The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: Fifty North American American Stories Since 1970

715 Pages·1999·3.76 MB·English

by  Michael Martone

The SCRIBNER ANTHOLOGY of CONTEMPORARY SHORT FICTION
Fifty North American Stories Since 1970
Lex Williford and Michael Martone, Editors
SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION PUBLISHED BY SIMON & SCHUSTER
FOREWORD
In Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular (Houghton Mifflin,
1987), Rust Hills, former Esquire editor, writes of the “growing role in all the
processes of contemporary literature of the colleges and universities of
America”:
If one but stands back a bit and looks, one sees that it is no longer the book
publishers and magazines, but rather the colleges and universities, that support
the entire structure of the American literary establishment—and, moreover,
essentially determine the nature and shape of that structure.
The current listings in the ninth Associated Writing Programs Guide to
Writing Programs confirm this observation: There are now almost eight hundred
English departments across North America that offer undergraduate fiction-
writing minors and majors, half of these programs including curricula for the
study of fiction writing at the graduate level, and these numbers continue to
grow. Justifiably, critics balk at the elitist idea of any literary establishment,
academic or otherwise. Others argue that the quantitative rise of academic
writing programs over the last three decades has led to a corresponding
qualitative decline in short fiction, generations of student writers cranking out a
kind of uniform workshop “McStory” on an assembly line of increasing literary
mediocrity. Our experience has been different.
Mentored by teaching writers in writing programs, then becoming teaching
writers in writing programs ourselves, we’ve come to recognize that these
programs feed gifted writers who might not otherwise be fed. Just as important,
we’ve come to believe that teaching writers are perhaps one of the most
qualified sources of opinion about the remarkable diversity of the contemporary
short-story form. After all, other than writing-program students, editors, the
comparatively few readers who buy literary short fiction, and the even smaller
group of writers who make their living writing fiction, they are perhaps the most
widely and deeply read audience of the medium—and often its principal
practitioners.
The original premise of The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short
Fiction was that many teaching writers across the country—one of the largest
pools of people qualified to select stories for publication—historically have had
little or no say about the work that appears in the contemporary anthologies they
read and use to teach writing. Wanting as much as possible to democratize the
process of story selection, we created a database of more than 200 teaching
writers from the eighth edition of the Associated Writing Programs Guide to
Writing Programs during the fall of 1997. Our extensive four-page survey asked
writers and writing teachers to identify the five examples of contemporary short
fiction published since 1970 they most often returned to as readers, writers, and
teachers, identifying for us their level of satisfaction with the current offerings of
short-fiction anthologies on the market.
To our surprise, we received about fifty responses, a greater number than we
expected. Many of the respondents wrote at great length not only about the
stories they most admire, teach, and return to, but also about the principal
reasons why they bring these stories to their classes again and again—their
discussions covering everything from thematic to technical concerns. Sixty
percent of the respondents acknowledged that they are dissatisfied with the
current offerings of contemporary short-story anthologies for their own reading
and for their literature and writing classes. Some wrote that the most
representative stories are never in one volume and that many stories go to waste
because teachers use so few. Others complained that too many of the same
mainstream authors select the same mainstream stories, that too few anthologies
highlight the contemporary and too many lack an aesthetically diverse mix of
traditional stories and experimental stories that push the boundaries of the short-
story form. Some respondents also noted that current anthologies either do not
have enough gender, cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity or their selections are
too tokenized, and that many anthologies emphasize theme over fiction-writing
technique. A large number of our respondents wrote that short-fiction
anthologies are often either too general in focus or too long in their time spans or
too specific in their focus or too short in their time spans. Many, too, stated that
these anthologies are often too expensive or that the less expensive annuals {The
Pushcart Prizes, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Awards)
are often wildly uneven from year to year. The results of our survey seem to
indicate that teachers are always looking for something new, the perfect
anthology, yet the current offerings satisfy no one.
As the editors of this anthology, we’ve tried as much as possible to select
stories based upon the comments and results of our survey, using our own very
different but complementary aesthetics. And we’ve included all but a few of the
stories that received the most nominations.
The most nominated story in our survey, Tim O’Briens “TheThings They
Carried,” is included here. The other most nominated stories were
(in approximate ranking): Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl,” Raymond Carver’s
“Cathedral,” Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs,” Charles Baxter’s “Gryphon,” Denis
Johnson’s “Emergency,” and Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too.” All of these
but one are represented in this anthology. (Because the nominations for Carver’s
work were spread fairly evenly over many of his stories and because several
respondents suggested we choose a less widely anthologized story than
“Cathedral,” we selected Carver’s “Errand,” one of his last stories—based upon
the last hours of Anton Chekhov’s life—since it represents both the work of an
author at the peak of his creative powers and the additional irony that infuses
that work when the writer’s life is cut short at so young an age.) Our other
selections were more difficult than we expected because a tremendous variety of
stories were nominated at nearly equivalent rankings.
Our primary aim then was to choose stories representative of diverse
aesthetics, voices, and geographies, including contemporary “classics” as well as
new discoveries and lesser-known stories and writers. And, yes, we’ve left out a
few of everyone’s favorites. While there’s always the danger that in trying to
please everyone we’ve pleased no one, we believe that this anthology represents
the largest, most comprehensive selection of contemporary North American
short fiction published in one volume. That Scribner—perhaps the most
respected publisher of fiction since the last renaissance of the short story in the
1920s—should publish this anthology is, we hope, further evidence of our belief.
We appreciate any suggestions on ways in which we might improve this
anthology in future editions and any commentary and story suggestions by
writers and teaching writers wishing to participate in future surveys.
—L W M M
EX ILLIFORD AND ICHAEL ARTONE
INTRODUCTION
Rosellen Brown
Fiction writers who meet their public are routinely subjected to a few of the
most famous Paris Review interview questions re-tooled for the technological
generation: “Do you write with a pencil?” has become “Do you write on the
computer?” (the answer to which seems to me about as revealing as “Do you
drink coffee or tea?” but which, perhaps, offers an unthreateningly familiar entry
to the life of the imagination for an audience who finds it too mysterious to
approach head-on). “How (or when) did you decide to become a writer?” is
frequently replaced not even by “Did you get an MFA?” but, on the assumption
that of course you must possess that license-to-operate, “Where did you get your
MFA?” (second only to “How do I get an agent?”).
And then, for those of us who teach, what follows is often the skeptical
question, a challenge, really, which many who ask it have already firmly decided
in the negative: “Is it really possible to teach writing?”
I admit I am bewildered by the almost hostile resistance implied by the
question. Does anyone suspect the actor who has studied with Uta Hagen or Lee
Strasberg or at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts or who has, at a simpler
level of technique, learned to fence or stage-fight? Is there something deluded
about the painter with an art school degree, the violinist who sits at the feet of a
Dorothy Delay or the pianist who works, to endlessly acknowledged effect, with
a Rosina Lhevine, alone or in a master class?
What is there about writing that, to the general public, seems to exempt it
from “learnability”? Is it that language is available, free, to anyone—hence the
patronizing, self-aggrandizing boast no writer has failed to hear, which reduces
our work to weekend tinkering: “If only I had time I’d write a book!” Is it that
“natural story tellers” seem to be born, not made? Every family has one, after all,
if only in the form of the habitual retailer of jokes, clean or dirty.
Any honest writer, I think, will answer—leaving aside the complexities of
institutional ratification or the issue of sending graduates forth with a costly
degree into a sea of vocational uncertainties—“Let’s divide the question. Can
you make a writer out of anyone? No.” (Though you might help some hobbyists
and create a good many more discerning readers.) Can you give guidance based
on taste and experience, and speed up the process of the learning of a craft to
someone with talent and will? Of course. Are you responsible for the alleged
mediocrity, the short reach, of the “workshop story”? Every generation produces
merely competent practitioners of every art—music, painting, ceramics,
basketball (yes, that’s an art if there ever was one)—and then throws up a few
Horowitzes or Michael Jordans to come closer to the ideal than we dare imagine.
If most of us are earthbound, why should we blame our teachers?
Patiently I explain to the skeptical that a writing instructor—a coach, if you
will—teaches first by enthusiasm, singling out the best that’s already been
accomplished, and provides a receptive ear and some lucid methods of analysis.
Mundane strategies, cliches all. Very disappointing, especially if one is looking
for magic, the raising of the dead. If there’s mystery in the process— genius in
the writer or genius in the teacher—it will issue from daring, need, personal
idiosyncrasy and obsession, none of them teachable. But if brilliance, like luck,
favors a prepared mind, then it will be nurtured by a familiarity with what has
gone before and an attention to pesky issues of technique best studied not in the
abstract but on the page, in the most stirring examples.
And what a fortunate course of study and apprenticeship, which does not
demand that we learn the names of bones—femur, fibula, tibia—or the various
ways of computing interest or the precedents concerning divestiture, but rather
the means by which Cheever covertly studs a paragraph with intimate
information or Woolf takes us into the tunnels of consciousness by a control of
syntax that seems to parallel the intricate grammar of our own thinking.
Compared to the mastery of those other “terms of art,” this hardly seems like
work. And so, to those skeptics who say, “You can teach this stuff?” it seems as
if writers have nothing to learn.
Here, now, comes this compendium of what Carol Bly has elsewhere called
“The Passionate, Accurate Story,” not exactly a How-to book but a set of
dazzling opportunities for admiration and analysis that a few dozen
writer/teachers have found valuable to the point of indispensability. I will assign
this collection to my students gratefully, though by containing so many of my
favorite, most finger-smudged stories, it will rob me of credit for thinking up a
fabulous reading list of my own. Of course every teacher will supplement the
anthology with other new discoveries, not to mention the necessaries of a time
earlier than 1970. (Chekhov! Both O’Connors, Flannery and Frank! Delmore
Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”! Guimaraes Rosa’s “The Third
Bank of the River”! D. H. Lawrence’s “The Blind Man” to accompany Raymond
Carver’s “Cathedral,” compare and contrast; Grace Paley’s “Wants” and Tillie
Olsens “Tell Me a Riddle” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Village”! I cannot
teach without them.)
But look what lessons are to be learned here, in the stories at hand. Some of
this may sound a shade too absolute (like Donald Barthelme’s famous dictum
that no one in his classes could write about weather). Still, let us consider the
evidence before us:
That not one of these writers begins a story in a car en route to the action, or
in bed with the ringing of an alarm to signal the arrival of a Big Day. Instead
each plunges headlong into the deep waters of character or situation, sink or
swim, but always, always in a sharply defined voice. (“ ‘Jesus, this is hard on
me,’ says Floyd Dey.” “Cherry Oxendine is dying now, and everybody knows
it.” “The pump repairman was cautious.” “You had to get out of them
occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names: Paris, Oblong, Normal.”
“My sister’s voice was like mountain water in a silver pitcher; the clear, blue
beauty of it cools you and lifts you up beyond your heat, beyond your body.”)
An acting or a basketball coach, a painter leaning toward the canvas, all would
say, and be satisfied with those examples, “What I want to see is a vivid attack.
A sense of urgency. Where is the force of personality in this? Do you convince
us that this is the way it must be?” Fiction is not for the faint of heart.
Which does not mean that it is, instead, for the sensation-seeker. It is not to
be assumed that every story must contain a bona fide tragedy (murder, suicide),
nor its polar opposite, that quiet epiphanic moment when a character looks off
into the trees or closes the door with a discreet click and understands everything,
but gently and perhaps only metaphorically.
Nor do these writers confuse journalism with fiction, serviceable fact-
mongering language with eloquence, linearity with clarity. Writing is
performance. Indecisiveness stifles. Modesty of conception and of style is not
the default setting; it must be chosen. What I want to say to my students, which
these stories demonstrate as a matter of course, is: You are an actor now. Inhabit
your role.
What a reader needs to learn is how to ask questions of the story without the
voice of that coach over his or her shoulder, without the questions at the bottom
of the page. A “non-professional” reader might enjoy Richard Ford’s “Rock
Springs,” for example, as a provocative glimpse at a man who doesn’t see
himself very clearly, a petty crook, self-serving lover, abstracted father, fairly far
down a path toward self-destruction—but how does he show us this? What does
the narrator say and what does he not say that we pick up his signals so clearly?
(But wait: Doesn’t most of this story take place in a car, which three paragraphs
ago was held up for mockery? It does, but not as a stalling device to prepare us
for the action. The journey, in this case, is the action.) For a writer open to
instruction, the “unreliable narrator” is more than an interesting perspective; it’s
a set of decisions the author has made, a technique borrowed from what we’d
call “real life”—people unintentionally show their self-deceptions and
unsanctioned intentions all the time—revealed subtly, sentence by incriminating
sentence, in a carefully constructed mock-world that gives the illusion of reality
and completeness. I remember a very inexperienced reader of “Rock Springs”
saying to me once, “I didn’t know you could do that. It’s like he’s telling on
himself but he doesn’t know what he sounds like!” The next step, of course, is
for the student writer to try that technique exactly as if it were a run on the piano
in which the thumb needs to be passed under the third finger, or the hands have
to cross at middle C. An exercise, not to be confused with inspiration but
instructive to otherwise inert muscles.
Because it’s the vivid individuality of these voices that cannot be borrowed,
however much they may teach us after the fact. Borrowed, they are copies, not
originals. What they model for us, beyond technique, is daring. These
conceptions, no two alike, achieve what Clark Blaise, in a perpetually useful
essay, “To Begin, To Begin,” calls the breaking of a silence—the genius is in the
first sentence, that moment when all the strangeness happens, when the Ancient
Mariner clutches you by the arm like a sharp-taloned bird closing its feet around
a perch, and demands that you listen.
The best of these stories will never happen again; they exist as challenging
one-of-a-kinds, tributes to focus, passion and expertise. But the spirit that insists
they can instruct another generation exists in hundreds of classrooms these days:
master classes, taught jointly by creators and their interpreters. The Horowitzes
and Rubinsteins, pouring out a thousand beautifully shaded notes a minute, and
the Jordans hovering in the air like unlikely hummingbirds though no one can
claim credit for teaching them to do that, are most likely students in those seats
listening hard, taking coaching and eventually, we hope, moving beyond it on
their own. They are learning to dissect without murdering. Watching, or rather,
hearing them find their unique voices is the reward we are granted as teachers.
As artists, payment has been tendered and received the moment the ball or the
note or the monologue has gone out into the air and been caught and held tight
against someone’s body and cherished there.
ROSELLEN BROWN (1939-) is the author of four novels [Before and After,
Civil Wars-, Tender Mercies-, and The Autobiography of My Mother), three
collections of poetry (Some Deaths in the Delta; Cora Fry and its sequel, Cora
Fry’s Pillow Book), a collection of stories (Street Games), and a miscellany
containing essays, stories, and poetry (A Rosellen Brown Reader).
She has published widely in magazines and her stories have appeared in
Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Best American Short Stories, and
Pushcart Prize series anthologies—and most recently The Best American Stories
of the Century, edited by John Updike. She has been the recipient of an award in
literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and
fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation,
the Bunting Institute, the Howard Foundation, and twice from the National
Endowment for the Arts. She was also selected one of Ms. magazine’s twelve
“Women of the Year” in 1984. Civil Wars won the Janet Kafka Prize for the best
novel by an American woman in 1984. She teaches in the Graduate Creative
Writing Program at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago.