First Stories
My first published story appeared in Stylus, the University of Kentucky’s literary magazine. It was the era before the MFA, so instead of pursuing creative writing in graduate school, I studied literature. Suddenly Donald Barthelme’s novella Snow White (1967) turned my head around. Sneaking off from graduate studies that summer, I tried writing a novel about the Beatles from a Barthelme slant.
Eventually, in the 1980s, when I began to write fiction in earnest, which I had wanted to do all along, I found myself in the middle of a hopping renaissance of the short story. All around me superb fiction writers were producing extraordinary fiction. Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, Mary Robison, and Alice Munro were all the rage. Critics searched for labels for the new direction.
The surge of good fiction was stimulating and encouraging. The MFA programs had not yet reached their heyday, and everything seemed new.
My own stories, coming out of a rural western Kentucky world of unsettling change, seemed unfamiliar to many readers, but others were relieved to see fiction about people like those they knew—a truck driver, a drugstore clerk, a bus driver, a preacher, a retired couple headed for Florida. The reviewer Anatole Broyard wrote that my characters were “more foreign and incomprehensible” than European peasants, a line I treasure for its comic absurdity.
—BAM