“A Poet” by Sherwood Anderson, and short story thoughts.

If I could be brave enough and live long enough I could crawl inside the life of every man, woman and child in America. After I had gone within them I could be born out of them. I could become something the like of which has never been seen before. We would see then what America is like.

–Sherwood Anderson

Thank you, Mr. Anderson.

That’s a prose poem in the public domain. I think he tried to do this exact thing with Winesburg, Ohio, often summed up as portraits of Southern Grotesques. It was not hailed when it arrived, but remains in the canon, and I love it, partly because I guess I enjoy grotesquerie, and I love books that challenge what and how we write. This odd book does that so well.

I’m going to write about writing, which I don’t do that often. But first, I need to write about reading, because reading is a crucial aspect of writing, isn’t it?

I’ve been reading so many short stories lately, including the collected Deborah Eisenberg. I’m working on a collection by Katherine Anne Porter, and I’m dipping into the collected short stories of Mavis Gallant. She is wonderful. She makes me laugh right out loud. Her collected stories are the size of a Bible and I look forward to a long, leisurely read of them. Then I might return to Flannery O’Connor. Yes, I know. All women, and some of them seem to have faded into obscurity. Please don’t tell me to read Raymond Carver because I have and he’s good but he’s not doing what I want to be doing. Thanks in advance.

I’m just finishing up a short story collection by Katherine Mansfield, a short story writer of whom Elizabeth Bowen wrote, “Born into the English traditions of prose narrative, she neither revolted against these nor broke with then; she surpassed them.” Bowen also wrote of her, “Her imagination kindled unlikely matter: she was to alter for good and all what goes to make a story.” Italics are mine. I agree.

I’m learning more than how to write a story. I’ve learned more about daily life before cars from her stories than I’ve learned from any history book. Mansfield’s earliest stories involve horse and buggy transport, for goodness sake. This happened in a history class I took from a brilliant professor named Patricia Schechter back in the early 2000s. She lectured on how each American war changed the homefront. Her lectures hewed to the domestic, where war acted as a catalyst for social change. I realized under her tutelage what really matters to me. I don’t care about wars in terms of how they were fought. I care about wars in terms of how they affect how people live.

But back to short stories!

Obviously I’m self-educating because I’m hoping to write more short stories but the form has always felt so confining to me. Like, I only have this much room to tell the tale? And it has to have a beginning, middle and end, and a revelation of some sort? Reading Eisenberg in particular gives me permission to bend all expectations. I would finish one of her stories and think, “Oh you mean I can write like this?” I want to write like that.

I’m also doing this because I thought when I retired that I’d be doing all this new and adventurous stuff, like art and classes and so on. But what I’m really interested in doing is writing, so I am trying hard to learn how to do something new. I have probably written more novels than short stories, so this is a challenge. Also a challenge? Having to send them out to see the light of day, which involves rejection.

I’m terrible at being rejected.

I have some good short stories (some of which have been published) and I have an unpublished short story that I think is my best. Like, my very best. Like I’ll never write another that good, that kind of best.

I sent it to Ploughshares, and received this heartbreaking rejection:

Dear Karen,

Thank you for the opportunity to read your story, “Love Thy Neighbor.” While we didn’t find a place for this piece, we want you to know the story made it to our final round, and our readers and editors thoroughly enjoyed considering and discussing your submission. (I especially admire the gorgeous precision of your prose – “The campfire lighting her hair like spilled gold coins” – so good I’m not even jealous!) We hope that you’ll consider sending us more work during our next reading period, which runs from June 1^st – November 15^th each year.

All best and in the spirit of common endeavor,

(name redacted) (through my tears)

So close, so close. And I will submit another story, but to do that, I need to make my best stories better, and that involves having them read critically by trusted readers. One of whom is my husband, with whom I had a spirited discussion about the last one I asked him to read. This happened last night. I kept insisting, “Something is wrong with that story. For me.” Back and forth. After kicking it around for a while, I realized that the trouble is…

I don’t like my main character.

I honestly need to cherish my characters, even if it’s in a “love to hate” manner (Rhondalee LaCour, here’s looking at you, you irresistible biddy). This story is about a man having his heart broken by failure. I realized that while this is happening, my heart is not breaking for him. I have another story with a similar type of plot in a completely different situation, and as I read it, my heart breaks and bleeds for my main character (if you’re wondering, that’s the one I’ll probably send to Ploughshares).

But my heart remains unbroken by the first man’s plight, and for this story to work for me as an author, it has to be cracked in half. I need to be wrung dry right along with him. I can’t be mean to him unless I suffer, too.

And this is the end of my TED talk for today, thank you.

Here are my published short stories with characters I love:

Short story at Thin Skin: Wet Rain

Short story at Persimmon Tree: Mysteries of June and August