Excellent, excellent. Coincidentally, I just finished a draft of a stort titled "The Short Happy Life of Robert Polatkin," which plays with the plot and motifs of Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." But the timeline of my story is 30 years, not two days. I haven't read Ann Beattie in many years but I just looked on my shelves and found her "What Was Mine" that I'll delve into.
Thank you Sherman! I really like her stuff. Her early stories are great - when she was bored in grad school and a certain shapelessness about her life got reflected in the stories. I think it was harder for her to find the magic once she was well known.
Very cool re Robert Polatkin! Excited to read it!!
Great post! I haven't written a short story in years, but the spate of them I did write in the 2010s, when I was more determined to appear in lit journals, and most of which I've republished on Substack, I saw as belonging to the Hawthornian tradition, or Bloom's Gogol-Kafka line, with just a surface feint toward Chekhovian realism. And to escape what you identify as the Chekhovian smugness, which I consider an effect of free indirect discourse in fiction, with the wise narrator condescending to adopt the benighted character's provincial idiom and limited purview, I often inclined toward first person narration instead of third.
Thank you! I've been enjoying your stories! Really glad that you've been publishing/posting them on Substack.
Yeah, 'smugness' is a good word for the problem with the 'realist' short story style, and it's the problem I have with Chekhov's plays as well. I like the idea of 'first person' narration or of the characters coming to the theater 'voluntarily' - which was Brecht's deviation from Chekhov.
It's too bad btw that the lit journal scene is so lousy. I'm hoping that that energy for short-form creative fiction will migrate onto Substack or something similar as a freer, more kinetic way of sharing short stories. I can feel that it hasn't really happened yet, but soon....soon....
In any case, I applaud you for sharing your work. Please keep doing it!
Beautiful piece, and so much to think about. Thank you. I'd like to zoom-in on what you pointed out early-on about the early modernists' response to literary romanticism via writing about daily life / poignancy / social dynamics: "all exciting stories, are a kind of delusion, a way of distracting oneself from ever-present, ever-excruciating truth."
We live in an obscenely noisy era, but one of the benefits of all the noise is we are starting to witness a shift *away* from Netflix-and-Chill distractions, wherein we return to the ever-present (Substack being a beautiful example; I can't remember the last time I had a dialogue with writers across oceans). I had the benefit of being in a low-residency MFA program, which meant the "workshop model" was almost non-existent--personal truth was valued over everything, and while this is a beautiful philosophy, it was interesting to note how many "memoirists" there were in the program. There are many downsides to thinking writing is *only* about writing about ourselves, which in my mind is just one of the many effects of an MFA-driven literary era defined by market-driven individualism appealing to gate keepers, the fear of being accused of cultural appropriation, which leads to less empathic writing, and the rampant identitarianism we see coming out of this technologically disillusioned era. But *one positive* aspect of memoirs and the "look at me" culture is that stories are returning to the poignancy, daily life, and social dynamics of daily experience.
“the fear of being accused of cultural appropriation, which leads to less empathic writing, and the rampant identitarianism we see coming out of this technologically disillusioned era. But *one positive* aspect of memoirs and the "look at me" culture is that stories are returning to the poignancy, daily life, and social dynamics of daily experience.”
Hi Samuél, Yes! This was exactly what I was hoping for when I started getting involved in Substack - to have conversations with writers across oceans! I've had to make a note of like four different writers and ideas you've mentioned. Look forward to digging in to all of these! Yes, I'm very ambivalent about being in the era of personal writing and 'confession.' I do really think it's great that the aperture is opened wide on daily life - that the experiences of 'ordinary people' doing 'ordinary things' are considered viable expression. (A lot of other cultures and eras have trouble with a certain snobbery which privileges only the 'noble' experiences of 'important' people.) But there are real traps to the personal writing. It creates a kind of arms race of trauma - with the experience that 'matters' being only the experience of suffering and victimization. And it places an undue emphasis on factuality - we get disappointed if the person is "just making it up." Short stories are a really nice compromise and I think that's why I've found myself drawn to them recently. On the one hand, they have versimilitude and are a decent way to record the actual content of one's life (I've been writing mine largely as a kind of personal encyclopedia), and on the other hand they have an imaginative, creative component to them. But I can just tell that there isn't much appetite for them in the 'reading public.' I can't shake the feeling that this is the fault of writers almost as much as it is readers and that there is some better way forward for the short story - something that incorporates 'reality hunger' but also 'himma.' What I think it really means is that writers would need to start believing in the short story again - not assuming that it was perfected by Chekhov and then reached its terminal point in The New Yorker - and to look for more varied and more intense ways of working with this instrument.
Love this phrase, “the arms race of trauma,” which to your point is a zero sum game involving a lot of guilt and fatigue, at best. I do think that like it or not, the *form* of the short story will have to make amends with the reality of episodic television, which, when done well, seems to promise and deliver if nothing else more diverse kinds of short storytelling (I’m thinking of “Rick and Morty” or “Seinfeld” or “Arrested Development”, all of which are written as parts of a linked collection). Alas, in the end I turn to the novel for literature and other mediums for shorter storytelling (a songwriter like Andy Shauf promises me more relatable stories than almost anyone published in the New Yorker today). As always, thanks for the inspiration 🙏🏼
“Grab a glimpse of life, it doesn’t matter what it is, and see where it leads, let it take any shape it wishes. “
I can’t help but think about the notion of the “flâneur" in this context, of someone who (particularly in Paris) walks without direction--not aimlessly, but without a goal or objective: the aim is to walk, to pursue life wherever it leads (Guy Debord's writings on psychogeography are damn interesting if slightly pessimistic when it comes to this).
The first thing I teach my creative writing students about beginnings / middles / ends + Freytag's pyramid is that if stories are meant to resemble life, how do our lives shape our narratives? My day doesn't necessarily start when I wake up, and I certainly couldn't tell you about the climax of my day even yesterday, so here's to acknowledging the structures and doing away with those that no longer serve us; and here's to remembering the singular, autotelic experience that is life--be gone, packaged goods and predictable cohesion!
PS: Jane Allison's craft book, "Meander, Spiral, Explode," changed the way I thought about life and narrative.
There’s something about the way you write that trips a wire in me and out pops everything I’ve seemingly ever thought about a subject, like a speed round at the end of a challenging interview. It’s odd. Perhaps I simply miss conversations like this.
I do read a great deal of short stories, a form I’ve always associated with women. Or that many women I liked especially wrote short stories. Often connected in some way - with characters or settings that continue one from another. Not that Chekhov doesn’t figure into things - I’m reading him right now coincidentally - but I seem to read him much differently then you do - to me he runs around with a penlight poking it where he will, illuminating something discrete and final - the amusing/alarming frankness. And So There It Is and steps back proudly from it. Tableau more than portrait. To me at least.
To me it is women who write short stories. Who are the enchantresses because to be short stories shimmer with light and episode, like flipping through a fashion magazine and getting an overall impression of an era.
Clarice LiSpector - and if you haven’t read her please do - attracts me particularly. She is so deeply frightening original. Powerful and bewitched. Sometimes I feel like I’m sucked into a vortex I might never escape. I close the book on my hands.
Last year, after a bout of reading Faulkner and tearing my hair out about it/him/The Whole Business Of What Is Art For? and for various reasons - I turned for solace to Flannery O’Connor. before I knew it made my way through all of the Collected. She writes so strange and delicate with a penknife, a scalpel. A dreadful knowing about it all. She wrote mostly staring at a fireplace wall. That’s it red bricks and irons. Deathly ill to.
I allege that women write short stores when or because they have other duties and responsibilities, constrained by the care of others and various difficulties tied to lack do support. So their/our artistic “mind” gets conscripted into other labor and then has to wait it’s time. So it distills like this in these concentrations.
Bartleby the Scrivener is a particular touchstone for me. I think about it so often. I don’t know, it comes up. What answers is he keeping that will never yield? I’ve read it countless times, identifying mostly with the lawyer. (What the hell is wrong with you and why can’t I fix it ?!?). I felt very personal towards him, Bartleby. I could never read him as my English professors wanted me to - as some harbinger of the terrible century. (But then there is that subtitle : a Story of Wall Street, so what do I know?)
I appreciate the review of the history lesson too. Much I never knew. thanks again
Kyra, so many thanks for this note. Yes, these are exactly the conversations I like to have! Means a lot to me that this Substack can help in facilitating them. I think it's a really interesting topic what you're bringing up - how different genders relate to different forms. (And it's almost impossible to have that conversation in any meaningful way in the contemporary political climate.) I remember being very taken with a discussion - this was part of a Caryl Churchill play I was in during college - about how gendered sexual responses shape the structure of dramatic narrative arcs. Churchill was claiming that the structure of traditional playwriting mimicked the male orgasm - with a 'climax' of explosive, often violent energy - and Churchill wanted to write her endings in a way that was more like a rolling female orgasm, with peaks and valleys. That struck me as being really interesting - and then I don't think I was ever again in a setting where people would be comfortable having a conversation like that. What you're saying definitely strikes me as plausible - that short stories are inherently a more 'female form,' without, for instance, the male grandiosity of the epic or novel and with a structure that's a bit more attuned to daily life. I honestly hadn't thought about it that way before, but the more I'm thinking about it the more I'm drawn to that. For one thing, the older 'tale' has a connotation of being in public spaces - travelers speaking to each other at an inn or in a train carriage or on the cruising yawl Nellie and, essentially, swapping war stories - while the short story is more about private space and private (typically 'inaccessible') emotions. I guess the other way to phrase it - and this is where people like Chekhov and Melville come in - is that the short story is conducive to being in touch with a certain 'femininity' in one's nature, and male writers just as much as female are able to tune in to subtler emotions, interpersonal dynamics, a typically more emotion-driven and miniaturist landscape than the rollicking adventures that characterized the epic, the tale, and at least the early incarnations of the novel. Anyway, lots more to say on this topic! Thrilled to chat about all this! (Yes, I've read a bit of Clarice Lispector, but would love to read more.)
Thanks Sam. Yes, these are the conversations it feels ever harder to encounter in the “wild”. My need to have them seems to get more desperate every year. Between the global pandemic and my general introvertish tendency to hole up with a book, I guess I am not doing much to improve my odds. Everything you put out makes me want to buy a pack of Gauloises and invite us all to Deux Maggots to really hash it out.
How nice to find a Churchill out there that I might agree with! Her observation is apt and in keeping with my developing understanding of how the structure of language informs and reinforces our social tendencies. Kenyan author and philosopher Nguni Wa Thiong’ O helped me most in considering the nuance of how material all the forms language - from grammar and word forms to sentence structure and traditional forms of writing is a small scale reflection of the values of a culture and hard to adapt to new experiences and populations.
Our language system is very masculine. I find it easy to lapse into vehement declarations when I feel passionate curiosity or inspiration for instance and I just think our relationship between thought and expression goes into the tunnel of culture and comes out reflecting the strain of it. Like a tool and die process on molten steel.
Men are the writers of epics. When I look at my list of longest books they are all written by men (except Middlemarch written by a woman posing as a man). I attribute it to a ego confidence that is a consequence of millennia giving men the job of defining themselves and the world. Women are more confident about their secret sense of things. The interior and social world of relationships where they are culturally free to roam without notice or consequence. For generations the work of women were considered of dubious value or just generally boring and aimless to many literary critics who just didn’t get it. Anyway, thanks again for diving in where angels exist but fear to tread
Sam, This wide-ranging essay pairs well with the one in which you talk about David Shield's _Reality Hunger_. I do think the writer needs to "go for the jugular" for the work to matter, short or long. I am wondering what you think about Grace Paley's body of work and of Alice Munro's. The former never wrote a novel and the latter, as you probably know, wrote only one that doesn't compare with her body of work in the short story form. As to the problem in the MFA workshop: Group think is a killer--and only a powerfully good prof will cut through that and make sure the"baby," meaning the inventive work, doesn't get thrown out with the bathwater. As always you hit a with a solid punch. Much appreciated here. xo ~Mary
Hi Mary, I don't know Grace Paley very well. Alice Munro is really fabulous - although I haven't read her since college. My sense with her is that she was basically doing what people do in novels and telling whole stories in a very compressed way. I guess there's a complicated question about violence and the short story. Chekhov is very non-violent. But Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro (at least the stories I know) have a violent charge in them. My guess would be that the photographic aspects of the short story make it not particularly conducive to violence - to violence as gesture but not especially to violence as a plotted story of justice or revenge. On the other hand, there's something about the short story that really enables writers to capture daily life and the intricacies of relationships in ways that they might be shy to do in a more plot-based form like a novel. Re workshops, I'm doing my first workshop ever now. I am getting the appeal of it - there's really something very addictive about it, the feeling of a group of people who know each other very well, have all read each other's work and can talk about it incisively, but, yes, fiction writing is largely about individuality. It's hard for me to imagine a scenario (maybe some really great writers' room) where the rough edges wouldn't be smoothed away. You always give me so many people to read! After The Gift, I'll read Munro and Paley! - Sam
Sam, you do the same for me. I was so glad to see that Joshua Dolezal cross-posted your essay on journalism. And I wrote him directly to tell him how much I love what you, Sam, are doing. As you are now taking a workshop, I would love to know what you think about what I'm doing in Write it! that part of my Substack that is of course paid--so if you don't find it worth it after the comp, I'll understand. My guess is that it might reflect in some way on what is happening to you in workshop -- and I'm certain you are a bright star in that group. Today on Joshua's Substack on his discussion of "epiphanies", I added a note about James Joyce and wanted to share it with you: One of the amazing things that Joyce did was to actually change the way a short story reaches its climax: Most, if not all the short stories, in _Dubliners_ end with an epiphany in the last line of the story. We don't necessarily see "resolution", but we for sure see discovery--and a certain sense of an open-ended moment. I also have a sense that you will love the brevity and wit of Grace Paley in direct contrast to the novelistic style of Munro, whom I absolutely adore. I think she's been incomparable and will remain so ... xo ~Mary
Mary, many thanks for the note - and for writing to Joshua. It does feel like a network is forming. I'd really like to explore with you some of the shapes that that can take. I've been distracted with family events, etc, the last few days - will dive more into what you and Joshua have been posting. And it would really be great to chat a bit on cross-posting and finding the absolute best ways to all support each other. xo - Sam
He and I, like you and me, have been emailing each other and discussing David Foster Wallace, among many others--and how we might help one another and build a literary community. Fascinating writer. Definitely worth a deep dive. xo ~ Mary
Excellent, excellent. Coincidentally, I just finished a draft of a stort titled "The Short Happy Life of Robert Polatkin," which plays with the plot and motifs of Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." But the timeline of my story is 30 years, not two days. I haven't read Ann Beattie in many years but I just looked on my shelves and found her "What Was Mine" that I'll delve into.
Thank you Sherman! I really like her stuff. Her early stories are great - when she was bored in grad school and a certain shapelessness about her life got reflected in the stories. I think it was harder for her to find the magic once she was well known.
Very cool re Robert Polatkin! Excited to read it!!
- Sam
Thanks for sending me back to Beattie. She's got me thinking about writing a "shapeless" powwow story!
Great post! I haven't written a short story in years, but the spate of them I did write in the 2010s, when I was more determined to appear in lit journals, and most of which I've republished on Substack, I saw as belonging to the Hawthornian tradition, or Bloom's Gogol-Kafka line, with just a surface feint toward Chekhovian realism. And to escape what you identify as the Chekhovian smugness, which I consider an effect of free indirect discourse in fiction, with the wise narrator condescending to adopt the benighted character's provincial idiom and limited purview, I often inclined toward first person narration instead of third.
Thank you! I've been enjoying your stories! Really glad that you've been publishing/posting them on Substack.
Yeah, 'smugness' is a good word for the problem with the 'realist' short story style, and it's the problem I have with Chekhov's plays as well. I like the idea of 'first person' narration or of the characters coming to the theater 'voluntarily' - which was Brecht's deviation from Chekhov.
It's too bad btw that the lit journal scene is so lousy. I'm hoping that that energy for short-form creative fiction will migrate onto Substack or something similar as a freer, more kinetic way of sharing short stories. I can feel that it hasn't really happened yet, but soon....soon....
In any case, I applaud you for sharing your work. Please keep doing it!
- Sam
Thanks so much, Sam!
Beautiful piece, and so much to think about. Thank you. I'd like to zoom-in on what you pointed out early-on about the early modernists' response to literary romanticism via writing about daily life / poignancy / social dynamics: "all exciting stories, are a kind of delusion, a way of distracting oneself from ever-present, ever-excruciating truth."
We live in an obscenely noisy era, but one of the benefits of all the noise is we are starting to witness a shift *away* from Netflix-and-Chill distractions, wherein we return to the ever-present (Substack being a beautiful example; I can't remember the last time I had a dialogue with writers across oceans). I had the benefit of being in a low-residency MFA program, which meant the "workshop model" was almost non-existent--personal truth was valued over everything, and while this is a beautiful philosophy, it was interesting to note how many "memoirists" there were in the program. There are many downsides to thinking writing is *only* about writing about ourselves, which in my mind is just one of the many effects of an MFA-driven literary era defined by market-driven individualism appealing to gate keepers, the fear of being accused of cultural appropriation, which leads to less empathic writing, and the rampant identitarianism we see coming out of this technologically disillusioned era. But *one positive* aspect of memoirs and the "look at me" culture is that stories are returning to the poignancy, daily life, and social dynamics of daily experience.
“the fear of being accused of cultural appropriation, which leads to less empathic writing, and the rampant identitarianism we see coming out of this technologically disillusioned era. But *one positive* aspect of memoirs and the "look at me" culture is that stories are returning to the poignancy, daily life, and social dynamics of daily experience.”
Yes 🙌
Hi Samuél, Yes! This was exactly what I was hoping for when I started getting involved in Substack - to have conversations with writers across oceans! I've had to make a note of like four different writers and ideas you've mentioned. Look forward to digging in to all of these! Yes, I'm very ambivalent about being in the era of personal writing and 'confession.' I do really think it's great that the aperture is opened wide on daily life - that the experiences of 'ordinary people' doing 'ordinary things' are considered viable expression. (A lot of other cultures and eras have trouble with a certain snobbery which privileges only the 'noble' experiences of 'important' people.) But there are real traps to the personal writing. It creates a kind of arms race of trauma - with the experience that 'matters' being only the experience of suffering and victimization. And it places an undue emphasis on factuality - we get disappointed if the person is "just making it up." Short stories are a really nice compromise and I think that's why I've found myself drawn to them recently. On the one hand, they have versimilitude and are a decent way to record the actual content of one's life (I've been writing mine largely as a kind of personal encyclopedia), and on the other hand they have an imaginative, creative component to them. But I can just tell that there isn't much appetite for them in the 'reading public.' I can't shake the feeling that this is the fault of writers almost as much as it is readers and that there is some better way forward for the short story - something that incorporates 'reality hunger' but also 'himma.' What I think it really means is that writers would need to start believing in the short story again - not assuming that it was perfected by Chekhov and then reached its terminal point in The New Yorker - and to look for more varied and more intense ways of working with this instrument.
Love this phrase, “the arms race of trauma,” which to your point is a zero sum game involving a lot of guilt and fatigue, at best. I do think that like it or not, the *form* of the short story will have to make amends with the reality of episodic television, which, when done well, seems to promise and deliver if nothing else more diverse kinds of short storytelling (I’m thinking of “Rick and Morty” or “Seinfeld” or “Arrested Development”, all of which are written as parts of a linked collection). Alas, in the end I turn to the novel for literature and other mediums for shorter storytelling (a songwriter like Andy Shauf promises me more relatable stories than almost anyone published in the New Yorker today). As always, thanks for the inspiration 🙏🏼
“Grab a glimpse of life, it doesn’t matter what it is, and see where it leads, let it take any shape it wishes. “
I can’t help but think about the notion of the “flâneur" in this context, of someone who (particularly in Paris) walks without direction--not aimlessly, but without a goal or objective: the aim is to walk, to pursue life wherever it leads (Guy Debord's writings on psychogeography are damn interesting if slightly pessimistic when it comes to this).
The first thing I teach my creative writing students about beginnings / middles / ends + Freytag's pyramid is that if stories are meant to resemble life, how do our lives shape our narratives? My day doesn't necessarily start when I wake up, and I certainly couldn't tell you about the climax of my day even yesterday, so here's to acknowledging the structures and doing away with those that no longer serve us; and here's to remembering the singular, autotelic experience that is life--be gone, packaged goods and predictable cohesion!
PS: Jane Allison's craft book, "Meander, Spiral, Explode," changed the way I thought about life and narrative.
Thank you for the recommendations! You might also like Peter Brooks' Seduced By Story which makes a similar anti-narrative point.
Good piece!!!
Thank you GD!
Beautiful piece. There is so much to delve into here -- this might be the first Substack piece I print out to fully absorb!
🔥🔥
Aw! Thanks so much Alicia! And thrilled to discover your Substack!
Yay!! :)
There’s something about the way you write that trips a wire in me and out pops everything I’ve seemingly ever thought about a subject, like a speed round at the end of a challenging interview. It’s odd. Perhaps I simply miss conversations like this.
I do read a great deal of short stories, a form I’ve always associated with women. Or that many women I liked especially wrote short stories. Often connected in some way - with characters or settings that continue one from another. Not that Chekhov doesn’t figure into things - I’m reading him right now coincidentally - but I seem to read him much differently then you do - to me he runs around with a penlight poking it where he will, illuminating something discrete and final - the amusing/alarming frankness. And So There It Is and steps back proudly from it. Tableau more than portrait. To me at least.
To me it is women who write short stories. Who are the enchantresses because to be short stories shimmer with light and episode, like flipping through a fashion magazine and getting an overall impression of an era.
Clarice LiSpector - and if you haven’t read her please do - attracts me particularly. She is so deeply frightening original. Powerful and bewitched. Sometimes I feel like I’m sucked into a vortex I might never escape. I close the book on my hands.
Last year, after a bout of reading Faulkner and tearing my hair out about it/him/The Whole Business Of What Is Art For? and for various reasons - I turned for solace to Flannery O’Connor. before I knew it made my way through all of the Collected. She writes so strange and delicate with a penknife, a scalpel. A dreadful knowing about it all. She wrote mostly staring at a fireplace wall. That’s it red bricks and irons. Deathly ill to.
I allege that women write short stores when or because they have other duties and responsibilities, constrained by the care of others and various difficulties tied to lack do support. So their/our artistic “mind” gets conscripted into other labor and then has to wait it’s time. So it distills like this in these concentrations.
Bartleby the Scrivener is a particular touchstone for me. I think about it so often. I don’t know, it comes up. What answers is he keeping that will never yield? I’ve read it countless times, identifying mostly with the lawyer. (What the hell is wrong with you and why can’t I fix it ?!?). I felt very personal towards him, Bartleby. I could never read him as my English professors wanted me to - as some harbinger of the terrible century. (But then there is that subtitle : a Story of Wall Street, so what do I know?)
I appreciate the review of the history lesson too. Much I never knew. thanks again
Kyra, so many thanks for this note. Yes, these are exactly the conversations I like to have! Means a lot to me that this Substack can help in facilitating them. I think it's a really interesting topic what you're bringing up - how different genders relate to different forms. (And it's almost impossible to have that conversation in any meaningful way in the contemporary political climate.) I remember being very taken with a discussion - this was part of a Caryl Churchill play I was in during college - about how gendered sexual responses shape the structure of dramatic narrative arcs. Churchill was claiming that the structure of traditional playwriting mimicked the male orgasm - with a 'climax' of explosive, often violent energy - and Churchill wanted to write her endings in a way that was more like a rolling female orgasm, with peaks and valleys. That struck me as being really interesting - and then I don't think I was ever again in a setting where people would be comfortable having a conversation like that. What you're saying definitely strikes me as plausible - that short stories are inherently a more 'female form,' without, for instance, the male grandiosity of the epic or novel and with a structure that's a bit more attuned to daily life. I honestly hadn't thought about it that way before, but the more I'm thinking about it the more I'm drawn to that. For one thing, the older 'tale' has a connotation of being in public spaces - travelers speaking to each other at an inn or in a train carriage or on the cruising yawl Nellie and, essentially, swapping war stories - while the short story is more about private space and private (typically 'inaccessible') emotions. I guess the other way to phrase it - and this is where people like Chekhov and Melville come in - is that the short story is conducive to being in touch with a certain 'femininity' in one's nature, and male writers just as much as female are able to tune in to subtler emotions, interpersonal dynamics, a typically more emotion-driven and miniaturist landscape than the rollicking adventures that characterized the epic, the tale, and at least the early incarnations of the novel. Anyway, lots more to say on this topic! Thrilled to chat about all this! (Yes, I've read a bit of Clarice Lispector, but would love to read more.)
- Sam
Thanks Sam. Yes, these are the conversations it feels ever harder to encounter in the “wild”. My need to have them seems to get more desperate every year. Between the global pandemic and my general introvertish tendency to hole up with a book, I guess I am not doing much to improve my odds. Everything you put out makes me want to buy a pack of Gauloises and invite us all to Deux Maggots to really hash it out.
How nice to find a Churchill out there that I might agree with! Her observation is apt and in keeping with my developing understanding of how the structure of language informs and reinforces our social tendencies. Kenyan author and philosopher Nguni Wa Thiong’ O helped me most in considering the nuance of how material all the forms language - from grammar and word forms to sentence structure and traditional forms of writing is a small scale reflection of the values of a culture and hard to adapt to new experiences and populations.
Our language system is very masculine. I find it easy to lapse into vehement declarations when I feel passionate curiosity or inspiration for instance and I just think our relationship between thought and expression goes into the tunnel of culture and comes out reflecting the strain of it. Like a tool and die process on molten steel.
Men are the writers of epics. When I look at my list of longest books they are all written by men (except Middlemarch written by a woman posing as a man). I attribute it to a ego confidence that is a consequence of millennia giving men the job of defining themselves and the world. Women are more confident about their secret sense of things. The interior and social world of relationships where they are culturally free to roam without notice or consequence. For generations the work of women were considered of dubious value or just generally boring and aimless to many literary critics who just didn’t get it. Anyway, thanks again for diving in where angels exist but fear to tread
Sam, This wide-ranging essay pairs well with the one in which you talk about David Shield's _Reality Hunger_. I do think the writer needs to "go for the jugular" for the work to matter, short or long. I am wondering what you think about Grace Paley's body of work and of Alice Munro's. The former never wrote a novel and the latter, as you probably know, wrote only one that doesn't compare with her body of work in the short story form. As to the problem in the MFA workshop: Group think is a killer--and only a powerfully good prof will cut through that and make sure the"baby," meaning the inventive work, doesn't get thrown out with the bathwater. As always you hit a with a solid punch. Much appreciated here. xo ~Mary
Hi Mary, I don't know Grace Paley very well. Alice Munro is really fabulous - although I haven't read her since college. My sense with her is that she was basically doing what people do in novels and telling whole stories in a very compressed way. I guess there's a complicated question about violence and the short story. Chekhov is very non-violent. But Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro (at least the stories I know) have a violent charge in them. My guess would be that the photographic aspects of the short story make it not particularly conducive to violence - to violence as gesture but not especially to violence as a plotted story of justice or revenge. On the other hand, there's something about the short story that really enables writers to capture daily life and the intricacies of relationships in ways that they might be shy to do in a more plot-based form like a novel. Re workshops, I'm doing my first workshop ever now. I am getting the appeal of it - there's really something very addictive about it, the feeling of a group of people who know each other very well, have all read each other's work and can talk about it incisively, but, yes, fiction writing is largely about individuality. It's hard for me to imagine a scenario (maybe some really great writers' room) where the rough edges wouldn't be smoothed away. You always give me so many people to read! After The Gift, I'll read Munro and Paley! - Sam
Sam, you do the same for me. I was so glad to see that Joshua Dolezal cross-posted your essay on journalism. And I wrote him directly to tell him how much I love what you, Sam, are doing. As you are now taking a workshop, I would love to know what you think about what I'm doing in Write it! that part of my Substack that is of course paid--so if you don't find it worth it after the comp, I'll understand. My guess is that it might reflect in some way on what is happening to you in workshop -- and I'm certain you are a bright star in that group. Today on Joshua's Substack on his discussion of "epiphanies", I added a note about James Joyce and wanted to share it with you: One of the amazing things that Joyce did was to actually change the way a short story reaches its climax: Most, if not all the short stories, in _Dubliners_ end with an epiphany in the last line of the story. We don't necessarily see "resolution", but we for sure see discovery--and a certain sense of an open-ended moment. I also have a sense that you will love the brevity and wit of Grace Paley in direct contrast to the novelistic style of Munro, whom I absolutely adore. I think she's been incomparable and will remain so ... xo ~Mary
Mary, many thanks for the note - and for writing to Joshua. It does feel like a network is forming. I'd really like to explore with you some of the shapes that that can take. I've been distracted with family events, etc, the last few days - will dive more into what you and Joshua have been posting. And it would really be great to chat a bit on cross-posting and finding the absolute best ways to all support each other. xo - Sam
Oh, that would be so lovely, Sam.
Take a look at Terry Freedman, who will be doing a guest post for me: https://terryfreedman.substack.com
He and I, like you and me, have been emailing each other and discussing David Foster Wallace, among many others--and how we might help one another and build a literary community. Fascinating writer. Definitely worth a deep dive. xo ~ Mary