Stories Matter
Five short story collections that informed my new book, plus a sixth
As a child, on Saturday afternoons at summer camp, when electricity wasn’t allowed, and regular programming was put on pause for the Sabbath, special guests would come, rabbis or educators mostly, and read to us. I first heard Bernard Malamud’s “The Jewbird” underneath a leaky pine, sap ruining the borrowed white shorts of a bunkmate with a stain the size of Florida. I listened to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Zlateh the Goat, and laughed at the Amelia Bedelia-esque absurdity of The Wise Men from Chelm. (Everyone wanted to know: Are they for real?) At night, staffers would visit our stuffy cabins. They’d bring flashlights that lit them up like gods and tell ghost stories of the standard camp variety: lurkers in the woods, strangers across the lake, spinning out the violence and horror. They’d recall their own childhood rebellions and sexcapades. Bunk beds shook like bars on a cage, erupting with adolescent howls for more. Beneath my sheets, I took it all in, wide eyed and hungry and afraid.
In school we read “All Summer in a Day” and “The Necklace” and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “Harrison Bergeron.” This was public school in the 80s where the curriculum was set with little invention or deviation. For me, the short story was something found in a smudgy ELA textbook. I’d never experienced multiple, dynamic stories by a single author. In. A. Row. So in 6th grade I swapped Sweet Valley High for Robert Cormier’s Eight Plus One. Goodbye, Columbus came next followed by Salinger’s Nine Stories and James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man. At some point a high school teacher introduced me to Kafka. Jayne Anne Phillips’s Black Tickets turned me onto the short short, stoking a desire to write, and so it went.
Short stories opened something inside me. An avid reader, I’d long turned to novels for their ready escape. Novels transported me from my bedroom; like life, they were messy, digressive, and often disappointing. But the short story exhilarated: at once expansive and complete, it never failed to startle. As Steven Millhauser put it in “The Ambition of the Short Story, “if you concentrate your attention on some apparently insignificant portion of the world, you will find, deep within it, nothing less than the world itself.” Rapidly, short stories became the things I carried, the possibilities I was looking for, the narrative bodies to which I returned again and again.
So I read. The dudes. Chekov, Cheever, Hemingway, Joyce. Carver. Barthelme, Brodkey. Denis Johnson. Winesburg, Ohio. Borges, Bruno Schulz. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. I read O’Brien and O’Connor. A.M Homes, Amy Hempel, Aimee Bender, Toni Cade Bambara, Mary Gaitskill and Jhumpa Lahiri. ZZ Packer. How to Breathe Underwater. Ann Beattie, Lorrie Moore. Alice Munro, Susan Minot. William Trevor. Edwidge Danticat, Miranda July.
I was a good student. I got The New Yorker. I read what I was told. My education, as a result, is an embarrassment of inadequacy: too Western and far too white, narrow and stunted.
When I finally tried my hand at the form, I found it challenging for all the reasons Millhauser lists, but also gratifying: to meet the demands of a story, get in and get out, crack that window for the reader, and then, to move onto the next thing. If every writer has a sweet spot, the short story was mine. The shorter the better. Flash fiction? I was hooked.
All the while, I read. I haven’t stopped reading. I will never catch up on all the wonder out there, all the literary magazines, online and in print, bursting with fresh approaches to the form, crackling with searing, whip smart and bonkers talent, stretching my love wide and deep. Thanks to journals, I first came to Danielle Evans, Marie-Helene Bertino, Leesa Cross-Smith, Yiyun Li, Anthony Veasna So, Amelia Gray, Megan Giddings, Bud Smith. I’m lucky I get to revisit them on the syllabus, and to keep adding more each term. To keep discovering. As a teacher I am a student for life.
I wanted to highlight a few titles that were directly instrumental to me while I was writing my forthcoming book JERKS. Lists, of course, are inherently problematic, exclusionary, incomplete. Lists imply a hierarchy whereas all I want is to languish in a Delta variant-free ball pit of beloved collections. I gave myself limits. I’d stick to five. Pick only women writers. (Sorry Etgar Keret, Peter Orner) Choose those that haven’t been already comported to memory (Grace Paley and Pam Houston) and contemporary authors whose collections perhaps didn’t attract the widespread attention of Kimberly King Parsons and Roxane Gay. As I scanned my library I realized I could do this every week and never begin to scratch the surface of all voices that live loud inside me.
Cowboys and East Indians by Nina McConigley (2013, Five Chapters Books)
McConigley’s collection taught me how to stitch together a cohesive collection. These ten stories on identity and belonging and fraught, complicated love are not only penetrating as stand alone works, but accrue to forge a vital resonant arc. McConigley’s voice is unfussy and clean, restrained yet skewering in its precision. “I hated how the West, this place, had been reduced to a movie set or a backdrop for a story that had nothing to do with here. It was a kind of screensaver.” It is a book about place, where Place is as all encompassing: character and conflict, emotion and desire. “Place is where the I goes,” Dorothy Allison writes. Born from the American West, it straddles Wyoming and India, exploring what it means to have a foot in each world, and how that can feel like no foot in any. McConigley does not skimp on social commentary: “Even their Kmart was a log cabin. Because god forbid you came on your vacation and saw an ugly strip mall. That would be no vacation at all. That would be too much real life. And what we wanted most of the time was a facade, a shell that covered up all the shit that was inside.”
The Cloud of Unknowing by Mimi Lipson (2014, Yeti Publishing)
Lipson’s linked collection feels almost novelistic in its treatment of the idiosyncratic Shultz family: Kitty, Jonathan and Lou. These are father-daughter stories, father-son stories. We follow Kitty into an adulthood rife with awkwardness and longing. Loneliness follows even when she is no longer alone. “A dream is just a way of talking to yourself.” Even when the outlook is grim, Lipson offsets the heartbreak and existential dread with humor. I’m also a sucker for any story set in Philadelphia. One of the things I love about her voice is how casually off-handed it is, as if these brilliant lines just fell out of her. “Instead of breaking up, they bought a run-down row house in South Philadelphia and worked on it together over the years, never quite getting it past the construction-site stage.”
Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen (1956, Delta/Seymore Lawrence)
So this one’s been around the block, but Olsen’s voice, pushing through suffocation, muscling its way through an impossibility of circumstance with dizzying heart and fury is a perennial influence. So much of my writing has been shaped by, and feels in humble conversation with the mother-daughter story of “As I Stand Here Ironing,” which ends: “Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom — but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know — help make it so there is cause for her to know — that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.” Once you pick yourself up off the floor, stay for the rest of this slim volume of stories, which culminates in her unvarnished novella, Tell Me a Riddle.
People Like You by Margaret Malone (2015, Atelier Books)
When I pulled this collection off the shelf, I found it covered in scrawl, barely legible, on the inside cover and dedication pages. If my handwriting weren’t so shitty perhaps I’d be able to make sense of what appears to be the beginning of a story. When I flipped to the back, I found additional lists and notes: “What a fox must do to get back his tale,” I wrote, conjuring the patterned plot of the children’s book One Fine Day, in which a fox is punished for stealing milk by having his tail severed, and thus must jump through a series of hoops in order to repay the milkmaid and have his tail re-sewn. Apparently, I was planning to use this as a structural framework for a story about a woman who has an affair with a much younger man in order, I’m assuming, to restore some lost integral part of herself. I never wrote the story. But its appearance here only underscores the fact that Malone is the kind of writer who makes me want to write. Her prose is so goddamn biting, “Gladys smokes like it was just invented, brand new and full of possibility.” On the back page, I scribbled: “to be horny is to admit needs,” which has no attribution but I gather is Malone’s, and yet, could easily be the epigraph of JERKS. As could this line, from her story “Yes,” starred on page 41: “Married, I think, that’s something to be.”
Back Talk by Danielle Lazarin (2018, Penguin)
“In New York, everyone wants to lay claim to a piece of something,” Lazarin writes in her beautiful collection of women — mothers and sisters, neighbors and friends — and girls. Her stories brim with desire and conflicting desires. “She tells herself she can love him without wanting anything from him.” Throughout, Lazarin’s insight is clear-eyed and unflinching, honest and true. She is among that rare breed of writers who captures sex well on the page, with the right balance of detail and restraint. I could lap up the liquid rhythm of her prose. Most of all, she is not afraid to hit us with the frustration and rage that is an inextricable part of living. (In a patriarchy. Under capitalism.) When Lazarin writes, I feel her breath in my ear.
And a sixth (because I can’t adhere to my own damn rules):
In The Land of Armadillos by Helen Maryles Shankman (2016, Scribner) Republished in paperback as They Were Like Family To Me, this is a mesmerizing, heartfelt, and haunting collection on the Holocaust that has been criminally under-read. Drawn largely from the author’s own family history, it slips into surreality with loving nods to Bruno Schulz and folktales. It is devastating magic.
If it’s true, as Grace Paley said, “We write from what we know but what we write into what we don’t know,” then Shankman — and all these authors — exemplify this axiom through their generous and spirited storytelling for which I’m forever grateful.
Your turn. What collections have been instructive to you? Which titles stay?
