A Few Highlights from Past Story Prize Events

Here's a short highlight reel we've put together to promote The Story Prize event on Feb. 28 at The New School. That night, authors Daniel Alarcón, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Elizabeth Strout will read from and discuss their work onstage before we announce the winner. (You can order tickets here.)

This video includes excerpts from George Saunders, Adam Johnson, Lorrie Moore, and Adam Johnson. Sometime soon, we hope to create a longer video featuring more highlights of author readings and interviews from past Story Prize events.

Thanks to the Creative Writing Program at The New School, which co-sponsors our award events and arranges to have them recorded each year.

News Coverage of The Story Prize Event and Announcement

L to R: Story Prize winner Elizabeth McCracken, founder Julie Lindsey,
finalists Francesca Marciano and Lorrie Moore, and director Larry Dark

Here are some links to press accounts of The Story Prize event on March 4, at which eventual winner Elizabeth McCracken and fellow finalists Francesca Marciano and Lorrie Moore read from and discussed their work onstage at The New School, and Julie Lindsey announced the winner:

Reuters

Associated Press

New York Times

Los Angeles Times

San Francisco Chronicle

Publishers Weekly

Shelf Awareness

Fiction Writers Review

The Dallas Morning News

Video: The Story Prize Event on March 4 at The New School with Francesca Marciano, Elizabeth McCracken, and Lorrie Moore

In case you missed The Story Prize event on March 4 at The New School, here's the video. That night, the three finalists—Francesca Marciano, Elizabeth McCracken, and Lorrie Moore—read from and discussed their work on-stage. And at the culmination of the event, we announced the winner for books published in 2014: Elizabeth McCracken's Thunderstruck. 

What the Judges Had to Say About Lorrie Moore's Bark

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Arsen Kashkashian, Noreen Tomassi, and Laura van den Berg. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge.

Here's what the judges had to say about Lorrie Moore's Bark, one of three finalists for The Story Prize:

Bark is the great American short story collection. It shows how much can be accomplished in the form without any of the seams ever showing. These eight stories are great tragedies, with all the comedy present that is inherent to the form. The situations portrayed are the stuff of life’s middle period, when things fall apart. People divorce or die; children become less than their potential; the political becomes personal. I have never read a more heartbroken collection, and I laughed the whole time. Welcome to America.

Please Join Us for The Story Prize Event on March 4 at The New School

Between the time we announce The Story Prize finalists in early January and the event at which we honor all three of them and present one with the $20,000 top prize, we spend a lot of time worrying about filling the seats in The New School auditorium. We always end up doing pretty well on that count (and probably would without worryng about it as much as we do), but we're still eager to have a substantial audience to support the three authors, The Story Prize, and the form we exist to promote—short fiction.

(L to R: Francesca Marciano, Elizabeth McCracken, and Lorrie Moore)

The authors always prove to be interesting and amusing, but it's also no secret that writers aren't necessarily the most outgoing bunch. We all know that their real performances take place when they are alone and writing, and that what matters most happens on the page and through the deeply personal experience of reading their work. So whether you plan to join us or not, we can't recommend too highly the three books we're honoring: The Other Language by Francesca Marciano, Thunderstruck by Elizabeth McCracken, and Bark by Lorrie Moore.

You can watch the event later on YouTube or FORA.tv, and we post a lot of pictures in the days that follow, but it is, of course, impossible to reproduce the live atmosphere in the auditorium. Nothing can take the place of the authors' presence, the burst of laughter or buzz that comes from the room when one of them reads or says something funny or profound, or the feeling of suspense before we announce the winner, the electric moment when founder Julie Lindsey speaks that name, and the moving experience of seeing someone accept the prize—most often a hard-working, supremely talented, and deserving author who hasn't received a comparable honor before. (For instance, last year was the first time George Saunders had ever won a book award.)

Tickets are $14 (close to the same as a movie ticket). The event is a week from today, on March 4 at 7:30 p.m., at The New School auditorium at 66 W. 12th St. Please join us if you can.

The Finalists for The Story Prize: The Other Language by Francesca Marciano, Thunderstruck by Elizabeth McCracken, and Bark by Lorrie Moore

The Finalists: (L to R): Marciano, McCracken, and Moore

We're pleased to honor as finalists for The Story Prize three outstanding books chosen from 129 entries representing 85 different publishers or imprints. They are:

• The Other Language by Francesca Marciano (Pantheon)
• Thunderstruck by Elizabeth McCracken (The Dial Press)
• Bark by Lorrie Moore (Alfred A. Knopf)

The Other Language by Francesca Marciano collects nine stories about women and men in or just beyond the cusp of major life changes, in locales as diverse as Greece, Rome, Venice, Kenya, India, and New York. The nine stories in Elizabeth McCracken's Thunderstruck, her first collection in 20 years, delve into dark subjects with seriousness and wit, and deliver on their inventive premises. Lorrie Moore's collection, Bark, consists of eight stories set mostly in Middle America, about people in or approaching midlife who find themselves midway between speaking their minds and protecting their emotions by forming a hard shell around themselves.

This year's judges, Boulder (Colo.) bookseller Arsen Kashkashian, Center for Fiction Director Noreen Tomassi, and author Laura van den Berg will decide the outcome.

The annual award event will take place at the New School’s Auditorium at 66 West 12 Street in New York City at 7:30 p.m. on Wed., March 4. Tickets cost $14. That night, Marciano, McCracken, and Moore will read from and discuss their work on-stage. At the end of the event, Julie Lindsey will announce the winner and present that author with $20,000 (which remains the biggest top prize of any annual U.S. book award for fiction) along with an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will each receive $5,000.

In the weeks ahead, we'll publish an index of guest posts form 2014 authors, and a long list of other exceptional collections we read last year.

“Thank You For Having Me” (You’re Welcome!): Lorrie Moore at Powell’s

By Molly Reid

Portland, Ore., April 11, 2014

Moore: Reading from Bark at Powell's

I’m obviously not the only one who goes a little fangirl for Lorrie Moore. The reading room at Powell’s Books was packed, people standing in the back and along the aisles, clutching their copies of Self-Help and A Gate at the Stairs, excitedly twittering like all the birds of America (see what I did there?).

Lorrie Moore read from Bark, her first story collection in fifteen years. Moore has written several lovely novels, but, for many, she is one of the reigning queens of the contemporary short story. (In a talk she gave years ago for Literary Arts’ Portland Arts and Lectures series, in response to a question about how she knows whether something is a short story or a novel, she likened it to knowing whether an animal is a dog or a cat: “If you throw the ball, and the creature goes eagerly after it and then brings it back to you, wanting to continue for eternity or for as long as you can stand it, whichever comes first, you’ve got a novel. If you throw the ball and the creature doesn’t budge but just looks at you as if you are out of your mind, you may have a short story – or you may just have a cat.”)

With humor that’s often described as mordant or sardonic, but feels more soft hearted than that, she handles the serious matters of life with lyric precision, offering up your very heart disguised as somebody else’s, or something else—a joke, a visit to a dead friend come to life, a dog named Cat.

Bark is what animals do in fear, in anger, in loneliness. It’s a laugh, a cough. A warning. Bark is also the protective layer, able to peel off and heal, sometimes grown rough and scabby over oozes of sap. In the last story of the collection, which she read from, the narrator tells her daughter that she saw a PBS show “that said only the outer bark of the brain — and it does look like bark — is gray. Apparently the other half of the brain has a lot of white matter. For connectivity.” In typical Lorrie Moore fashion, these multiple meanings echo and branch and contradict themselves throughout the stories of this collection. Her characters are a little older, if not wiser, have become more layered, have grown a bit more spiritually gnarled.

The title of the story she read at Powell’s, “Thank You for Having Me,” comes from one of the characters, a farmer who is playing music at his ex-wife’s wedding in Wisconsin, singing songs like, “I Want You Back,” and “I Will Always Love You.” But this character is somehow not pathetic or pitiful, or not only: 

Except he didn’t seem to want her back. He was smiling and nodding at everyone and seemed happy to be part of this send-off. He was the entertainment. He wore a T-shirt that read, THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME. This seemed remarkably sanguine and useful as well as a little beautiful. 

This is typical of the kind of dance performed in the story between humor and pathos, the push-pull of play and heart Lorrie Moore is known for.

This story doesn’t, actually, have much of a plot, at least not in the traditional sense. The only real event is that some bikers roll in and the head biker (wearing a football helmet with plush puppy dog ears glued to each side) gives a little speech about life, shooting a gun in the air. However, the bikers quickly realize they’re at the wrong wedding and speed off before anything really happens. Most of the story consists of the narrator, a woman living in the wake of her own heartbreak, a husband who left, talking to various characters, to the bride’s ex-husband, to her sassy daughter, and musing about life, and death. But the reason it works so well is simple: The writing is so f-ing funny. Every few lines, the audience erupted in laughter, and Moore knew exactly how to read with those interruptions, is obviously used to pausing as her audience continually loses control. She read: 

Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn’t have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell of the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly. 

She read: 

The bridesmaids were in pastels: one the light peach of baby aspirin; one the seafoam green of low-dose clonazepam; the other the pale daffodil of the next lowest dose of clonazepam. What a good idea to have the look of Big Pharma at your wedding. Why hadn’t I thought of that? 

These lines are funny on the page, but Lorrie Moore delivers them with such sharp smoky intimacy, they feel brand-new, and even funnier.   

 

“Most of the humor I’m interested in has to do with awkwardness,” Moore says in a 2001 Paris Review interview, “the makeshift theater that springs up between people at really awkward times—times of collision, emergency, surrealism, aftermath, disorientation.” This is what prevents Moore’s stories from seeming like just a string of one-liners, wordplay, amusing musings—of which there are many. Most of the stories in this new collection have very serious backdrops: divorce, war, death, torture, psychosis. Two of them—"Referential" and “Wings”—re-imagine tales by Nabokov and James. They trace the moments right before and after loss, the language play and humor inextricable from this loss, what floats to the surface when reason and safety fall away.

The story she read at Powell’s is the last story in the collection, and it feels more optimistic than the rest of the stories. Though death and loss still lurk, it takes place at that staple of comedy, a wedding. After all the heartbreak and sorrow, Moore tips the balance a bit, and ends her story, and her collection, on a hopeful note: 

I needed my breath for dancing, so I tried not to laugh. Instead I fixed my face into a grin, and, ah, for a second the sun came out to light up the side of the red and spinning barn. 

The red and spinning barn! (I just wanted to try that out, another thing Lorrie Moore can get away with and I can’t: the exclamation mark).

In the Q&A after the reading, Moore politely and thoroughly answered the audience’s questions, even the ones that seemed to me blurted unformed and absent of reason. But she had some good advice, delivered with the same kind of crackerjack humor and poise as her stories: “This is why it’s called art. There’s an element of artifice to it. You don’t write every single thing someone says. You write down the essential thing, and you get people bouncing off each other in interesting ways, and if it’s not interesting, don’t put it in,” she said about dialogue. And: “The difference between someone who is a writer and who’s not a writer is that they’re just writing things down,” in response to a question about whether there was anything in particular that influenced her to become a writer. 

I mean it when I say that’s some of the best advice about writing I’ve ever heard. If I could remember just these two things, if all writers could, what a world it would be: If it’s not interesting don’t put it in. Writers write things down.      

Lucy Wood Gets Inspired

In the 51st in a series of posts on 2012 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Lucy Wood, author of Diving Belles (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), discusses the roots of her stories and what other writers’ work has taught her.

Where do you find inspiration?
For my collection of short stories, Diving Belles, I was inspired by Cornwall’s folklore and landscape. The folklore and the landscape are intrinsically linked: Many of the stories grew directly out of specific locations. When you go walking around Cornwall’s coastline, you can see granite boulders that look as if they’ve been carved by giants and dangerous stretches of water with small peaking waves that look as if they are haunted by mermaids.

Zennor Mermaid Chair, Cornwall

When I started to read nineteenth-century collections of Cornish folklore, I was inspired by the very real, everyday lives that the folklore described. Although the folklore is full of magic and extraordinary events, it is, fundamentally, about human situations and relationships. For example, stories about mermaids luring men out to sea are stories about loss and absence. I find it fascinating that these stories may have evolved to describe the feeling of losing a loved one at sea.

I found certain images in the folklore very inspiring: a wrecker swinging a wrecking lamp in the dark, house spirits watching over a house, storm spirits hovering over the sea. I also came across lots of interesting Cornish dialect words during my research. The word “wisht,” which means melancholy or lonely, and is also the name of hounds that run over the moors, is very evocative. When I came across this word I was inspired to craft a story around its meaning and the atmosphere it evokes.

What writer or writers have you learned the most from?
I have learned things from so many writers. I think the ones that have had the most influence on me are Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, and the poets John Burnside and Alice Oswald. I am particularly influenced by writing that focuses on a particular place or landscape. The way that Annie Proulx writes about the landscape of Wyoming in her short stories and Newfoundland in The Shipping News is really inspiring—the language and style that she uses reflects the environment she’s writing about. And the characters and the action are shaped by place, too.

Along with many short story writers, I learned a lot from Raymond Carver’s stories. His stories are so well crafted and the tension is perfectly pitched. Carver’s stories show that nothing much needs to happen in a short story, as long as the tension and conflict is maintained and developed throughout it. I learned that what it unsaid and unspoken is just as important, or even more important, than what is said.

Lorrie Moore is such a playful writer: Her stories play with form and language, move backwards through time, and use second person narration. She finds the right balance between sadness and wit, often with a well-placed pun. This play with language and vivid imagery is evident in a lot of the poetry that I enjoy reading. Both Alice Oswald’s and John Burnside’s poetry are rooted in a specific place or landscape, and they evoke this through unusual language and imagery. Poems are often structured through movement from image to image, from conjuring a particular atmosphere, or through repetition, and I try to use these ideas in my own writing.

What story by another writer do you most wish you’d written?
I wish I had written Lorrie Moore’s collection Self-Help. The collection works so well because it is tied together by such a wonderful premise—stories that take the form of self-help guides. This means that Lorrie Moore can play around with, and poke fun at, the structures and clichés of self-help manuals, while at the same time gently poking fun at the disasters and tragedies of her characters. The whole book is full of wit and wry humour, but it is also serious and sad. I love the way that the stories use the second person ‘you’ to address the reader, as if the reader is a character in the book. Like the self-help manuals that the collection plays off, “you” implicates the reader in the action, the character’s small joys and mistakes are everyone’s. Lorrie Moore plays around with time to great effect throughout the whole thing, whether we are moving forward quickly through a relationship in small snapshots, or going backward, seeing a relationship between a mother and daughter from the mother’s death to the daughter’s birth.  

The stories are full of interesting language, vivid images, and poignant moments. There is a real confidence and playfulness to the collection, and it is wise without being earnest. It really influenced my decision to base my first short story collection on a specific premise, Cornish folklore, and find ways to play around with its ideas and structures in my own work.

Getting Less of Moore

Here's a book you won't see in U.S. bookstores: The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore. The hardcover volume, published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. in early 2008, includes all of Moore's previously published stories, plus three that haven't appeared in any collection: "Paper Losses," "The Juniper Tree," and "Debarking." Amazon.com (U.S.) lists the book, but the only available copies are from a third party for the hefty price of $129.77. In the U.K., it lists for £20 (about $29 at current exchange rates) and on Amazon there it sells for £12 ($17.50).

I had an e-mail exchange with Lorrie Moore earlier in the year, and she told me about The Collected Stories, which, alas, isn't eligible for The Story Prize because it's not published in the U.S. It came to my attention again when I saw that British short story writer Helen Simpson had named it in The Independent's yearend survey of 2008's best books.

I'm not sure why Moore's U.S. publisher, Knopf, didn't put out The Collected Stories here--I imagine a lot of readers would love to replace their tattered copies of Self-Help, Anagrams (published as a novel but now out of the closet as a book of connected stories), Like Life, and Birds of America with a single volume. It's been ten years since Moore's last book. I guess we'll just have to be patient and wait.