I learned yesterday that Flaubert said, “Prose is like hair. It shines with combing.” A beautiful simile — but what I’ve been doing of late is more like raking.
2011 is The Year Of The Short Story! Who knew? Go to http://www,YoSS2011.ca and find out all about it.
A new story, “Red Girl Rat Boy,” has gone up at http://www.joyland.ca, the site of Joyland magazine. I’m happy to appear in this publication, which offers stories from various cities all over North America. Spend some time browsing through it!
“Red Girl Rat Boy” is for me an unusual kind of story, and I’m pleased with it. Some stories just kind of arrive in the writer’s head, and the majority of this one did just that. It’s very short, and a light fairytale motif runs through it.
Also, at http://www.foundpress.com , there’s now a much easier way to get my story “Addresses,” which appeared in January 2011. Under my story’s title (and those of the other writers in that issue) is a link to The FP Store. There you can choose between an EPUD or a MOBI version, pay online as usual, and then receive by email a link with the download.
Recently at http://www.foundpress.com a new story of mine titled “Addresses” appeared. FoundPress is an online literary journal, brand new, and I’m happy to be in the premiere issue. You can read more about FoundPress on that site of course, and in Quill & Quire online, and at http://www.openbooktoronto.com
There are four stories in the issue, by Danny Goodman, Kirsty Logan, Lana Storey, and me. Each story has its own gorgeous cover as well as a brief bio and some blurbs; each can be purchased separately, or you can buy the whole issue. Whatever you choose is downloadable in various media — see the website.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this new form of magazine works in the world!
19 November 2010
Recently I was introduced to the short fiction of Barry Lopez, via a couple of his story collections — Field Notes, Light Action in the Caribbean.
Lopez often writes about human connections with landscape, and often about connections between Native Americans and people of settler stock. His writing is admirable. However, I don’t wish I’d discovered it earlier, because in that case I would by now have read all of his published work. I intend to take my time, instead. Maybe in the New Year I’ll get one of his books of essays.
Something one of his characters says about fiction has stayed with me. It’s from a story called “The Entreaty of the Wiideema,” about a 20th century American narrator who’s in Western Australia learning about a tribal grouping by that name. Of course he does not find what he came looking for.
He says, And I finally came to see the Wiideema as a version of something of which my own people were a version. What we shared . . . was . . . a sense of danger. A sense that it was dangerous to be alive. . . . Human consciousness beckons us all. My Wiideema companions . . . had not accepted it fully. They didn’t shun knowledge, and it was not that they were never contemplative or curious about ideas or other abstractions. But their hesitancy had led them off in another direction. All that they knew, all they believed or imagined, they cast in stories. Stories for them were the only safe containers for what consciousness, as we have it, might have elucidated for them about life.
A story as a container – that makes sense to me. So much intense feeling, time, energy can be packed into a few pages by fiction writers trying to convey what they are coming to see/understand. All that vitality is preserved, for reader after reader after reader.
Lopez’ character means that the stories don’t take away danger. It’s still there, alive and bristling.
Too often when I’m reading fiction I feel that writers haven’t done that tight packing but have left a lot of loose stuff to spill off the edges, where its dangerous force is lost. The story dies. There’s no elucidation. Not a problem with Lopez. Some of his stories are perfection, some not, but he is such a good writer that his failures are absorbing, curious, well worth reading.