short stories

Neighbors, by Diane Oliver

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It may seem unfair to read a debut story collection by a 22-year-old woman right on the heels of reading the final short stories written by a Nobel Prize winner. However, Oliver’s work stands up to the comparison. In fact, although Munro’s stories take place in Ontario and Oliver’s mostly in the South, they seemed quite similar.

Both are almost all about women, ordinary women, with piercing insight as to the reality of their lives. While Munro’s works remind me of how confining women’s roles were in the middle of the 20th century, before feminism’s Second Wave, Oliver’s open up the lives of Black women at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the title story, young Ellie is helping her little brother Tommy get ready for bed. In the morning, the first-grader will be integrating the local school. Oliver captures the nuances of concern and caring and determination of the children as well as the parents. His father says, “‘I keep trying . . . to tell myself that somebody’s got to be the first one and then I just think how quiet he’s been all week.’” In a later story a young woman goes off to college to oblige her parents but inwardly hates being “the Experiment.”

In other stories, parents struggle to care for their children in the Jim Crow South. A few deal with mothers who’ve been left behind by husbands who’ve gone north as part of the Great Migration. One packs her children onto a bus and takes them to meet the father who hasn’t written in months. In response to her daughter’s question, she says, “‘I couldn’t know for sure. … We had to work toward something. Don’t you see? We wouldn’t have ever gotten out if we didn’t work toward something.’”

These stories go beyond the stereotype of the strong Black woman. We see their weaknesses and accommodations. Oliver’s subtle prose shows the self-deception of a rich doctor’s wife and the blank face that a maid turns to her employer. We walk with a young woman as she heads to her first lunch counter sit-in.

So much meaning is packed into each sentence of these stories, each gesture, each bit of dialogue. What is left unsaid rumbles beneath the text, driving the characters down what comes to seem an inevitable road.

Sadly, this brilliant writer died in 1966, only 22 years old. At the time, she’d had four stories published in journals, so was just beginning her career. I’m grateful for this new collection of her work, and so terribly sad that she couldn’t have been with us longer.

These are some of the best short stories I’ve ever read. Is there a short story you’ve read that you’ll never forget?

Dear Life, by Alice Munro

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Having recently reread Munro’s first collection of short stories, I was eager to read this, her last. Much is unchanged: the stories are still mostly set in small towns in rural Ontario; many are about women struggling for agency in a conservative culture; and there’s a lot of leaving and returning home.  

What has changed is the depth, a willingness to take on even darker themes, and even more complex characters. “Pride” and “Corrie” feature characters with physical disabilities, exploring issues of sexuality, gender, and class. In other stories, such as “Amundsen” and “Haven,” men inhabit their male privilege without apology, leaving the women in their lives to piece out a life from whatever’s left.

Some of the stories explore aging: a character beginning to experience the onset of dementia (“In Sight of the Lake”), a couple choosing where to end their lives (“Dolly”). Other stories are from a child’s viewpoint. “Gravel” in particular is interesting because the first-person narrator seems to be telling the story of loss and memory as a child. Only later do we come to understand that this is a grown woman looking back.

Whatever their ages, Munro’s people exhibit what one reviewer called “bravery, steadiness and stoic grace.”

As an author, my biggest takeaway from this collection—and indeed from Munro’s entire oeuvre—is to trust the reader. I’m one of those people who likes to fix things. An engineer in my day job, I’m always on the alert for a solution, so I still struggle to remember to ask a distraught friend if they want potential solutions (with a risk analysis of each) or a listening ear. As a result, I sometimes find myself explaining too much to forestall a complaint of I don’t get it or Why did the character do that?

Munro seems to have no such qualms. Much is left unexplained in these stories, leaving some people disgruntled, as a glance at Goodreads shows. What she’s really doing is leaving openings for us as readers to bring our own experiences to the table. Like white space in a poem, these openings encourage us to engage with the story. They force us to interpret for ourselves the actions and motivations of her characters.

At times she is more direct: “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.”

The story that fascinated me most was “Train,” about a soldier returning from the war who, nearing his destination, jumps off the train and walks away. It reminded me of Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years which begins with the protagonist simply walking away from her family on a Delaware beach, a scene which has stayed with me for 28 years.

“Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation. You roused your body, readied your knees, to enter a different block of air. You looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window. What are you doing here? Where are you going?”

When you walk away from one life, what do you walk into? I imagined him there, holding on for dear life and then letting go.  

The last four pieces are different. She says, “The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.”

I found them interesting in their own right, seeing the seeds of many stories. As writers, we do take bits of our experience and transform them as only one tessera in the mosaic of a story. We get some hints of her creative process when she describes a neighbour’s house in rural Ontario “… that we would never visit or know and that was to me like a dwarf’s house in a story. But we knew the man who lived there… Roly Grain his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.”

The choice of what four things to write about also intrigued me. They are a reminder that it’s not necessarily the obvious events, like marriage or having a child, that change and shape you. It could be the small, seemingly trivial events that have made you into the person you are. And thus her choice of subject matter over the course of her career comes into focus: the moments that make a life. And thus life itself. “So immense an enchantment.”

If you were to choose four incidents from your early life that most affected who you are today, what would they be?

Dance of the Happy Shades, by Alice Munro

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Hearing of Munro’s death sent me back to this, her first book, winner of the Governor General’s Award in 1968. One of my favorite authors, Munro wrote short stories exclusively, forcing her to master the art of compression. Even these early stories demonstrate—to my delight—the kind of concise writing we expect in poetry. Munro is lauded for capturing the life of small towns in rural Ontario, drawing on her experience of growing up in one such town where she was born in 1931. As Hermione Lee writes in the New York Review:

Munro’s “real life” ingredients become enormously familiar to us: the childhood in the fox farm on the edge of town, the mother with incurable Parkinson’s, the studious girl reading her way out of the country into university, the expectations for young women in 1940s and 1950s provincial, conservative, colonial Canada; the early marriage and motherhood in Vancouver, the condescending young husband, the adultery, the divorce, the deaths of her parents, the returns home.

Yet even when I come across some of these familiar details, each story feels new to me and each character a new and different person. She establishes the new character immediately, sometimes by starting in media res, sometimes by giving her an unmistakably original voice.

Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch, with a quilt around her, and the women kept putting more wood on the fire although the kitchen was very hot, and no one turned the light on . . . “The Time of Death”

Now that Mary McQuade had come, I pretended not to remember her. It seemed the wisest thing to do. She herself said, “if you don’t remember me you don’t remember much.” “Images”

Setting and mood, as well, are deftly established with just a few sentences. Here, the narrator has returned to her hometown for a visit and is sitting on the steps with her sister Maddy in the quiet night.

At 10:30 a bus goes through the town, not slowing much; we see it go by at the end of our street. It is the same bus I used to take when I came home from college, and I remember coming into Jubilee on some warm night, seeing the earth bare around the massive roots of the trees, the drinking fountain surrounded by little puddles of water on the main street, the soft scrolls of blue and red and orange light that said Billiards and Café . . . “The Peace of Utrecht”

This story also illustrates why I value Munro’s work so highly. The tangled relationship between the two sisters, one who stayed to care for their aging mother and one who left, is the fire smoldering between lines laying out the events and memories, the encounters and discords. No story I’d read before this one truly captured the roiling emotions and testy skirmishes between sisters that I’d experienced. Munro is someone who gets me. Was.

Stories, such as “Boys and Girls” where the narrator rejects her mother’s homemaker-in-training chores to join the boys doing far more fun farmwork, speak to me childhood. Others could have been written about my life as a young mother. “The Office” begins:

The solution to my life occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt. It was simple but audacious. I went into the living room where my husband was watching television and I said, “I think I ought to have an office.”

Girls and young women populate the stories in this first collection. I’ve read many of her later stories, which only get better, and now am looking forward to reading her last two books.

Have you read Alice Munro’s work? What is your favorite story?

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, by Deesha Philyaw

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The nine brilliant short stories in this award-winning collection center on black women whose conflicts are influenced by their relationship to the church. I knew that the church’s influence on the black community was strong, but welcomed this frank look at how that plays out in individual lives.

In the first story “Eula” two forty-year-old women are getting ready to celebrate the last New Year’s Eve of the twentieth century. They have been friends for many years and, more recently, occasional sexual partners. Yet while our narrator is honest about her sexuality, Eula still wants a church-approved marriage. Most women will remember, as I did, the many times a female friend has ditched them for a man, real or fantasy. Still, it’s hard to resist those lifelong teachings. Setting the story at the turn of the century adds metaphorical resonance to this intimate story.

“Peach Cobbler” explores a teenaged girl’s conflicts with her mother, here lifted out of the ordinary by the mother’s longtime affair with their pastor. The push and pull of the young narrator with her mother, the pastor, and the church drive the story and add subtlety and nuance to the whirl of emotions teenaged girls experience.

Each story is a master class in voice. The women who narrate them are different in many ways—age, sexuality, experience, location—giving each a voice that is more than distinctive; it is unforgettable. As with any voice that we create on a page, each is formed by what the character says—the vocabulary they use, the details they notice, the opinions they voice—and how they say it—the diction, sentence structure, even the sounds of the words. Along with these, voice comes from the character’s values and biases, their dreams and regrets, the weight of their life experience.

We’ve been talking in my writing workshops about allowing ourselves to be vulnerable. Whether introvert or extrovert, we all have developed ways to protect our private selves. Yet this reticence is exactly what we must set aside to write. Risky? You bet.

New York Times best-selling author Robin LaFevers says:

In order to take our writing to the next level we must embrace our strange, unique, and often embarrassing selves and write about the things that really matter to us . . . We need to be willing to peel our own layers back until we reach that tender, raw, voiceless place. We need to get some skin in the game. It should cost us something emotionally to tell our stories.

Award-winning children’s and young adult author Meg Rosoff suggests exploring our unconscious to open up our stories:

Authentic voice comes from unconscious. Examine the connection between the conscious (small) and the unconscious (big, scary; conflict, darkness and death) mind . . . Your past is stored in the unconscious, your own ghosts, the things you don’t want to think about. The best, most surprising, most thrilling writing comes from the unconscious, not the conscious mind. Conscious writing won’t resonate, and your reader won’t feel that they’ve connected with a real person

Fiction gives us a way to explore these raw, sometimes scary places. Through the characters in a story, both writers and readers can go where we might otherwise hesitate to venture.

What makes these stories so powerful are the characters, their strong voices, their willingness to open their hearts. Their vulnerability enables readers to recognise all that we have in common no matter how different our individual experience might be.

And this is the great gift stories offer us.

What book of short stories have you read recently?

Blackberries, Blackberries, by Crystal Wilkinson

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Wilkinson’s first book is a collection of short stories—perfect for my attention span just now! These stories feature Black women in rural Kentucky, young and old, each with her individual take on the world, her own idea of herself.

In some stories, such as “Tipping the Scales”, we meet women who can’t be bothered by society’s conventions. A big woman, “not sloppy fat, though,” Josephina Childs has “sure had her hands full in the men department most all her life.” All her life she’s been aware of how “the whole town ‘bout tripped over” themselves to find out what was going on with her mother in the house Ethel’s lover build for them. So when Josephina wants children, she goes ahead and has them. I could hardly wait to find out what happens as she charts her own path among the gossiping townsfolk.

A few stories are from a man’s point of view, such as “Mine” in which Joe Scruggs complains about his former girlfriend Racine. She’d left him when she found out he was cheating on her. Now he sees that she has cut the long, straightened hair he’d loved in favor of short natural hair. Worse than that, she’s had breast reduction surgery and “black women do not get their breasts worked on.” The voice is pitch perfect as Joe thinks about what he sees as Racine’s insult to him and about Darlene, the woman he cheated with, now his wife. It’s a strong indictment of a man’s idea of ownership.

Wilkinson’s use of voice carries each of these stories. Without resorting to dialect, she captures the individual rhythms of her characters’ thoughts and speech. In “Mules” she finds just the right voice for a naïve girl, just starting to develop and learning to navigate the complicated and risky world of men. In “Deviled Eggs” Wilkinson gives voice to a young girl who is dragged along when her mother goes to her job as a domestic servant and has a startling lesson in racism from the elderly white woman who thinks she is doing the child a favor. In “Need” we meet three characters in a café, two women embarking on a difficult conversation and their male waiter, each with a distinctive voice.

I’ve been thinking recently about the shape of short stories, how they begin, how they end. The variety of story shapes is this collection is part of what makes it so enticing. Some stories spiral back to their beginning, while others rise to a new understanding. Many for me ended in ways that surprised me, taking a direction I hadn’t expected: Wilkinson displaying the penchant for independence we see in many of her characters. I love being surprised!

In every story, Wilkinson demonstrates the writer’s mantra that the personal is universal. These may be Black women in Appalachia, but I saw myself in each of them. Reading their stories has been a gift, and I look forward to reading more of her work.

Do you like reading short stories? Can you recommend a collection?

The Springs of Affection, by Maeve Brennan

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Maeve Brennan was a staff writer for The New Yorker, and by all accounts a colorful character. In his Introduction, William Maxwell described some of her antics such as hanging her large framed photograph of Colette by Louise Dahl-Wolfe on the wall above his desk, removing it later when he said or did something she didn’t like. One day it was back again. It came and went “like a cloud shadow. I never knew why and thought it would be a poor idea to ask.”

The stories in this book, all quite stunning, are set in Dublin where Brennan grew up. The first set seem to be autobiographical. They are in first person and the characters have the names of Maeve and her family. The home is the rowhouse on a dead-end street in a Dublin suburb where Maeve grew up.

Each recounts some incident—whether small, such as a man coming to the house to sell apples or the delivery of a new sofa, or large, such as a fire in the garage out back or raids by men looking for her father during a time of dissension between those in favor of a Republic and those supporting the Free State—but imbues it with such accuracy and character that it seems to hold a whole lifetime.

These stories remind me of writer and teacher Meg Rosoff advising us writers to look at the incidents that stick in our memory’s colander, those seemingly unimportant bits of the past. Yet there is a reason we remember them, and if we dig deeper we may be surprised by what emerges.

The second section is a series of stories exploring the particulars of Hubert and Rose Derdon’s unhappy marriage. Their only son John has become a priest, leaving Rose bereft. Over the course of the stories, details emerge about the family dynamics and the psychological burdens borne by the couple.

The stories in the third section are also about a marriage, not quite so fraught as the Derdons’ but held in a precarious balance. Martin and Delia Bagot lead mostly independent lives, he working late while she is responsible for the house, garden and two girls. However, the eponymous final story, told through Martin’s twin sister Min after the couples’ deaths, gives us a different slant on their relationship, though not perhaps the one Min intended.

What especially fascinates me about the Derdon and Bagot stories are the narrative scenes. As writers we usually balance narrative, also known as exposition, with dramatic scenes. These scenes usually have action and dialogue and conflict between characters. However, it is possible to write scenes that are all narrative. Usually writers are advised not to include long narrative passages, as they can be boring and slow the story to the point where momentum is completely lost.

However, a narrative scene is different, containing all the drama and emotion of an action scene. C.S. Lakin says, “What makes for great narrative scenes is the character voice.” I agree, but Brennan in these stories also shows the value of burrowing deep into her characters’ hearts and minds. Her astute understanding of their psychology, their fears and dreams, their upbringing and social context makes for stirring reading.

For example, 87-year-old Min is still furious about Martin having married Delia, even though both of them are now dead. She believes that his doing so broke up their family, saying of their mother:

. . . who had sacrificed everything for them and asked in return only that they stick together as a family, and build themselves up, and make a wall around themselves that nobody could see through, let alone climb. What she had in mind was a fort, a fortress, where they could build themselves up in private and strengthen their hold on the earth, because in the long run that is what matters—a firm foothold and a roof over your head. But all that hope ended and all their hard work was mocked when Delia Kelly walked into their lives.

This is telling about something that happened instead of showing it in a scene with action and dialogue. Yet it works, because of the vivid language, the voice—can’t you just hear Min?—and the accuracy and precision of the author’s insight into this character.

As I closed the book, moved by Min’s unconscious revelations about herself and by the two couples and Maeve herself as a child, I found myself thinking about my own childhood. Like Brennan, like all of us I suspect, those early years of family and the house that contained us have almost mythic status in my imagination. I can understand how she wanted to return again and again to that well of inspiration.

Have you read a collection of short stories that you’d recommend? Perhaps they carried you away to a faraway place or gave you a new understanding of human nature? Perhaps they introduced characters whom you can’t seem to forget?

Calyx, Volume 24, No. 1

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Cleaning out a box, I came across this copy of Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. I’m not sure where it came from, but I could tell right away that I had never read it. The opening story was so gripping, I knew I would not have forgotten it.

In “Goulash”, by Anna Balint, the fourteen-year-old narrator is in Budapest, Hungary with her parents and younger brothers visiting Uncle Zoltan and his family: Auntie Eszter and their daughter Gizi. They are all on their way out into the countryside, a trip Zoltan didn’t want to take and Eszter is still angry about. But Mum fought for it, Mum who refuses to speak Hungarian, who claims she is “English, English, English.” There is much here about language and heritage and what we choose to remember, about denial and loss, all wrapped in a story full of enticing scents and sounds, the taste of apricots and hot peppers, singing in the night, and outstretched hands.

The poetry in this volume, too, is stunning. Each poem resounded deep within me. Such innocent images at first, drawing the reader in, ever further in, through forests of joy or comfort or peace. Take “Doorpost”, by Laurie Patton:

There is a lightness
when we cross a threshold—
. . .
No matter the sorrow,
every door holds a hope

And then the memories summoned by the room’s objects begin to multiply, memories of joys and losses, of days past, days that can seem like a future—all conveyed in just a few lines. And then the final lines subtly tie these memories to the image of the door, the threshold, the liminal space between past and future.

There is art here as well, black and white photographs of paintings and sculptures, starting with four pieces by Leah Kosh that seem to unearth hidden memories in me, truths I once knew but have let slip away. Kosh says, “My paintings most often explore the belief that there are a multiplicity of realities co-existing and that these realities are our shadows and our mirrors—always with us, rarely acknowledged.”

Four substantial reviews of books by women close the volume.

Each piece in this issue is a gem. I am stunned by the quality of the works and their diversity. There are stories of a girl who sees her absent mother as a star floating in a pond, of a young woman whose boyfriend’s age seems to be going backwards, of an older woman who has suffered one too many accidents. There are astonishing poems about crows and dancing and walking in the dark.

There are hundreds of literary magazines out there. I used to subscribe each year to a different one, until I hit a rough patch timewise and decided to get through the backlog before continuing. However, there has always been one so consistently good that I’ve continued to subscribe to it and read year after year.

I think I’ve just found a second one.

What literary magazines have you enjoyed reading?

Fall of Poppies: Stories of Love and the Great War

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This new anthology comes in the middle of the centennial of the Great War, later called World War I. Usually when we think of centennials we think of celebrations, but this occasion is one for remembrance, with all the mixed emotions memory evokes.

I have written before about the reasons for my intense interest in this war. Poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon took me beyond the dry facts of schoolroom history. My fascination grew as I began to realise just how much those few years changed Western culture and influenced all that has happened since.

These stories all take place, at least in part, on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, when the war ended, not in victory or defeat so much as in exhaustion. They are love stories: romantic love, love between parent and child, love of a native or adopted country. They express on a personal level what that day meant.

The authors—Jessica Brockmole, Hazel Gaynor, Evangeline Holland, Marci Jefferson, Kate Kerrigan, Jennifer Robson, Heather Webb, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig—come to that day in different ways. Some stay firmly in that day while others start before or after. Stories are set in Paris, Brussels, Kenya, Dublin, the English village of Brimsworth, even Pelahatchie, Mississippi.

All are haunted by loss. The indescribable losses of those years, falling on a population accustomed to peace and plenty, left everyone terrified whenever the postman stopped at their door, as Hazel Gaynor describes in her story “Hush”. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, British forces experienced 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of whom died. French and German forces also suffered huge numbers of casualties.

Yet even with the omnipresent losses, these are stories of unexpected connection. Evangeline Holland’s narrator in “After You’ve Gone”, Morven, is a woman of color from Scotland, without money or friends in Paris when she meets a man who has a surprising link with her past. In Kate Kerrigan’s “The Photograph” set in the present day, Bridie learns something new about her beloved great-aunt that helps her find a way forward in her current troubles. In “Hour of the Bells” Heather Webb’s heroine, Beatrix, the native German widow of a French clockmaker-turned-soldier, undertakes a journey out of despair that leads to surprising encounters.

If there is consolation to be found in contemplating these cruelly hard times, it is this: that in the midst of death, we are alive. Even in our great grief, we can be touched and at least a little healed by love.

What stories of World War I have you read?