doing this for some time. It seems like a good way to broaden our focus on short fiction and to support bookstores, institutions, reading series, and literary magazines that are essential to the short story.

If you'd like TSP to cover your event, please feel free to contact us at info@thestoryprize.org (a week before the event, if possible). 

Ed Falco and the Quest of a Lifetime

As we did last year, The Story Prize is once again inviting the authors of the story collections we receive to contribute to this blog. In 2010, 71 writers availed themselves of this opportunity.

In the first in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Ed Falco, author of Burning Man (Southern Methodist University Press), elaborates on his reasons for writing short stories.

Question
Why do I write short stories when as a rule there is no money to be made or fame to be gained as a short story writer in America?

Answer
“The Country Husband,” “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” “Cutting Edge,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “Guests of The Nation,” “A Hunger Artist,” “The Babysitter,” “Chopin in Winter,” “The Magic Barrel,” “Some Other, Better Otto,” “Araby,” “Sugar Among the Chickens,” “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” “The Open Boat,” “Cathedral,” “The Management of Grief,” “I Want to Live!,” “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” “Tell Me a Riddle,” “Bullet in the Brain,” “Bartelby, the Scrivener,” and “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.”

Elaboration
If you’re a short story writer or reader, you know all or most of the stories above, by, in order, Cheever, Tolstoy, Purdy, Hawthorne, Frank O’Connor, Kafka, Coover, Malamud, Eisenberg, Joyce, Lewis Nordan, Flannery O’Connor, Crane, Carver, Dybek, Mukherjee, Thom Jones, Chekhov, Tillie Olsen, Tobias Wolff, Melville, and Sherman Alexie.  These are all short stories that have become a part of my life, that is, they have dramatically influenced both the way I see the world and the way I live in the world. I don’t think it’s too much to say that a few of these stories changed my life. I read “The Death of Ivan Illych” when I was still in my teens, and from the moment I put the story down I started looking at the world through different eyes. The harrowing death scene that ends the story, the innocuous “bump” that begins Ivan’s decline, the futility and foolishness of living one’s life “decorously”––all of these elements of the story worked their way into my consciousness immediately through Tolstoy’s skill as a storyteller and thereafter took up residence in my internal life, guiding my thinking and my behavior. To larger or lesser degrees, the same is true for all the stories I’ve listed. They have influenced my life.  In some cases they have changed my life. And they’ve done so in an instant, in the brief time it took to move from the first word to the last.

Not many short stories will have this kind of impact on me. I read lots of stories that give me pleasure, that are terrific stories, but nonetheless don’t have such a powerful effect. Some of my favorite short story writers are not represented on that list. I couldn’t imagine it any differently since surely for a story to have this kind of influence a whole set of circumstances has to converge, many of which have as much to do with the reader as with the story itself.  Still, I always start reading a story with the hope that it will hold this kind of power.

I write short stories because the act of writing one engages me like almost nothing else. Once I have a story going, I spend my days thinking through its possibilities. I go to bed thinking about it, and I wake up in the morning excited about getting to work. I’ve been writing for a long time now and the excitement has never gone away. There’s a rush I feel at the completion of a short story that “works,” that feels right, that is unlike any other writing experience. In a good short story, all the elements come together, they click into place with a sense of finality. In the process of writing a story, I never know whether or not I’ll get there.  Sometimes everything is moving along just fine, but the ending won’t click. Sometimes I’ll spend days on the opening paragraphs before I realize I don’t have a story at all. Sometimes I’ve got a good beginning, but no place to go. Sometimes I have to settle. I have to accept that I’ve written a story that is clearly not one of my best, but for one reason or another––usually because it explores a question that remains important to me––I settle for it.  I say to myself something like, “Okay, it’s not one of your best, but it’s still part of the family.”

And sometimes everything works, everything clicks, and then the aforementioned rush follows.

As for why I get excited about the possibility of writing a good short story, I refer you again to my original answer to the question that opens this post. I get excited because the quest to write a story that’s as good as any of those listed is a challenge that can occupy a lifetime. The hope of doing so is thrilling.

Short Story Month: Cheering from the Sidelines

May is Short Story Month, and you'd expect The Story Prize blog to be chock full of posts about short fiction. Oops. May is turning out to be a busy month with a lot of travel (to California, Argentina, Brazil, and possibly Fishtown). So you'll have to get your Short Story Month on elsewhere. Fortunately, there are several great places you can go.

• The Godfather of Short Story Month, Dan Wickett, will be posting often on the Emerging Writers Network.
• Matt Bell will be matching him post for post on a blog he's set up for the occasion.
• Fiction Writers Review will play the Holy Ghost (if I may mix my metaphors) in this Short Story Month trinity. And I've promised to contribute a post.
• And it looks like Callie Miller has joined the fray on her Counter Balance blog.
• Monkey Bicycle has posted a list of other participants, as well.

Of course, this blog is entirely devoted to short fiction, and  71 authors of short story collections published in 2010 provided us with guest posts. We plan to continue this practice in 2011, and we'll be adding some other regular features to the blog in June. So stay tuned. Until then, happy Short Story Month. (And, remember, keep it short.)

A Visit from the Goon Squad: Is It Candy or Is it Gum?

First things first: Congratulations to Jennifer Egan on winning the Pulitzer Prize for her story collection, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Yes, you heard it right: I'm calling Goon Squad a story collection. We didn't get it as an entry for The Story Prize*, and I didn't push to get it (nor The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman—likewise a story collection), but I recently read Egan's book for my book group, and the thirteen chapters are definitely stories. Do they work together to create a whole greater than the sum of their parts? Yes, but so do a lot of story collections. 

Novel or story collection—which is it? This brings to mind the great philosophical conundrum of my childhood: Are Razzles candy or gum? As the slogan says: "First it's candy, then it's gum." The answer for Goon Squad is similar. It falls into both camps: First it's a story collection, then it's a novel. As you read the stories, the connections among them strengthen and create a satisfying whole. In fact, it's a lot more successful at being two different things than Razzles ever was.

Here's the thing: Any good story collection will have commonalities that make the book a single, cohesive work. Nonfiction and fiction, stories and novels, poems and stories exist along a continuum. A book, like a person, can be more than one thing, and even more than two things. For instance, a collection of prose poems could also work as a story collection and as a novel and have aspects of a memoir. A nonfiction book can also verge into fiction (I'm looking at you Greg Mortenson). The same goes for genre—a book can crossover among different ones. The stories in Goon Squad have elements of science fiction/alternative reality—as did this year's Story Prize winner, Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall.**

The point is this: Labels are for marketing. Books are for readers, and labels shouldn't place limits on a book's reach. A Visit from the Goon Squad was one of the best novels published in 2010. It was also one of the best story collections, among many good ones we read in 2010.

* We, of course, remain very enthusiastic about the three books we did choose as finalists for The Story Prize (Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr (which won), Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li, and Death Is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca). I can't say we would necessarily have picked A Visit from the Goon Squad as a finalist (Olive Kitteridge came very close, but we didn't choose that, either). Still, I wish we'd had a chance to consider it.

** The same could be said of the work of Chris Adrian, Kevin Brockmeier, George Saunders, and many others who usually fall into the literary camp. Maureen McHugh's Mothers & Other Monsters, a Story Prize finalist in 2006, seemed to carry the alternative history label, but it's also a very literary collection that deserves more attention (as do books by other authors that Small Beer Press publishes, such as Kelly Link and Karen Joy Fowler).

The Story Prize Finalists Are Racking up the Honors

When Story Prize winners or finalists achieve other honors, we're always happy for them. We're pleased on a personal level because we get to know and like these authors. Further honors also reaffirm our choices. And we hope that the books that are finalists for or win The Story Prize get into as many readers' hands as possible. Every honor helps in that regard.

So I was excited when Anthony Doerr, who just won The Story Prize, also won the the £30,000* Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for "The Deep." The story first appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story's Fall 2010 issue** and is in the April 10 edition of the Sunday Times Magazine.** Of course, I would have been equally excited if Yiyun Li, who was also a finalist for the Sunday Times Award, had won.

As it happens, this year's finalists have been racking up the honors since we held The Story Prize event on March 2. Yiyun Li and Suzanne Rivecca were also up for the Northern California Book Awards on Apr. 10. Suzanne was a finalist for PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction, is a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award (even though she's more of a tiger person), and also won a Rome fellowship in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.***

If there's any downside to our finalists and winners achieving other honors it's that certain prizes can overshadow† The Story Prize—but not too many of them, in our view. The Pulitzer Prize is one, and will announce its winners and finalists on April 18. Nonetheless, if Tony, Yiyun, or Suzanne win, we'll be very happy for them. Plus, one real test of a book award is how well its winners and finalists hold up over time, and winning other awards increases the chances that this will happen.

* The equivalent of $49,155 at current exchange rates. Though this eclipses the $20,000 top prize for The Story Prize, we've been mentioned in all of the press coverage and at least have the advantage of a decidedly more succinct name than The Sunday Times EFG Bank Short Story Award.

** It is not one of the stories in Memory Wall, The Story Prize winning collection. For now, you have to buy one-day access to the Sunday Times site for $2 or purchase the back issue of Zoetrope for $8 to read "The Deep." Coincidentally, that same issue of Zoetrope included a story by Mary Swan, whose "The Deep" was the first-prize winner in Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards. In that volume, 2006 Story Prize winner Mary Gordon introduced Swan's story. 
*** Anthony Doerr is a past winner.
† By this, I mean that it could supplant mention of The Story Prize on book covers and in author biographies.