Dedicated to Barry Hannah (1942-2010).
I am happiest when I‘m working on a story. Over the years I’ve written a play, a slim volume of poetry, a hockey novel, a nonfiction travel memoir on Ireland, and done some freelance articles on skiing and canoeing. I’m currently working on a novel set in the Wild West and a novel set in Italy. But last spring I took time from those projects to write a futuristic short story for Zsuzsi Gartner’s new dystopian anthology, Darwin’s Bastards. The story is called “The December Astronauts” and is set on the moon.
As the story evolved and came together in bits and pieces, I felt a kind of delirious joy rising at its creation, even though it’s a rather melancholy story.
I’m pleased when work on a novel seems to be going well, but I noted a more palpable reaction when I was jumping into this new story, I sensed a blood happiness while living inside an unknown story on the moon (even though I envision the moon as being like working in Fort MacMurray).
I had the same positive feeling when pulling a very rough excerpt from my Italian novel. Before that I was grumpy about the futile random nature of the book’s material and felt I was getting nowhere.
I decided to treat one piece like a separate story, and I worked it over. That story became “The Troubled English Bride,” a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards. It became a much better piece of writing by being singled out, laid under a klieg light, made both shorter and longer, carved up, chopped and channelled into a new creature. The novels are fine, I want them to go out in the world and do well and be content, but they do not induce this kind of glee. The story does it for me. The short form has parameters, and it works for me because of the parameters. Don’t fence me in, the cowhands sing out west, but perhaps I like being confined. I think the story is the most natural form. The American writer Steven Millhauser has called it the realm of perfection and it can be that.
Yet the world sends me other signals, very different signals, that, realm of perfection or not, the story doesn’t sell, the story isn’t wanted on the voyage anymore.
It can be hard to be a story writer now. I’ve bitched about this before in Fiddlehead editorials for Summer Fiction Issues. Agents, publishers, and editors tell their stable of writers to forget writing stories and go for the big book. At the University of New Brunswick we’ve had visiting writers read a story and then say, Don’t tell my agent, she doesn’t want me to spend time on stories. The writers are being jocular, but it’d be a tad funnier if it wasn’t so true. This pressure can lead to a self fulfilling prophecy in the business. They don’t sell, so therefore we won’t sell them.
Neil Smith’s fine collection Bang Crunch was a success and sold globally, but reviews and articles held it up as an exception, an oddity, a book of stories that sells, as it was akin to someone with one leg winning a foot race.
I want to be very clear: I am not against any form, I like them all. Feel free to try a novel or a screenplay or a cookbook, but I hate to hear of active discouragement or censure of one form in favour of another. I hate to hear that you should start with stories, but then move on. Why move on? Some authors write their best stories later in their career. No one told Hemingway or Flannery O’Connor to stop writing stories. They made money on stories and they worked on novels too. I realize that writers want to pay the rent, but it is not impossible to work in several forms.
Many believe that Hemingway’s reputation will rest on his stories, not his novels. And what of Flannery O’Connor? How many pick up her novels? It’s her stories that will prevail. Cheever’s Collected Stories cemented his reputation, not his novels. Add the names William Trevor, Alice Munro, Updike, Joyce, Isaac Babel, Lorrie Moore, Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, Steven Heighton, Rebecca Rosenblum, Bruno Schulz, Ha Jin, Kate Braverman, Jayne Anne Phillips, Clark Blaise, Denis Johnson, Maile Meloy, Donald Barthelme, and Ray Carver. I could append dozens more. Why denigrate such a rich tradition, such a successful form?
Time’s Arrow may be Martin Amis’s best book and it started as a story and is not much longer than a story, really a novella or long story rather than a long-winded novel. Lydia Davis argues that “shorter pieces have a bigger emotional impact.” Read Steven Millhauser’s brilliant short story, “Flying Carpets.” It’s so good it makes me jealous and it would never work as any other form, other than perhaps a short film, and even that wouldn’t be as fine. John Cheever’s “The Swimmer?” It is perfect as a story, it doesn’t need to be a novel.
But if you invest your time in stories, you are made to feel part of some Legion of the Doomed. I joke with the poet Ross Leckie that short stories are like a car teetering on the edge of a big cliff and that soon we will down there with the poets and 8 tracks, down there with the other wrecked cars.
Maybe the good times will swing back, maybe the salad days will return. Russell Smith, in a recent Globe and Mail column, noted that over the centuries the story has had ups and down in popularity, mentioning the Renaissance and 19th-century Germany. I would add the Roaring Twenties, when short story writers were paid handsomely by many glossy magazines, and I look back fondly to the 1980s, when many magazines paid well for serious fiction, e.g. Esquire, Atlantic, the New Yorker, Playboy, Saturday Night, and prestige publisher such as Vintage, Atlantic, and Penguin signed short story writers and published scores of collections in beautiful editions. I didn’t know how long it would last, but it seemed normal and possible and there was a kind of optimism then about writing that is perhaps lost now.
The problem may be one of surfeit. There are so many books out there now. I think there was far more excitement for a book even in 2000 than there is now, for any book, big name or not. One editor said to me that it’s like we have warehouses of corn, but no one is eating. The bookstores stock millions of books, and we agree that books are good, that literacy is desirable, but how to compete with the crowd, how to make a dent, how to avoid being another return in the truck after a brief stint inside the box store?
This problem of making a dent is related to the problem of promotion, or lack thereof. An editor or publisher has to convince the reps and all the staff at a house that the book has merit and must be sold, and there must be a viable plan. They must really get behind a book, not just toss it out there and hope for a prize or random buzz or wonder if Kindle or the internet will save them. Publishing is the only industry I’ve experienced where most know how to make a widget, but don’t know how to sell the widget.
I don’t believe the form is the trouble. CDs have separate tracks and no one thinks that odd or impossible to market. People download single songs and no one says, Hey, I’d rather have me a fat novel. I think the form is fine. But something has altered. I know that cultures are constantly in flux, people always think there is a crisis, so I don’t want to convey just doom and gloom; instead I feel more anger and puzzlement at the fate of the story, and a perverse stubbornness. I’m going to keep writing stories no matter what they say; my story set on the moon put me over the moon. I had fun with it, but it ain’t always easy. As the old song declares, Jack of Diamonds is a hard card to play.
The wild southern writer Barry Hannah was teaching at Iowa when I went to school there. His collection of stories, Airships, was a huge influence on me; it was liberating to see the way he’d mash up a sentence; he made me realize it didn’t have to be noun verb, noun verb. And his language was a weird risky inspiring mix of Elizabethan and cracker. “Testimony of Pilot,” from that book, is a great, great story.
Barry died of a heart attack in Oxford, Mississippi this past March and I saw his obituary in the New York Times. The obit spoke of his novels and his attempt at Hollywood screenplays, but he said he was a short story writer first, a fragmentist, with an imagination calibrated to the short burst. I like that idea, I think I’m calibrated that way and I’m going to keep living by that line from a dead man.