Laura Boudreau on Tenuous and Tangential Connections Between Stories

In the 49th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Laura Boudreau, author of Suitable Precautions (Biblioasis Press), offers a conceptual definition of short story collections.

What do you think a good short story collection should deliver?

There’s an Isaac Bashevis Singer story called “Disguised” that has influenced the way I think about the nature and function of short story collections.

The story is about Temerl, a young bride who is abandoned by her husband. This causes her tremendous problems, particularly because Jewish law doesn’t allow her to remarry unless she obtains a divorce. So, Temerl sets out on a search for her missing husband, and there’s a line or two when Singer writes:

“She gained the kind of knowledge that comes from staying at inns and listening to all sorts of talk... Temerl learned how vast the world was and how odd people could be. Each human being had his own desires, his own calculations, and sometimes his or her own madness.”

I always thought those lines could serve as a conceptual definition of the short story collection — that perhaps we might think of the stories as travelers, brought together by chance or fate or circumstance, but connected, all the same. Although I understand the appeal of linked stories, and the pleasure of that logic, I am more attracted to a collection in which stories’ bonds are tenuous and tangential. In my own book, the stories are wildly different from each other. One story, “Strange Pilgrims,” is about a woman finding a fortune hidden in the attic of her new house; it’s plot-driven, detective-like. Another story, “Falling in Love,” is a series of images, of feelings, and confusions about those feelings. It’s almost a prose poem. I think that what ties the stories together is my voice, my way of looking at the world. And as a reader, that’s what I want — a way to look through the author’s eyes.

Is there a story collection you consider your ideal of what a collection should be? 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver, is about as good as it gets for me. In that one slim volume, there’s something electric and dark that takes on a life of its own. I think Carver’s much-imitated style of colloquial narration is one that contemporary writers can take for granted, or read as ironic or affected, but this particular collection still seems radical to me. I think it has something to do with the fact that the pared-backness of the stories doesn’t seem overly engineered or arrogant; you as a reader don’t feel manipulated. You’re allowed to come to the stories on your own terms, and you leave them that way, too. There’s something very demanding — and potentially alienating — about that kind of collection, but Carver shows the pay-off can be huge.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection?

The process reminded me of making an old-fashioned mix-tape. I needed to figure out what sounded good beside each other, making sure I alternated fast and slow, long and short, without being too predictable or prescriptive about it. The pauses in between needed to feel right.

Or maybe it was more like making a seating chart for a dinner party: if the stories are personalities, who is going to get along with each other but not get bored? Actually, one of my stories, “Monkfish,” is about a dinner party, and the hostess has a rule: “boy girl boy girl, no spouses beside each other.” That’s probably as good a framework as any.

I opened the collection with a short piece that’s part invitation to the reader, part throwing down of the artistic gauntlet. I end with a piece that has more of a novel vibe, in that it’s an exploration of a family across generations. The first word of the book is “Try” and the last word is “love.” I like to think that’s indicative of the arc of the collection.

Maureen F. McHugh and the Earthquake Kit

In the 48th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Maureen F. McHugh, author of After the Apocalypse (Small Beer Press), tries to figure something out.

When I was first starting out people always said, ‘Write what you know.’

Seriously, no one is interested in what I know. I’m not interested in what I know. Unless someone has done something truly, seriously, oh my god amazing, trust me on this. It’s like going to a party and talking too much. Even if someone has done something truly, gloriously amazing, like cloned the first human baby, chances are that a lot of it is about getting grants and doing the same thing over and over with pipettes and petri dishes and yelling at post docs and people really only want to hear the fun parts.

I find that the stories I like best to read and the stories that people like best of mine are the stories where I’m trying to figure something out. Usually what I am trying to figure out is something that bothers me and often it doesn’t actually have an answer.

After I wrote all the stories in my collection, After the Apocalypse, I moved to Los Angeles. After the Apocalypse might be described best as ‘oh my god I’m fifty and the economy sucks and what is going to happen?’ (except that one of the stories has zombies in it. I’m not really that nervous about zombies.) I am anxious about the future because big chunks of it (it is becoming more and more difficult for me to avoid this knowledge) are out of my control. After I moved to Los Angeles, I realized that I had written a book about bad things happening and I didn’t have an earthquake kit. This could be embarrassing—Writer of Apocalyptic Fiction Unprepared For Earthquake. This is exactly the kind of thing I am trying to figure out in my writing. What can I be prepared for and what is basically out of my control and how awful is what is out of my control going to be?

Earthquake. The Big One. Definitely out of my control. Moving to Los Angeles, in my control and maybe incredibly stupid, but already done. Getting together some candles, some batteries, and five gallons of water? Something a moron could do. Then, of course, I worried about where I had stored the water because the water is in plastic jugs and what if the house falls on them and ruptures the jugs? But thanks to writing this collection I at least have an earthquake kit which is an unexpected benefit of writing.

(I was in the grocery store in August and they had back-to-school earthquake kits. Sometimes the problem with being a writer is that reality is so much stranger. Who would make that up? Back to school earthquake kits have those single serve lunch box Jello™ packs in them, among other things. I suppose because pudding snacks would be too tempting to break into before the earthquake.)

Life-like doll

I don’t always know what it is that I don’t know the answer to. I often start a story with two strands—for instance I saw a documentary on television about something called Reborns, which are incredibly life-like infant dolls sold to adult women. I was worrying about what I would do if I had to get a job besides writing (I obsessively note those signs on fast food restaurants that say they’re hiring.) The story that came out of those two things is called “Useless Things” and when I started it I had no idea what it was going to be about.

I would not actually recommend this as a way to write. It means a lot of beginnings go nowhere and a lot of stories get about three-fourths of the way done and then chunks have to be thrown out and re-jiggered. I’ve tried outlining but once I write the outline I already know what’s going to happen. Then I’m already bored. I don’t mind revising, which is mainly about making sure that other people can read the story and feel something or even understand what is going on. But if I’m not finding out something when I’m composing, then the story feels lifeless.

I suppose my next collection could be called Why Don’t I Eat Less and Exercise More but that’s not about questioning so much as it is self-loathing, and frankly, who wants to read that?

Elissa Schappell on the Continuing Conversation

In the 47th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Elissa Schappell, author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls (Simon & Schuster), tells why she put her collection together the way she did, describes a painful writing experience, and names the books and writers that inspire her.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection?
Arranging the stories in the collection was a challenge for me because, unlike a traditional story collection, I wanted the book to have an arc of sorts and thus read more like a traditional novel with the first and last stories serving as bookends. I also wanted the stories to move back and forth in time, overlapping directly or obliquely, so you’d see the character from several different perspectives and distances. So you could see how, say, the experience of being labeled a slut in high school would inform your identity, reverberating, even twenty-five years later when you’re a grown woman and mother. The ways in which we exist only in the imagination or memory of others and how at odds this perception is with reality. My hope is that as the stories progress, each revealing a new side of a character through another lens, the reader will be challenged to confront their preconceived notions of who these women are. Perhaps question the judgments they’ve passed on these women earlier and consider why they were inclined to do so.

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later?
Once. It’s called, "Try An Outline" and it’s from Use Me.

I knew that there would have to be a story in the book where the father dies. And I hated it. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want it to be all sentimental, then-a-golden-ladder-of-sunlight-reached-down-into-the-hospital-room. I wanted it to feel authentic. I was angry at the universe, angry with my father, and confused. I felt like child. Now were I a girl, faced with writing a difficult paper, my father would have helped me. He’d have said, as he always did, “Make an outline.” This always bothered me to no end. I didn’t want to make a freaking outline. I wanted him to help me write this paper on Of Mice and Men.

As it would happen, the day I sat down to write the story, feeling reluctant, angry and full of doubt, I heard his voice in my head: “Try making an outline,” he said. As ever, this pissed me off. “Really,” I thought. “You really think that’s going to help me get through this? An outline? Sure. Right. Fine. You want an outline so bad, well here it is.”

And so it went. It was the most painful writing experience of my life. I was shaking and sobbing, completely rattled. Anytime I started to slow down, or thought, “I can’t do this, I’ve got to stop,” I’d tell myself, “No. Just keep going. Go down. Go down, touch the bottom and then, when you come up, it won’t hurt as much."

For the next five hours I sat and wrote it, and when I was done, I got up, went to the loo and vomited.

Later when I read it, there were parts I didn’t even remember writing, parts I scarcely recognized.

What book or books made you want to become a writer?
I don’t think I ever wanted to be a writer. I’ve just always been one. At this point in my life, I have no other marketable skills, at all. So, I suppose I’m stuck with it.

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV, so I read a lot and wrote a lot in my notebooks. I loved all of Salinger, especially Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories. Although later, I’d carry a copy of Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenter because I liked that, despite the experience of being there [editor's note: *spoiler alert*] when Seymour kills himself in “A Good Day for Bananafish,” I could go back, across this bridge of other books and visit him. The conversation continued. The idea that a book could do that, continue the conversation, is what spurred me to write my first book, Use Me, which is about, in part, the relationship between a daughter and her father who is dying of cancer.

As an adult, Amy Hempel and Lorrie Moore gave me permission to take my world and the characters that populated it seriously. To write in my voice, to realize a story needn’t be long to be deep. Length doesn’t equal strength. I own all their books—multiple copies of some—the ones most lined and worn are Amy’s Reasons to Live and At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and Lorrie’s Self-Help and Birds of America.

There was anger and desire and awkwardness in these stories; these women were going into dark places. Their stories were honest in a way I couldn’t be in life, or on the page, and they were using humor as a vehicle to deliver the truth. They made me smarter about the world and myself. They were writing sentences so perfect they demanded re-reading and memorizing. They were able to give up something of themselves without drawing attention to themselves as writers, or ever lapsing into sentimentality. Still, there was always the sense that some part of the story was written with a bone. The humor and sadness, the terrain was familiar to me, so reading them felt a bit like discovering my pack. Although they were bigger and faster and cleverer than me, even if I never made it to the front, I could be a writer, and I wasn’t alone anymore.

Anne Leigh Parrish and the Big Reveal

In the 46th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Anne Leigh Parrish, author of All the Roads That Lead From Home (Press 53), describes how she works and who has influenced her writing.

Which story in your collection required the most drafts or posed the most technical problems? 
Without a doubt, the lead story, "Surrogate." I had this idea of a house split in half – into two apartments, that share a common wall and basement. One half is occupied by a couple. The wife is grieving for her dead father. A neighbor moves in, an old man. He's a widower. What connects them is the piano on his side of the apartment. He's a retired music teacher, and the piano had belonged to the young woman's father. It was on her side until she couldn't stand seeing it every day, and moved it next door. She waits for the tenant to lift the lid and play. When he finally does, she feels a needed release. In time I changed it all around so that the woman's grief was for a lost child, and the surrogate wasn't an old man at a piano, but a little girl with a fiery spirit and a lawn ornament, a crude Madonna, about three or four feet tall, which the little girl breaks by accident. I thought that was more immediate and plausible than the original idea.

What is your writing process like?
The starting point for me is the moment of revelation – the big reveal, if you will. What is that moment about? And whom does it involve? Next, I like to focus on setting – a house, a rocky island, a road running through an overgrown field of grass. Characters come next, their peculiar traits and failings, what makes them charming, sweet, or infuriating. Many of my stories are between two people—spouses, lovers, a parent and her child. That balance and tension drives the plot, whatever it may be. After I think I have a fairly solid piece, I put it away long enough to come back with fresh eyes, ready to edit and uncover what I really need to get in front of the reader for maximum impact.

What do you think a short story collection should deliver?

A broad spectrum of mood and sensibility. And a variety of settings and situations. I refer always to Alice Munro, who can give us an old farm wife or a young woman who's lost her children. She writes in the present day, a generation ago, or even further back, to World War I. Her characters are schemers, losers, silent sufferers, doggedly loyal spouses and siblings, or slippery, sketchy people out for personal gain. She gives us rural Canada with its small-town mores, or the perversions of wealthy city-dwellers. She weaves important social issues like abortion, adultery, and abuse through ordinary lives that have gone terribly awry. I think she's fabulous, and wish to follow firmly in her footsteps.

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later?
Yes. Many years ago I wrote what I consider to be my "break-out" story – the first one where I thought I really sounded like myself. It was called "Among The Trees," about a young woman consumed by an anxious depression that causes her to overspend on her credit cards and conceal the fact from her husband. There was a lot of black humor in it, despite its rather heavy nature, and I actually laughed aloud while writing it. It never found a publisher, but it did get some attention, particularly from Mike Curtis, Fiction Editor at The Atlantic, which may have kept him interested in reading more of my work over time.

Have you had a mentor and who was it?
Mike Curtis at The Atlantic read everything I wrote over an eight-year period. I'm afraid I truly taxed his patience! Yet he was always even-tempered, pleasant, and to the point. In one paragraph he could identify where my story succeeded, and more often than not, where it fell short. I learned a great deal from him. He was good enough to write a back-cover blurb for my first collection, All The Roads That Lead From Home.

What was the longest narrative time period you've ever contained in a short story?
I covered one woman's life from a very young age to when she's roughly middle-aged. This required the action to jump ahead at certain points, condensing years into a line or two. The story ran around fifty-two hundred words, which I think is about right for a project like that. Anything much shorter would have been awkward, and possible lost the thread altogether.

Amina Gautier on Giving Readers Freedom of Choice

In the 45th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Amina Gautier, author of At-Risk (University of Georgia Press), compares reading a short story collection to listening to a record.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection?
At-Risk features ten stories that are roughly divided between telling the stories of the adolescents and teenagers who “make it” and the ones who do not. Given this rather clear demarcation, I could have very easily arranged the stories in alternating fashion. I chose not to do this, finding it too easy and too insulting to the reader, too much like shoving something down the readers’ throats. Readers of literary fiction are far too savvy for any such manipulation. I wanted the reader to have the same freedom of choice I enjoy when I read the short story collections of others. What I chose to do was provide a “frame” for the collection by using the two stories in the collection with recurring characters as bookends for the other eight stories. In “The Ease of Living,” the readers see the return of Kiki and Stephen, two boys the readers meet in “Yearn,” a story whose action takes place four years earlier.

What book or books made you want to become a writer?
I cannot attribute the desire to complete books but to individual stories. Although there are too many stories to acknowledge, there are two clear standouts. Reading Toni Cade Bambara’s “Gorilla, My Love” at an early age showed me a narrator who looked like me and expanded my thinking by showing me that that which was familiar to me could indeed be the subject of great literature. Secondly, when I was a sophomore at Stanford, my creative writing instructor generously gave me a copy of Stuart Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago with the suggestion that I read “Pet Milk.” When I did—when I read that story—everything began to feel right. I’d already decided that I wanted to be a writer, but reading that story, which had the most beautiful transitions I’d ever beheld, showed me where the bar was and how much work was ahead of me, showed me just how much attention and care each individual sentence of every story I would ever write would demand from me.

What do you think a good short story collection should deliver?
As a writer, I have never made demands upon the short story collections I read. Never asked them to change their ways for me, pretend to be something that they are not, or masquerade themselves as novels-in-stories (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one). Freedom and independence are gifts that the good short story collection gives. I have always approached short story collections the same way I used to approach record albums and CDs, the same way I now approach downloaded songs on my MP3 player. I jump in wherever I like, immerse myself and wade through the selections in whatever order I please. Just as I never played a 33⅓ rpm record album from first song to last, I have never read a short story collection that way, preferring to let the titles or the opening paragraphs woo me into starting with one story rather than another. I have never been interested in reading collections where the stories are all about the same thing (e.g., boys with dogs, or mothers who grieve over boys with dogs, etc.). Furthermore, I’ve never been interested in reading linked short stories, knowing that if I’d wanted to stay with the same characters for two hundred odd pages, I would have picked up a novel instead.

For me, a good short story collection offers the reader the freedom to choose where to begin while simultaneously assuring the reader that he or she will be pleased no matter where he or she finds him or herself. If the reader begins with the third story rather than the first, he or she should never feel as if he or she has entered the movie house midway through the film and wonder what has been missed. A good short story collection should be tricky; each story should convince the reader to spare time from her busy schedule, then make her regret she has not more hours in her day. A good short story collection should make the reader regret his working hours, should make him want to hurry home just so he can read his book and make his dinner, then—once he is home—it should make him stir the pot with one hand and turn the page with the other. It should make him burn his dinner.

Pamela Ryder: The Story of the First Line of a Story

In the 44th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Pamela Ryder, author of A Tendency to Be Gone (Dzanc Books), finds a starting point.

If a have a first line, I have a story. But that first line never comes sitting at a keyboard. It usually happens outdoors, triggered by a glimpse of something most mundane that becomes odd—becomes luminous for me—with language. The first line of "Three Men" happened while I was standing in the yard and looking up at the contractor on the roof. He had said my little house was falling apart, top to bottom, and he kicked down a shingle. “He is kicking down shingles,” I said to myself aloud, to hear the words and have them ready for the moment when I would sit down at my desk to begin. And I kept the sentence into the present tense, as I frequently do, to give it a sense of immediacy. The repetition of the short “i” sound in “kicking” and “shingles” clinched it for me, as did the man’s position on the roof. His being up there gave the story form, and it was just a matter of keeping to the form as I went along making the story, carrying the language of the rot and decay from the roof right down to into the cellar and further, into the very earth.

Dagoberto Gilb: "The Small Is Large, Strength Is Economy, Simplicity, Not Verbosity"

In the 43rd in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning (Grove Press), riffs on his influences and how he works.

Which story in your collection required the most drafts or posed the most technical problems? 

Drafts? Technical problems? Me? No, though not quite, I’m almost perfect. Really, if there are 10 words in a sentence, I try maybe 90 of the 100 possible combinations before I move on. One tech problem I have is the shift key. Not exactly the shift key, but the fact that there is pressure to hit the shift key and another, with the other hand, at the same time. (Kidding? Kind of not.)

What is your writing process like? 

At this point of my life it’s more what this life would be without the keyboard. Two and a half years ago I would have said that most of my writing was in notebooks. Thousands of pages accumulated. Two and a half years ago I lost the use of my handwriting, so now I am back learning my writing process again.

How did you decide to arrange the stories in your collection? 

I had one arrangement, an editor another. I do know that the oddest story, "please, thank you," was placed first by me because it sort of set the stage for the rest of the stories, both as the collection’s public theme goes and the personal importance the book had to me. Also because I think it’s a strong, unique fiction, aware as I am that I am not supposed to assert such positive critical opinions of my own work. It’s just that the story almost had nothing to do with me, my own experience of life, or wouldn’t have before.

If you've substantially reworked any of the stories that originally appeared in magazines, can you explain what you changed and why?

I added two sentences, at the end, to one story in the collection, "Why Kiki Was Late to Lunch" (published it in The Threepenny Review). When the ARC of the collection went out, I wished I could have an insert page with the new graph. I thought the story, which I liked fine, improved tenfold.

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

On occasion I let a couple longtime friends read, but generally I don’t have that. I send to mags, a couple of editors for yes or no judgments, though it does seem the minute I punch Send, I see little errors. Now that I think about it, these stories didn’t see too many magazines, and the few that were published hit fast.

What do you think a good short story collection should deliver? 

Delivered: Tacos

I want to say tacos con un chile picoso but it may be that I’m hungry. I think short fiction is closer to poetry than to novels:  The small is large, strength is economy, simplicity, not verbosity. What I like about short fiction is what I don’t like about the so-called "big" books: The art is with the ordinary, common, unobserved, unimportant, the quiet, the mystical—not the sweeping, the grandiose, the epic, and all the "big is better" that can go with that.

Is there a story collection you consider your ideal of what a collection should be?  

The most perfect story collection ever is by Juan Rulfo, El llano en llamas, translated in the U.S. as The Burning Plain. Set in Northern Mexico, it captures both the land and life of the characters there, and vice versa, the people captured in the land. I believe that place is a central "character" in great fiction, and that idea is exemplified by Rulfo’s work.

What book or books made you want to become a writer? 

Here’s where I always want to list the greatest writers of all time so that, once this sticks to the Internet, my name's Google-linked to them. Though it is also somewhat true. I studied philosophy and religion in college, I like myth (studied briefly with Joseph Campbell), and I read Plato, Chuang-tzu, the Heart Sutra, Descartes, Spinoza, al-Ghazali, and then came Beckett, Doestoyevsky, Rulfo, Singer, Chekhov…and so on until me!

What kind of research, if any, do you do? 

Very little for my fiction. Not to say I work out of memory alone, but I already write from and about a community it seems this country knows little about.

If you dabble in any other non-literary forms of expression, what do you do and how does it inform your work? 
Now that I don’t handwrite, I’m confused. In my young adult years my "research" was simply my employment, which is to say jobs, which I had to have to pay rent and bills for my children and wife. Sixteeen years in the construction trades, which usually went for eleven, six days a week until a job ended and I was laid off and wrote as many stories as I could until a new job appeared. Phase two has been teaching. That took some adjustment, I concede. For me, it halts incoming experience and ideas, since my stories come from participation in life, not only my opinions.

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later? 
If "one sitting" means like in say 8 or even 12 hours straight, then no. But, sadly, most I stay with until I finish, or it finishes me. I’m monomaniacal.

Have you had a mentor and who was it? 
Nope. Just books I’ve loved.

What's the longest narrative time period you've ever contained in a short story? 
Good question…for a researcher. I guess it’s true that, with me, I find short fiction should be a contained, even restrictive, amount of time as it is of characters and objects and concerns. In this new collection of mine, one story, "To Document," shoots ahead twenty-five years to end. See, I even think that sounds bad. I say it works in that story, for a particular reason, but it’s not usually what a short story can or wants to do.