"North Country" by Roxane Gay

Let's just go ahead and declare it the year of Roxane.  Seriously.  Her novel, An Untamed State, (which I was psyched to procure a copy of at this weekend's Muse) is getting rave reviews and her upcoming book of essays Bad Feminist, is going to break the internet, IMHO.  You can also find her tweeting about all the things.

I got a chance to attend a session with Professor Gay at this week's Muse conference, hosted by Boston's Grub Street.  The Brutal Languages of Love was fun, real, and insightful: not surprising.  One of the most valuable lessons I took from the session was the question of mixing love and politics.  A fellow conference attendee asked Ms. Gay how she navigates this challenging territory.  "I am a woman and I write.  That is a political act.  But I don't let politics stop me from writing what I want to write," Ms. Gay said. She reminded us that politics should be organic to the work.

Want an example?  Read Gay's "North Country," which is included in the Best American Short Stories of 2012.  I am almost rendered wordless in the face of explaining the beautiful intricacies of this story.

Confession: I am a Women's Studies minor dropout.  It was my senior year and I knew the last few courses to fulfill the minor would be dark and hard and twist my twenty-one year old brain like taffy, so I gave up and took fun classes like "The United States" instead.  It is very important to know all of the state capitals.  Women's Studies frustrated me; I guess I'm a bad feminist.  It was assumed that we would complicate (verb) our lived experiences (what other kinds of experiences are there?) by making the personal political.  I was happy to board that train.  But it was always a one-way ticket.  We never examined things in reverse.

That's what I love most about this story.  The politics are organic.  Kate is a Black woman living on the Upper-peninsula of Michigan, working in an all-male department as a university professor.  She's deeply unhappy with her surroundings but we also learn that Kate sought this desolation to escape a previous trauma.  Are gender, race, and class at the heart of this story?  Absolutely.  But so is Kate's broken heart.  The political becomes very personal in "North Country" and that's why I love this story.

"Taken" by CB Anderson

I spent Saturday at the Newburyport Literary Festival with my husband and he dug CB Anderson's reading from her collection, River Talk.  We're going to try to share, read, and discuss a short story each week in our own personal, world's smallest book club, in recognition that in about thirteen years our son will leave the homestead and we'll need to talk about something other than him.

Our first selection is Anderson's "Taken," which is the story of Michael, his brother Sheridan, and Sebastian's ex-girlfriend Et.  They live in Maine and shoot all the things, then they carve the things up and hang them on walls to honor them.  That part was a little hard for my all creatures great and small loving self but Anderson's strength is setting, and she nails it.  You are firmly planted in the middle of Maine where a random nighttime gunshot and a taxidermist are the norm, not the exception.

I'm looking for change, or the missed opportunity for change, in the stories I'm reading these days, and this falls into the missed opportunity bucket.  Michael is the better man, the better brother, and the better hunter.  He's ready to make a play for poor, dumped, white-haired, Alanis Morrisette-loving Et.  He's got the scallops and wine and everything y'all.  Yet he's also carting his human barnacle of a brother around town because Sheridan lost his license and he's dropping two hundred big ones on little bro at Wal-Mart.  Michael can take down a wild animal in one shot but he's a fool for his brother.  He knows it, Sheridan knows it, and Et knows it too.  It's why she stops making pies for Michael and heads back to Sheridan's love shack.  Michael's the better man, but until he figures that out, he's destined to spend most of his time with dead deer.

The Irony of a Short Story Blog

It's a SHORT story right?  And this is a blog, not the NY Times.  But alas, I haven't made the time to read a story and post my response in over a month.  How can that be?

Work, holidays, family, The Good Wife Seasons 1-4, writing, exercise….and these 24 hours we are given seven times each week quickly disappear.  

I'm taking a look at my priorities this week as my spring semester looks to be busier than ever, and that's going to mean some tough choices about how I spend my time.

I don't know if Shorty will continue to Get Down, and I know that all three of you reading this are very sad about that.

But it might.  I mean, they are SHORT stories after all.

So if you've happened on this blog trust that I still love short stories and I hope you'll take the time to peruse what I've read and recommended over the past six months.  

Stay tuned….

"The Briefcase" by Rebecca Makkai

I started reading this short story two weeks ago.  I finished a couple of pages, loved it, and then set the book down.  Two weeks passed.  This is not a reflection of Rebecca Makkai's cool and inventive story, but of the time management challenges faced by writers and readers everywhere.  My son must be fed.  My body must be cleaned.  My work must be done.  As essential as writing and reading are in my life, sadly, sometimes they get pushed to the side.  The good news is that I always manage to course correct.  I sit down with my planner in front of me and I make time like some people make cookies.  I can't make cookies to save my life, but I can turn my daily planner into a living and breathing thing with nothing more than the force of my will and a perfectly sharpened pencil.  Yesterday writing was pushed aside.  Today, I write.  There's always today.

Now for the story.  I pulled out the 2009 version of The Best American Short Stories a couple of weeks ago with the intention of picking a story whose title jumped out at me.  To begin, Alice Sebold edited that year's collection and I adore what I've read of hers, including Lucky and The Lovely Bones.  Sebold's memoir, Lucky, which details her sexual assault in college and its aftermath, took place at my own alma mater, Syracuse University.  Years after Seebold's attack, I played frisbee and had picnics in the park where she was raped, never knowing the sad legacy that park held in its history.  If you've only read The Lovely Bones and haven't yet made it to Lucky, do read it.

I chose Rebecca Makkia's story, "The Briefcase," because a briefcase seems like something that almost always holds a secret.  Today, they also feel like a bit of an anachronism, like the businessperson's version of Blockbuster Video, as more offices go paperless and iPads or netbooks replace our thick stacks of papers and reports.

I've been thinking in terms of Goal, Motivation, and Conflict in my writing lately so I'm going to approach my reading of this story with those concepts in mind.

Goal: The unnamed prisoner escapes his bondage in what I read as a dystopian future, though I suppose it could have also been in a not-so distant past, or even in the present.  When the guards see that a man is missing from their line, rather than taking the time to hunt him down, they replace him with the first man they see on the street: a professor carrying a briefcase.  When the line marches on, the protagonist steals the briefcase and decides to steal the professor's identity as well.  His goal: weave himself into his new life without getting caught.

Motivation: The prisoner's goal is survival.  We can only assume that his replacement, the professor, and the other 199 men in that line are dead.  Should he be revealed as a fraud, death will be his final sentence too.

Conflict: Using the generosity of the professor's friends and a post-office box, the prisoner lives in safety for a year.  He deals with the guilt of knowing that his own escape directly caused the death of another man by telling himself that in living, he is living for both himself and the professor.  But his plan fails when the professor's widow seeks him out and exposes him as an impostor.

My favorite part of this story is that Makkai manages to pull "it" off without identifying her main character's name, the location, or the time in which "The Briefcase" takes place.  Even without those details, we are still drawn into the world and the protag's journey.  I don't know how Makkai pulled that off exactly, but she does.

"ReMem" by Amy Brill

I'm back to my blog after a month of nonstop editing on my manuscript and I'm happy to be here to share a great story with you.  I'm particularly excited about this week's author because I got to hear the lovely Ms. Brill speak about her latest novel, The Movement of Stars, at the recent Boston Book Festival.  Full disclosure, I haven't read the book (yet) but it's about a 19th century lady astronomer on Nantucket.  I'm going to read it back to back with Liz Gilbert's The Signature of All Things, which is, of course, about  a 19th century lady botanist.  I will get so in touch with my dormant lady scientist that I might just be able to perform some amazing feat like changing a light bulb.

One last fascinating tidbit about Amy Brill: her Twitter page says that she had a baby in a car, so she's clearly some sort of superhero, considering the fact that I could barely have a baby in a hospital.

On to the story...

"ReMem" was published in this month's One Story, otherwise known as the lit journal you can fit into your pant's pocket.  And long story short (pun intended), I loved it.  It's this really cool sci-fi-ish, futuristic, dystopian....family saga?  YEAH IT IS.  You've all read George Saunders Tenth of December by now right?  Assuming you have, because you must, imagine Saunders with a bit less self-awareness and a smidge more emotional connection to his characters (no judgment--- I clearly adored his book, like he cares anyway).

"ReMem" tells the story of Alfred and his daughter Lauria, and his dead wife Elleni is in there too, because Alfred and Lauria live in a world where all of their memories are recorded and can be accessed at any time through various fancy technological interfaces.  The only problem is that Alfred's been getting these nasty headaches...oh and one other problem: humanity is contemplating the possibility of going body-less.  Just upload your memories to the server and you can be released from that pesky physical existence of yours.

A sign of a great short story is that it satisfies while also leaving you wanting more.  ReMem fits the bill.

"Milk" by Ron Carlson

I need to ramble a bit today.  May I?  Yes, it's your blog and it's a blog.  Ramble.

I love short stories and I love the idea of the people that write them.  Even if they are evil or otherwise unfit as humans, and they probably aren't but even if they are, I think if you write short stories you get a free pass.  When I thought Alice Munro was actually on Twitter last night I was so excited, and then felt sort of sad and shamed when it wasn't her.

One of the reasons I love short stories is because you can be in a bad mood, then you read a short story, and it makes everything just a little bit better.  It shifts your perspective just enough to make you realize that, like the story itself, your mood won't last forever.  Your mood, you realize, is a short story.  I'm generally a happy person but yesterday, well yesterday I didn't want to read a short story but I needed to, and I picked a great one: Ron Carlson's "Milk."

Do you know his work?  I didn't but I'm a fan now.  Not only did I enjoy his writing but he's got a great head of hair and I'm a sucker for any guy that can rock a jean jacket.  I think he would be fun to take to a dive bar on the Jersey Shore.  We could play pool and drink beer and talk about the writing life.  Ron, if you're reading, call me.

Back to "Milk." As you know I'm always looking for lessons in the short stories I blog about and there's a doozy in this one.  If you've been struggling with the issue of scale, read this story, the story of a father named Jim.  Here's the grand theme: being a parent is terrifying.  How does Carlson approach his theme?  By zeroing in on the story of one father.

There are the twins, and their generic adorability that cloaks their true purpose in life: to create a sense of fear in their dad that is so profound that it makes even milk cartons seem ominous.  I try not to let myself think of the unique pseudo-death that I would experience if anyone took my child, but that terror creeps in at times.  It hits me when bad things happen in the world, but yes, it also catches me unexpectedly, not in the moments of sadness but in the moments of joy.  What if I ever lost those moments?

I appreciated that Carlson told this story from a father's point of view, because in my experience worrying is often seen as the purview of women.  It made me look twice at his fears and see them more clearly.  If you are interested in stories about parenthood, if you want to study the use of scale, or if you are in a wicked mood, read "Milk."

"Pilgrims" by Elizabeth Gilbert

Yes, that Elizabeth Gilbert, of the Eat, Pray, Love fame and the recent new release of a novel, The Signature of All Things, which is getting great reviews, that Elizabeth Gilbert has a sordid past as an acclaimed short story writer.  Oh how I loved the recent Times story that glimpses the young Gilbert, hawking her fictional wares in the big city, refusing to accept no for an answer.  Then this---"Pilgrims," gets published in Esquire when Gilbert is just a wee lass.  

For the writers in my readers, the lesson Gilbert has to share is to Go There, Go Everywhere, Go at Once, but Go.  You won't write dialogue like that spoken between Martha and Buck, the two horse-wrangling main characters, if you don't Go and Listen to the voices of the lost seekers.  Or you will, because there are no rules, and if you follow the first lesson Gilbert taught us, the one in persistence, then you can live under a rock and still write pitch-perfect dialogue, because that's your way to get there and that's another rule: the only way there is the one you take.

The victory of "Pilgims" is the life infused in Martha and Buck through their own words.  What talent it took for Gilbert to stand back and let them speak their drunken memories and falsehoods, as if she's not really there at all.  The best writing is invisible, of course, and this is a perfect example of that.

The gift that I'll carry with me in my writing bag of tricks is how specificity breeds generality.  You don't get to grand themes by writing grand themes (unless you do, and that's your rule) but rather by zeroing in on two humans next to a campfire.  If you can capture those two humans then this magical thing happens: they become any two young people who are seeking a thing they don't know and can't name, who decide that riding bareback in a dark meadow is as good an answer as any.