31 Days of Short Stories: A Prolegomenon and Justification

Posted 1 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories |

Despite protestations to the contrary, the modern short story appears to have fallen out of favour with the broad spectrum of readers. Evidence for this assertion abounds. The general interest magazines that long served as a mechanism for bringing stories to a mass audience are largely pulling away from the form: The Atlantic has ceased to publish short stories in each issue, opting instead for a single fiction issue in the summer; Toronto Life has scrapped its annual fiction issue altogether; The Saturday Evening Post, once a venerable clearinghouse for short fiction, no longer publishes the form; and Esquire only publishes short fiction very rarely. Pretty much the only mainstream, general interest North American magazines to continue publishing short fiction on a regular basis are The Walrus in Canada and Harper’s and The New Yorker in the States.

This is not to say that people have stopped reading and writing short fiction. Indeed, a debut collection of stories, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam, won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and went on to become the bestselling title in the prize’s history. One of this year’s most lauded Canadian titles — Craig Boyko’s debut, Blackouts — is a collection of short stories. Alice Munro continues to publish, despite rumours of her retirement. And young writers such as Rebecca Rosenblum, Andrew Hood, Matt Shaw, and Matthew Firth continue to embrace the short form and to do new and exciting things with it.

Still, the audience for short fiction continues to atrophy, in part because the avenues for publishing stories are continuing to narrow; the largest market currently seems to be small-run literary journals that are read mostly by academics and other writers. In part, the short story’s ill fortunes are due to an adverse prejudice against the form promulgated by many acquisitions editors within the publishing field, who too often treat collections of short fiction as stepping stones on the road to the more legitimate — and, not incidentally, more lucrative — genre of the novel. In part, though, readers themselves seem to have lost their affinity for the short-story form; readers no longer seem willing or able to engage with the particular demands and conventions of the story as against its full-length distant cousin.

In some respects this is unsurprising. Short stories are not simply miniature novels; they adhere to their own set of rules and have their own rationales and approaches. Indeed, it’s always been my contention that short stories share more in common with poetry than with the novel, since both poems and stories depend for their effects on a concentration of language. Whereas the novelist is free to elaborate and digress, to introduce a large cast of characters and to broaden the focus of the narrative, secure in the knowledge that should a reader tune out for a page or two, it will always be possible to get back on track, the short-story writer has no such safety net to work with. In a good short story (and why read any other kind?), every word counts.

Moreover, stories — especially those of the 20th and 21st centuries — often operate through subtle changes in character or context, they frequently resist closure, and they rely on conflict as a subject and approach. Joyce Carol Oates takes up these latter points in the introduction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories:

Lovers of pristine harmony, those who dislike being upset, shocked, made to think and to feel, are not naturally suited to appreciate art, at least not serious art; which, unlike television dramas and situation comedies, for instance, does not evoke conflict merely to solve it within a brief space of time. Rather, conflict is the implicit subject, itself; as conflict, the establishment of disequilibrium, is the impetus for the evolution of life, so is conflict the genesis, the prime mover, the secret heart of all art.

While dramatic conflict is at the heart of all fiction, as Oates attests, the conflicts that attend a short story can often be more discomfiting, more unsettling than those in novels, precisely because they are not always — or even often — worked out over the course of the story. Short stories frequently do not present entire arcs or fully realized situations, preferring instead to focus on a particular moment in time. As Rebecca Rosenblum has suggested, they focus on what was said and done, but often leave out why, or what happened next.

Stories, more than novels, privilege language: the way the words on the page are organized to achieve effects that might be elliptical or elusive, but are nonetheless potent and moving and, due to the extreme concentration of words that the short form demands of a writer, can be much more immediate and visceral than in a longer, more discursive piece.

Neither is the short story tied to any single or definitive mode of narration. Readers who tend towards the Chekhovian or Joycean mode of naturalistic storytelling, stories that work their way slowly to a subtle epiphany at the end, may risk forgetting that there is a whole range of approaches to the short form that different authors have attempted and experimented with. From the minimalism of Raymond Carver to the postmodernism of David Foster Wallace to the word collages of Donald Barthelme, the short story has proven to be an extraordinarily protean and malleable form, and it is in the innovations of a number of its practitioners throughout the 20th and 21st centuries that the short story has shown itself to be most vibrant and alive.

This is especially true here in Canada, the country that produced Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, two of the indisputable giants of the short fiction form. However, the naturalism practised by Munro and Gallant, brilliant though it may be, is only one example of the kinds of stories this country has produced. The range of authors working in the short fiction arena in Canada — from Leon Rooke to Terry Griggs to Mark Anthony Jarman to Mary Borsky and beyond — is truly astounding.

This is, in part, the impetus for this month’s celebration of the short story here at That Shakespeherian Rag. Last fall, Penguin Canada published a weighty volume entitled The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, selected and edited by Jane Urquhart. Running to 700 densely printed pages, this volume contains sixty-nine stories by Canadian writers such as Margaret Atwood, Ernest Buckler, Rohinton Mistry, and Carol Shields. The front flap copy reads, in typically overheated marketing-speak, “The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories is a stunning volume of outstanding short fiction — quite possibly the best of its kind.”

The first thing that many critics and commentators noted about this anthology was its staggering omissions. Here is a volume of Canadian short fiction that claims to be “quite possibly the best of its kind,” yet can’t find room for writers such as Norman Levine, Ray Smith, Clark Blaise, Diane Schoemperlen, or Douglas Glover. Instead, we have selections from a former Governor General, Adrienne Poy (Clarkson), who is not best known for her fiction, and excerpts from memoirs and novels, which don’t even fit under the rubric of the title. (This is particularly baffling in the case of Michael Winter, who has published two excellent collections of stories — Creaking in Their Skins and One Last Good Look — yet is represented in the Penguin volume by an excerpt from his 2000 novel, This All Happened.)

The deficiencies in the Penguin anthology were severe enough to prompt Michael Carbert to pen a savage review, which ran in Maisonneuve magazine. Entitled “The Urquhart Disaster,” the review bemoans Urquhart’s selections, omissions, and organizational principles, and goes on to say that “when one considers how this book will likely be bought and read around the world, regarded by some as authoritative, and placed on innumerable course syllabi for years to come, the result is not just unfortunate or regrettable, but disastrous.”

Nor is Carbert alone in his assessment. The editors of two prominent Canadian literary journals, Canadian Notes and Queries and The New Quarterly, were so appalled by Penguin’s anthology that they are devoting their respective summer issues to a joint Salon des Refusés of stories by authors who were left out of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. In the words of TNQ’s editors, the staffs of the two journals “sat down to compose our own list of short story innovators, gathering examples of their break-through stories into two volumes that we’ve called the Salon des Refuses in homage to those 19th century artists who formed their own exhibition after being ‘refused’ by the official French Salon. Remember Thomas Rossiter? He was an official Salon selection. Remember Manet, Whistler, Picasso? They were Refuse-niks.” The TNQ half of the Salon features stories by, among others, Patricia Young, Keath Fraser, and Sharon English; the CNQ half includes stories by Douglas Glover, Mark Anthony Jarman, and Clark Blaise.

Since your humble correspondent was kindly invited to participate in this joint Salon (I provide the introduction to the Jarman story in the CNQ half), I thought that August would be a good time to celebrate the short story here on TSR as well. You can rest assured that there will be plenty of coverage of the Salon itself, once the two issues hit the stands later this month. In the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to broaden the scope of the discussion somewhat, to include not just Canadian writers, but short story writers from around the world. Therefore, each day in August, TSR will highlight one noteworthy story, with brief discussion provided courtesy of your humble correspondent. These thirty-one stories, in aggregate, are not meant to comprise an authoritative overview of the best stories ever written, nor to be quite possibly the best collection of its kind — who would ever be presumptuous enough to claim that? Rather, they are intended to illustrate the range and variability of the form, to spotlight stories written in a traditional mode and to give a nod to authors who challenge our definition of what a story can be or can do. We’ll start today with a story by one of the form’s undisputed masters, Papa Hemingway, and will continue throughout the month, including stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Mary Gaitskill, Flannery O’Connor, Haruki Murakami, among others. The complete list of thirty-one stories will, I hope, convey the diverse pleasures that stories are able to provide, and perhaps even serve as a kind of bare-bones primer for further exploration of the short form.

Finally, there are some special guests lined up for the coming month. Friends of TSR, including Rebecca Rosenblum, Adam Lewis Schroeder, Lauren Kirshner, and Nigel Beale, have graciously agreed to contribute essays throughout the month, so watch out for those as we move forward. In the meantime, keep checking back for more information on the upcoming TNQ / CNQ joint Salon, and for each day’s spotlighted story.

As always, contributions in the form of comments or criticisms are more than welcome.

UPDATE: Carmine Starnino, associate editor at Maisonneuve Magazine, e-mailed a nice note, which also mentioned two points that need correction in the above post. First, the Michael Carbert piece appeared online only, not in the print magazine. And second, Carmine points out that Maisonneuve publishes a short story in each issue.

5 comments to “31 Days of Short Stories: A Prolegomenon and Justification”

Leona Theis, August 1st, 2008 at 1:23 pm:

• Thanks for doing this. I look forward to a full month of thinking and reading about story.

Zachariah Wells, August 1st, 2008 at 8:45 pm:

• Short Story: 1. A bloated poem with an unhealthy attraction to the right-hand margin. 2. An unsatisfyingly brief novel.

Steven W. Beattie, August 1st, 2008 at 9:07 pm:

• Oh, Zach, you’re just suffering from Scrabulous withdrawal.

Sina Queyras, August 5th, 2008 at 12:55 pm:

• Nice to see some discussion of the short story–I’m interested to see the range of stories included. Although from your introduction it seems you are focussing on the school of minimalism/realism which the current marketplace seems to have people thinking is the only kind of story worth reading. I keep hearing people complain about who was left out of the Penguin anthology, but who they complain about being left out just seems to be more of the same. In any case, I look forward to evidence of a great range in Canadian short fiction.

  Thanks for posting this.

not dead yet… at imperfect offering, August 6th, 2008 at 10:29 am:

• […] of the literary ecosystem is the habitat of the short story. The reports of deforestation are coming in from everywhere. (and earlier) Now, I have to admit, I hadn’t noticed. I’m not a […]

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