Dzanc Compiles Essays on Short Stories

Short Story Month may never end: Dzanc Books is publishing a “collection of no less than 160 essays” about individual stories. Many of these appeared online over at the Emerging Writers Network, but you can get your own copy for a “minor tax deductible donation.”

This past May’s celebration of the short story produced an extraordinary number of great articles, blog posts and reviews in support of Short Story Month. We at Dzanc thought what a wonderful resource it would be to compile some of these essays into one publication. In partnering with Matt Bell of www.mdbell.com, Aaron Burch of Hobart, Steven McDermott of Storyglossia, and our own Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Network, Dzanc has put together a collection of no less than 160 essays, covering over 320 pages, into one book. Each essay explores a specific story and/or collection by authors both heralded and overlooked, all deserving of a first – or second, or twelfth – read.

As we are all readers and lovers of great writing, the chance to have a compilation of essays that champion some of the great stories and story collections of our time, provides an invaluable tool to turn to when wondering what to read next. Dzanc Books – as part of its mission as a nonprofit 501(c)3 press dedicated to bringing literature and lit programs to a wider audience – will mail you a copy of these Short Story Month Essays for a minor tax deductible donation. On top of publishing great works of literary fiction, Dzanc Books provides workshops for students in the public schools free of charge. Our Dzanc Writers In Residency Programs matches writers with students whose schools do not otherwise provide students the opportunity to explore their own creative voices. Dzanc covers all expenses for these programs, which run several thousand dollars each. All monies donated to Dzanc for the purchase of our Short Story Month Essays will go 100% to our charitable programs which Dzanc conducts nationwide. A ten dollar donation will cover our costs (printing and shipping) on our SSME and, understanding these harsh economic times, we wont appeal to you for anything beyond which you can afford. We believe these essays provide insights and recommendation for books and authors which can be turned to again and again. Dan and I thank you in advance. To get your own copy, please visit our support page at http://www.dzancbooks.org/support and make a tax deductible donation of ten dollars or more. Please email Dan at info@dzancbooks.org if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Steve Gillis
Dan Wickett
Dzanc Books
www.dzancbooks.org

Mini-Interview with Josh Weil

Your agent had the idea to approach publishers with a collection of novellas, The New Valley, and it sold within the week. Did you ever think your first book would be novellas? It’s such a rarity, especially for debut authors.
Honestly, I was a little shocked when my agent, PJ Mark, suggested we go out with the novellas first. I had a novel, and a bunch of stories, and, though I had written “Sarverville Remains” with the idea that it would be part of the novella collection, I showed it to him first with the idea that it could be a short stand-alone novel. But one of the things I love about PJ is that he has a knack for seeing what shape something is meant to take, and he knew it was meant to be a novella. Almost with chagrin (because you’re right: it’s very rare for anyone—especially debut authors—to publish novella collections), I mentioned that I had written it as part of a collection of three novellas. He said, Show them to me. He read them and came back and said, This is what we should go out with. I think he saw what I knew, too: that, of all my work, the novellas were closest to my heart, and, perhaps because of that, my best work at the time. And he wasn’t afraid of the idea of a novella collection. That’s another thing I love about him: he isn’t afraid to try stuff, to break the mold. But, you know, I should have known the novellas would be the first book I’d publish. A while ago, when I was about to head off on some rough solo traveling/researching in Uganda, I sent my father a makeshift will. In it, I asked that, if I died, he try to get the novellas published—not anything else of my writing: the novellas. When you feel that way about something, you know in your gut it’s what should be out there. And that’s what you should try to get out there, no matter how unlikely it might seem at first.

What do you find so compelling about the novella form?
So many things. I love short stories, and I love novels, and I love reading and writing both. But novellas exist in a unique middle ground that has all the intensity and focus of a short story, yet also has the generosity of a novel. I love that there is time for moments to breath, for the things that make up the world of the story be deepened, made a little more full. I love that characters have time to live, to exist in that world for long enough that I—and readers, hopefully—can really grow close to them. And yet there isn’t the room for detours and multiple, swirling plots that there is in a novel, so the novella is particularly clean. That doesn’t mean—as I think some people take it to mean—that it’s tied to a classic, simple approach to story. Because it’s so clean, there’s a lot of room to experiment, perhaps more than in a novel. A reader will read pretty much anything—so long as it’s good—for 20 pages in a short story, regardless of whether it fits her expectations of classical story structure. But it’s hard to sustain structurally inventive stuff over the course of a four hundred page novel. Some brilliant writers can, of course, but even with them, they lose a lot of perfectly smart readers. But over the course of eighty or a hundred pages, there’s the freedom of the short story, combined with the depth of the novel. That, more than anything else, is what draws me to the form.

How long did it take you to write The New Valley? Why do these three novellas, in your mind, comprise the entirety of a book? Why not two novellas, say, or four?
That’s a good—and complicated—question. First, the easier part (how long it took) though that’s not as straight-forward as it might seem. Once I get writing, I tend to write quickly, at least the first draft, but it often takes me a long time to get to the point where I’ve thought about a story enough, and mapped it out enough in my mind, and, most crucially, hit that point where my subconscious can crack whatever blocks my conscious mind has put up to letting the story start to roll. For instance, the central image and idea of “Ridge Weather” was gleaned from a failed short story I’d written years ago. I had thought about it and mulled it over and then one day, in December 2001, down at the cabin in Virginia, the whole novella just came to me. I wrote the first draft in about a week. I beat my head against the wall blocking “Stillman Wing” for a long time, and failed at a couple attempts at it, but then, one fall, the wall broke and I wrote that quickly, too. “Sarverville Remains” was similar, though of all the novellas, that one came to me most complete and required the least revision. Once Geoffrey’s voice was in my head, it kind of wrote itself. Except for the usual tightening and careful editing and sentence by sentence stuff, which I do with all my writing, and which I believe in very strongly. I write a fast first draft, but I spend a lot of time honing it afterward. I guess I wrote the novellas in short spurts over a period of about five years.

Why three? Well, two would have set them up as a pair, and drawn parallels too closely; they would have been expected to mirror each other in some ways, and to be tied together in ways that, I think, would work against the overall feeling of isolation and disconnect that is so central to the book. Originally, I had thought of it as four (one in each season in the valley). But once I wrote “Sarverville Remains,” I knew it would be three. In part, because that one is so long (there’s just not really space for another). And in part because it covers both spring and summer (the story is told in the present, looking back at the events of the previous season, but the present also follows its own arc through summer). But, truly, I think it just felt done with the three of them. I can’t put it any more clearly than those three just felt of a kind; they belonged together. One more would have made the book feel crowded. And if there’s anything The New Valley shouldn’t be, it’s crowded.

What’s next? A novel? More novellas?
I’ll definitely write more novellas sometime. And I’ve been wrestling with a novel for a while. But just recently I began something that, frankly, I don’t know what it is. I wanted it to be a novella; but I think it wants to be a novel. It will probably win out. That scares me a little, but excites me more. And it’s the first thing since The New Valley that came to me the way those novellas did, and feels as close to my heart, so I’m driving through to the end of it—and then we’ll see.

Mini-Interview with Midge Raymond

You began by writing nonfiction. How did you come to write short stories, and what does writing fiction offer you?
In graduate school, I fell in love with literary journalism, with telling true stories with all the nuance and style of fiction. I worked with Caryl Rivers and Mark Kramer, and Mark in particular taught me how to look at every word in a sentence and get it just right. He also taught me how to look for stories in everyday life, and once I began to see stories in everything, it made transitioning to fiction very natural.

I first started writing fiction because I had a full-time day job in New York, was freelancing a lot to make ends meet, and had little time leftover for the fieldwork that narrative nonfiction requires. If I was going to write, I needed to do it in short bursts: on the subway, during my lunch hour, for a few minutes before bed. So, quite simply, since I couldn’t tell true stories, I began making them up — and I had so much fun with it. Most of my stories stem from moments or people that intrigue me — seeing an interesting person on the street, watching two people interact, reading a bizarre news blurb. With nonfiction, you’d research, interview, and report a story; with fiction, I envision it and bring my own imagination and curiosity to it.

Several of your stories are set in far-off locales. What is the importance of place in your work? How do you talk about place in fiction?
For me, place is important mostly for what it reveals about character, which for me is what drives a story. In Forgetting English, place is obviously essential — these stories look at how being out of one’s element can actually bring certain things into a sharper focus — how we see things more clearly, for better or worse, once we’re away from our usual routines and distractions.

But I think that sometimes place will play a role in a different way. For example, one story I wrote, “Water Children,” which isn’t included in this collection, is about twins, and where they live in the story isn’t as important as the fact that they shared the same physical space before they were born. So “place” can mean a lot of things in a story, and emotional space is often more important than physical space. But I find it’s always fairly central because that’s where a character is truly coming from, and if we want to understand our characters — and if we want readers to connect with them — we need to find this sense of place in a story.

Forgetting English is a small book, some might say, with eight stories across 116 pages, and you’ve published far more stories in journals and magazines. How did you shape this particular collection? And, given that your manuscript won the Spokane Prize, I wonder how it changed after you submitted to the contest.
When I first started writing stories, I thought I’d be able to simply put them all together as soon I had enough for a collection — and what I ended up with was so completely random that it just didn’t work. So I knew I had to find a common theme, that I needed a thread to tie the pieces together, even loosely. I published my first story in 1999 — and here I am with my first collection ten years later. Although the stories in Forgetting English were all written in the past five years, it took me that long until I had enough stories that fit well together.

So when I found myself with several stories about Americans abroad, discovering things about themselves and about their relationships that likely wouldn’t have happened if they’d been at home, I knew I had a theme that would work. During this time, I wrote many stories that don’t appear in the collection, but if I found myself with a piece set outside a character’s usual setting, I’d finish it with the collection in mind. And eventually it all came together.

After it won the contest, the individual stories didn’t change much, but the manuscript as a whole took on a more graceful shape. The editors suggested omitting one piece, changing the title of another, and re-ordering the stories, which worked out really well. They had a fresh perspective and were able to see, in ways that I hadn’t, how to arrange them in a way that would flow better. The Press’s managing editor, Pamela Holway, is an amazing editor and proofreader, and she had some wonderful suggestions, all of which I feel improved the book as a whole.

What are you working on now? More stories, or something longer?
I’m always working on stories! I have a couple of new pieces in the works, but I’m also working on a novel. I’m in the very early stages, which is a rather stressful place to be — getting to know the characters, doing a lot of research, figuring out where it’s headed. I enjoy writing stories at the same time because it’s nice to tackle something smaller and more manageable when I feel overwhelmed by the book. It’s like returning to a friendly and familiar place that, at the same time, still allows you to lose yourself a bit.

Mini-Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell

This is your second story collection. How long has it been in the works, and what did you learn about writing—and shaping a collection—the second time around?
Oh, Lordy, you’re opening a can of worms here. I’ve written most of these stories in the last eight years. I like to say that when it comes to the recession business, Michigan has been ahead of the curve; we’ve been in recession for a decade already. On the other hand, I might confess to you that I’ve been working on one of the stories in the collection for twenty-four years. I started the story a few years out of college, but I didn’t have the writing skills to complete it. Over the last couple decades I’ve continued to pick it up now and again and fiddle with it. I finally got it right. That story is “Bringing Belle Home.”

This collection, American Salvage, required a lot more shaping than Women & Other Animals. When the collection was accepted by Wayne State University Press, I still didn’t quite have a clear idea of what the collection was, but the prospect of getting it published was a kick in the butt to figure it out. Wayne State was very patient while I fiddled with it; I swapped out a couple stories, and I wrote an entirely new story that tied together some of the other pieces. “King Cole’s American Salvage” was added to the collection very late in the process.

Aside from length, what do you perceive to be the essential differences between the short story and novel forms?
For me, a short story is something I can hold in my head in its entirety. When I’m working on a novel, I’m working on one part of a piece of writing, but every time I mess with a word or a piece of punctuation in a short story, I feel I’m working the whole piece. My background is in mathematics, and in a short story, I feel I’m creating something akin to a mathematical proof.

Do you think of an specific audience when you’re writing a story? Who is your ideal reader?
My friend Heidi Bell is my ideal reader. She reads carefully, notices and applauds all good things she reads in my work, and she also notices where I’ve screwed up. I would like a reader that has a high standard for fiction, on the sentence level and the story level. I know that if I’ve written a story that pleases Heidi, I’m in good shape. She edited American Salvage, and it is much better for it.

The second most important reader is my brother Tom. He’s a pipefitter, and he doesn’t read much fiction, but he reads and appreciates my work. I want to make sure that my stories speak to him as well as to the more typical literary reader.

Some other people I keep in mind are Carla Vissers and Lisa Lenzo, who are in my writing group. It is helpful for me to anticipate what they might say about a piece; that helps me improve it before I share it with them.

Who are your influences? What writers make you excited about the future of literature?
I can’t say for certain who my influences are, beyond my party-loving story-telling mother and my socially conservative (politically liberal) storytelling Irish grandfather. I hope I’m influenced by John Steinbeck, because he is such a humanitarian in writing about tough situations; Flannery O’Connor taught me that it is okay to be brutal. William Faulkner taught me that one can write richly about a particular region of the world, and that region will keep giving richness to the author who keeps looking closely.

I’m always excited to read Alice Munro and Aimee Bender—every time I read one of Bender’s stories, I feel the top of my head is coming off (à la Emily Dickinson). I love Lucia Perillo, especially her poem “The Shrike Tree.” I’m excited about Mark Bragg, a western writer who writes like Cormac McCarthy with a bit more mushy love. My pal Andy Mozina can write about sex in a way that makes you queasy and fully awake with your new knowledge of human nature.