"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.