Is the short story the form of first impulse for you? You’ve written several novels, of course, but many of your most faithful readers seem most excited when you have a new story collection. People are excited about Do Not Deny Me.
Stories and novels are actually different and quite separate impulses for me. And it’s true that my first love is stories. Maybe it comes from growing up in the early days of television and its many dramas packed into thirty minute spots. I have a clear memory of turning off an episode of “Captain Midnight” when the action got too suspenseful, and rocking and whimpering in my little chair. I was probably about three years old. In any case, I love the compression of the form, the chance to begin and complete an entire dramatic cycle within a finite space. It can be a little like solving a puzzle to fit all the apparatus of a story (conflict, characterization, resolution, etc.) into a more or less finite space.
How does a certain group of stories become a book for you? What are your thoughts as you try to shape a collection?
I was most conscious of shaping a collection in the case of Throw Like a Girl, which had a particular thematic identity—stories about girls and women. I wanted some variety within that framework, and so tried to find stories about girls and women of different ages, circumstances, etc. With Do Not Deny Me, I felt the need to stretch myself a little further, and write in different forms and tones, not to mention genders. More of a grab bag.
Do your novels begin as stories? Many authors talk about how their novels were stories that just kept growing.
No, as mentioned, novels seem to come from a different part of my brain. Most often, when the tale I want to tell will stray over greater periods of time, or greater geographical distance, or perhaps a multitude of characters who must be given voice, then a larger canvas seems called for.
Finally, please share a few authors —story writers, in particular —who you feel should be more widely read today.
Such an embarrassment of riches. Out recently: Robert Boswell’s The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, Antonya Nelson’s Nothing Right, and Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. Also very fond of last year’s National Book Award nominee, [Jim Shepard’s] Like You’d Understand, Anyway. All of these are short story collections, but let me also mention Pete Rock’s terrific novel, My Abandonment.
Continued congrations to the Club, & to Thompson, who I’ve followed for years.
That’s con-gra-tu-la-tions.
I recently read both the new Jean Thompson and Maile Meloy story collections. Both were very good. I also read a story collection, “Sonechka”, by Russian writer Ludmila Ulitskaya who was the first recipient of the Russian Booker award. That also is a definite keeper.