Introduction

In the spring of 1990, my first novel, Maybe I’ll Call Anna, was published. Shortly after its publication, I moved to Austin, Texas, got a job working the night shift at the local newspaper, and set about writing another novel. Then I fell in with a crowd of short story writers.…

The short story has much to recommend it to the writer, and its greatest virtue, its most seductive quality is, of course, its length. A short story can be written quickly. It can then be read to an audience. The writing of novels is, by comparison, a long, lonely trek through hostile country.

I wrote my first short story—a sort of homage to M.R. James—during a bout with the flu. I might have resisted the short story, had I been in perfect health. Who knows? I wrote the story while lying in bed and sent it off to an editor at Weird Tales who said he liked it and would buy it were it not that his magazine had a two-year inventory of material.

I took this letter as a positive sign, and I began to produce short stories and to send them to those few paying magazines that publish fiction. The stories were returned.

Every writer receives rejection slips. These rejections are to be expected and may even be helpful to him, leading naturally to the development of a reclusive, skeptical nature and allowing the writer to remain alone in a room for long periods of time without pining for the company of others.

But there was something about these magazine rejections.… I had, after all, had some experience with rejection while writing longer works of fiction, and the tone here was different. For example: Several months after sending a short story to The Boston Review, I received a form rejection letter (“it does not suit our needs at this time” et cetera) upon which some anonymous employee had scrawled the following: “P.S. Your submission had a good second and last paragraph.”

I tried to envision the sort of writer who would be heartened by such a statement. Was it possible that there existed a writer so craven, so devoid of self-worth, so riddled with doubt, that he would see this smug pronouncement as something positive? I did not understand, then, how thoroughly cowed and demoralized the writer of short fiction can become as he encounters a world in which supply vastly outweighs demand. Magazines that pay nothing for a story routinely receive five hundred stories a month and take four months to reply.

“Why don’t these magazines pay money?” the new writer asks. The editors of these magazines answer, with irrefutable logic and some heat: “We don’t pay money because we don’t make money.” In other words, there isn’t … well … an audience. Okay, the new short story writer responds, if no one is listening, then I suppose I’m willing to talk for free.

But why isn’t anyone listening? Did the reading public have, in fact, some good reason for avoiding these stories?

I began reading short stories for the first time in years. It seemed to me that short fiction had changed since those earlier days when I had read it voraciously. These stories seemed more opaque, less … well, less fun.

Fun? Not much of a critical assessment, and I might have remained in the dark, were it not for a local weekly entertainment newspaper, which sponsored a short story contest. The winners were instructive. All five winners produced excellent writing. These were stories that judges would immediately recognize as examples of fine writing. The metaphors were elegant and of the sort that only occur to writers. Four of the five stories were written in the present tense. The stories tended to be about childhood and adolescence and centered around some telling metaphor. For instance, one of the stories ended with the narrator watching a child stand on a pier and throw shells into the water. The pier (we are told in the last line) “looks collapsible and strong at the same time.” Keep in mind that we have not encountered this child before. The child is there at the end of the story, so that the point about life can be made.

If these stories are representative (and I think they probably are) of the direction short stories are taking, then the actual telling of stories has ceased to be of interest to the practitioners of this art form. Only one of these five stories actually offered a story that could be told, that would be interesting in its bare, fireside recitation. The present tense (which can leach the drama from any scene) was a clue here. People appeared to move as though underwater (“She walks to the door. She opens the door. She sees the newspaper lying on the grass”).

As a writer, I have to assume that someone is listening. To whom is the modern short story being addressed? I believe, sadly, that it is being addressed to other writers, that it is wrought in the laboratory of the creative writing class and is uncomfortable in the larger world. The short story has become something to admire rather than love.

Raymond Carver wrote stories of blue collar workers who encountered some event or symbol that summed them up with dreadful clarity. We enlightened readers understood the importance of the event or symbol although the poor lout in the story always missed it. These stories seemed to possess a smirky, intellectual superiority, these stories of used-car salesmen and cab drivers and fast-food workers blundering into academic epiphanies.

Well, it seems to me that the unwashed multitudes had the last laugh. The academics could “get it,” but the inner circle grew pretty small. Those who didn’t get it simply shrugged, said, “Life is short,” and moved on to more entertaining pursuits, including the novels of folks like Larry McMurtry, Pat Conroy, John Irving and Stephen King who still believed, like Homer, that you had to be talking to some purpose, that there had to, finally, be a tale to unfold.

Obviously, there is a place for those short stories whose aims and methods are more closely allied to poetry. What threatens the well-being of the short story, what may indeed lead to its ultimate demise except as a kind of arcane craft, is the dominance of short fiction as extended metaphor, fine writing for the sake of fine writing, critical disparagement of plot, and a general disregard for the reader’s right to some narrative movement. When the heroine of a short story wraps a baloney sandwich in cellophane before falling asleep on the sofa, the reader has the legitimate right to demand why two thousand words are exhausted for that purpose. It does not seem enough to reply that never in the history of the short story has the wrapping of a baloney sandwich been described with such elegance, with such an awareness of the mundane, with such a keen ear for the crackle of cellophane and with such sardonic wit.

Well, I’ve digressed some myself—as though you had all day. Enclosed are stories, some of which can, I suppose, be taken to task for possessing the very qualities I’ve inveighed against. I’ve done my best to tell compelling stories. It’s up to you to decide whether I’ve done that or not. I’ve tried to please myself, which is all, really, any writer who is also a reader can do.

I wish to thank Marty and Judy Shepard for publishing these stories, for their enthusiasm and support—and for the suggestion that I launch this collection with an intro.