Tonight, Tonight

Aint Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby*

We get most of our information electronically, from our computers and handheld devices, from the digital signals our TVs pick up, and other sources. Many of us also socialize on the Web, via Facebook or Twitter or the like. And more and more people are reading on digital devices. (I confess: I am sometimes one of them.)

If you want to know more about the three finalists for The Story Prize, Google them. You'll find video, audio, interviews, excerpts, reviews. You can learn a lot about Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca and their books via the Internet.

Or you can come and see them live. The Story Prize event on March 2, provides an opportunity that you can't experience electronically. Sure, there will be a Webcast you can watch ten days or so later. But seeing someone in three dimensions and sensing his or her presence, is a very different experience. Ask anyone who was there two years ago to hear Tobias Wolff read "Bullet in the Brain" in its entirety, and they will tell you that a Webcast is a poor substitute. There's also a certain energy in a room where hundreds of people gather to listen.

So if you love short stories, live in or close to New York City, and are available the night of The Story Prize event, I urge you to try to make it to the New School's Tishman auditorium (tickets are $14). You'll see and hear the authors read excerpts from their books and discuss their work on-stage. I try to make that discussion a conversation that the audience is overhearing. I don't write questions ahead of time, and the authors generally depart from their talking points and say things they haven't said before that reveal how they work and how they view the world. If you're there, you'll also feel the tension and energy in the room when Julie Lindsey, the founder of The Story Prize announces the winner.

Despite the suspense of that moment, I would add that the event is not just about the winning book for us. We aim to shine the spotlight equally on each author and to celebrate everyone's work—all three finalists, of course, but  also the authors on the long list, every author who wrote a short story collection in 2010, and everyone reading and writing short stories and keeping the form alive and kicking in the digital age.

* With apologies to Betsy Lerner for appropriating her blog headline style. (Betsy, consider it an homage.)

Next Stop for The Story Prize Finalists: Storyville

Exciting news: Each of the three finalists for The Story Prize—Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca—will have a story from their nominated collections appear on Storyville in the weeks ahead, leading up to the March 2 event at The New School in New York city. What is Storyville? It's an app for iPad or iPhone that each week delivers a short story directly to a subscriber's device. The stories come from published collections, and an author statement accompanies them. The app also interacts with Twitter and Facebook.

The creator and publisher of Storyville, Paul Vidich, is no stranger to this blog. He has twice contributed guest posts about digital distribution. Most importantly, he's a a short story writer and evangelist, who spent more than a year developing the idea for this app.

The $4.95 price for a six-month subscription to Storyville allows readers to sample a substantial number of story collections. In this case, I hope a taste of Doerr's Memory Wall, Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and Rivecca's Death Is Not an Option will lead readers to buy the books.

For our part, we're offering Storyville pairs of tickets to The Story Prize event to give away each week that one of these stories runs. That means a few subscribers will get to see the authors read from and discuss their work live on-stage, taking readers on a trip from the newest platform for stories to the oldest.

The Long List: Other Notable 2010 Short Story Collections

I've said it before: Anyone who writes and publishes a short story collection has accomplished something significant. This is certainly true of the authors of the 85 books we read for The Story Prize in 2010. It was difficult to choose three finalists. And it was just as difficult to narrow the remaining field down to a reasonable number of other notable collections, but these are the ones that ultimately stood out for me:

• Things We Didn't See Coming by Steven Amsterdam (Pantheon)
• Miracle Boy by Pinckney Benedict (Press 53)
• If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black (Random House)
• Mattaponi Queen by Belle Boggs (Graywolf Press)
• Cheyenne Madonna by Eddie Chuculate (Black Sparrow Press)
• Vida by Patricia Engle (Black Cat)
• Extraordinary Renditions by Andrew Ervin (Coffee House Press)
• Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans (Riverhead Books)
• What I Didn't See by Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer Press)
• Life Times by Nadine Gordimer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray (FC2)
• What He's Poised to Do by Ben Greenman (Harper Perennial)
• The Spot by David Means (Faber and Faber)
• Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)
• Further Adventures in the Restless Universe by Dawn Raffel (Dzanc Books)
• Burning Bright by Ron Rash (Ecco)
• Cut Through the Bone by Ethel Rohan (Dark Sky Books)
• Alone with You by Marisa Silver (Scribner)
• The Universe in Miniature in Miniature by Patrick Somerville (Fetherproof Books)
• Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor (Harper Perennial)
• Cradle Book by Craig Morgan Teicher (BOA Editions)
• Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives by Brad Watson (W.W. Norton)

[Click on the titles to buy the book. Click on the author's name to read his or her guest post on this blog.] 

Presenting The Story Prize Finalists: Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca

We're very excited to announce the three finalists for The Story Prize, which we selected from among 85 story collections submitted by 57 different publishers or imprints in 2010. They are:

• Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr (Scribner)
• Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li (Random House)
• Death Is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca (W.W. Norton)

It was another great year for short fiction, and the decision was, as always, a very difficult one to make. In the weeks to come we'll also present a long list of other notable story collections published in 2010, which will be hard to narrow down to a manageable number of books. 

The Story Prize event will take place at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 2. That night, the three finalists will read from and discuss their work on-stage. At the end of the event, Julie Lindsey will announce the winner.

Advanced tickets online through SmartTix or through the New School box office, by phone (212-229-5488) or email (boxoffice@newschool.edu). If you want to call for tickets, please note that the box office is closed until Jan. 24. After that, hours are from 4 to 7 p.m. Mon.-Thurs. and 3 to 6 p.m. on Fridays.

In the weeks ahead we'll be posting more about the finalists, their books, and the upcoming event. We'd especially like to thank the 71 authors who contributed guest posts to this blog. It was, to my mind, a successful experiment, and a we plan to do it again in 2011.

Ted Gilley's Collision of Ideas

In the 71st in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Ted Gilley, author of Bliss (University of Nebraska Press), discusses process, feedback, and influences.

What is your writing process like?

Usually for a story to get started, two or more ideas need to collide; I seldom get started with a single idea. Two ideas colliding throws off sparks and leads (I think) to more interesting outcomes and to more stuff happening; gets my brain going, anyway. When I don't define a problem at the outset, I'm in trouble; I need to understand where the pain--or at least in one case, the pleasure—is located before I get going, or I'll just go around in circles. I then bang away until I hit a wall, which usually—not always—happens about halfway through, and then there's trouble. A story of mine can sit completely stalled for a long time, and it's dreadful. But occasionally you get a gift. For example, I once had a story come to me almost complete in a dream. I woke up, wrote down the first sentence of the story, and went back to sleep. In the following week, the story wrote itself. There's usually not that much fun involved, though.

At what stage do you start seeking feedback on your work and from whom?

At a late stage, and I need to be feeling pretty good about what I've got. My idea, lame though it may seem, is that if you don't know what you've got, you have more than one problem. I look for someone who is more or less disinterested in my story, fiction generally, or even in me. I don't look for another writer, and I definitely don't want a "here's what I would do" response. A smart, disinterested reader is all you need. I'm not interested in writing groups, so that's out. My wife Ivy is a good reader for me, and frequently points out things I hadn't thought to question.

What book made you want to become a writer? 
Happy New Year, Herbie and Other Stories, by Evan Hunter. This was Hunter's only story collection. He had just hit it big (or was about to) with The Blackboard Jungle, but I didn't know that. It was 1963, and I was thirteen. The strange thing was that I didn't seek the book out; I'd never heard of Evan Hunter. But this paperback with its evocative title was lying in my otherwise empty locker at the beginning of the school year. A bolt out of the blue! I devoured the unapproved, unrecommended, un-high-school stories. The title story has retained its power, though the rest of the collection looks less strong to me now. But at the time, I was bowled over by these somewhat gritty stories. It was as if I could feel Hunter working; in some intuitive way, I knew what he was doing, and I knew I could do it, too.

If you dabble in any other non-literary forms of expression, what do you do and how does it inform your work?
I play electric bass in a (mostly) jazz trio. Writing, of course, is solitary, whereas the music is definitely not just about me but about the other two guys. I have to listen as much as I play; I have to be moved, and at times I have to push. I have to surrender to the music—and I'm sure that sounds trite, but it's accurate. They say in AA that in order to win, you first have to give up. Playing jazz is something like that. Writing is something like that, too: You give up while holding on tight.

Who is your favorite living author and why?
Richard Ford. No writer I know of writes with all his senses up and running the way Ford does. Reading Independence Day is like living in Frank Bascombe's skin—and it's not always a pleasant experience. Ford spares no one, leaves nothing out, misses nothing, never fails to praise what is praiseworthy, and comes down hard when he must. But my question is, who said Leo Tolstoy was dead?

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later?
Kind of. I wrote a very brief story (a thousand words) called "All Hallows' Eve" in about two hours and didn't do more than tinker with it afterward. However, the closing line bugged me for months, and finally I changed it. I think I changed one word in it, and then it clicked. So I guess I've flunked this question.

Have you had a mentor and who was it?
The composer Alec Wilder was my mentor. He read my poems back when I first started writing, at about 25, and while he certainly sometimes liked what I was doing, he didn't throw praise around; that wasn't the point. But he encouraged me strongly, and more important, he treated me as an equal—and he was a pro, after all. I knew I was not his equal—far from it! But his words, and the way he lived, put the steel in me. We lived on different coasts but corresponded for several years. Wilder was a very old-fashioned gentleman but his work was up to the minute. He introduced me to some modern poets (on paper) as well as to writers like Cheever, John O'Hara, and Joyce Cary, the superb Irish novelist.

Ivan Coyote Burns the Midnight Oil

In the 70th in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Ivan Coyote, author of Missed Her (Arsenal Pulp Press), discusses her cyclical writing process and how exploring archives generates ideas.

Describe one of the stories in your collection. 

"Maiden Heart" tells the story of my father's second wife, who was also his first girlfriend when he was a kid. They were separated for thirty years, during which time she was in a physically abusive relationship with a truck driver from northern British Columbia. She called my dad on his fiftieth birthday, and they rekindled their teenage romance. They have been married now for fourteen years. "Maiden Heart" tells the story of their courtship and reunion.

What is your writing process like?
In the winter I write at night, late into the evenings. In the summer I write early in the morning. I think this is a by-product of growing up in the Yukon, where there are 22 hours of daylight in June and 22 hours of dark in December. I am very cyclical like that.

What book made you want to become a writer? 
Woman On The Edge of Time by Marge Piercy was one. There were many, but that was a big one. The invention of an entirely different society was very inspiring for me, even though my work is nothing like hers at all.

What kind of research, if any, do you do? 
I am always in the archives. Old photographs, newspapers, books, film archives. I cannot get enough of them. Even if a lot of the information doesn't make it into the work itself, it generates ideas for me. Right now I am researching old maps and building plans for cabins, among other things, for a book I am currently working on.

If you dabble in any other non-literary forms of expression, what do you do and how does it inform your work? 
I am currently taking guitar and vocal lessons. I often tell stories with a collaborator playing music. I would like to eventually accompany myself.

What's the longest narrative time period you've ever contained in a short story? 
Sixty years, in the story "All About Herman," my grandmother's love story. It's a classic.