ebook img

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

715 Pages·1999·3.76 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

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

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.

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.