When Does a Bunch of Stuff Become a Story? Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses” Wins the £30, 00 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award for 2017.

Everyone who writes stories knows that often you have a folder, or box, or file, of “stuff” that you just keep adding to and tinkering around with and then putting away.  You feel the stuff goes together in some way, but you are not quite sure how, or at least you cannot find a way to put it together that makes it a satisfying whole.

Bret Anthony Johnston, whose first book was a well-received 2004 collection of short stories entitled Corpus Christi and who now directs the creative writing program at Harvard, told Benedicte Page on The Bookseller Blog that “Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses” was in a “process of accrual” for a decade.  He said he would be working on his novel and would get frustrated and leave it a while and write a little vignette about a horse.  When he started to have enough of the vignettes and his character became a “backbone” to them, he spread them over the floor and tried to understand the order of his character’s memory—where it would go next. “The trajectory of memory is not logical,” says Johnston, “ and a lot of time was spent trying to disabuse the story of logic.”

On the EFG Award website, Johnston said part of him is shocked that what he calls “The Weird Horse Story” was ever even published, much less a prize winner; he jokes that he is completely convinced there has been a mistake by the EFG in giving him the award and that any day he will received an email telling him they are sorry for the error.

That Johnston’s ten-year-folder of stuff is a indeed a story has been verified by the fact that a jury of five esteemed judges—Andrew Holgate, Mark Lawson, Rose Tremain, Neel Mukherjee, and Anne Enright—have chosen it out of over 1,000 entries to the 2017 EFG Short Story Award. However, the question that students of the short story might well ask is what made the collection of stuff a story. It is not enough that it is all about horses, for subject matter alone does not a story make.  Nor is it enough that it is about one character who loves horses, although it is his weakening memory that holds the story together. No, there also had to be some thematic significance of the relationship between the man and the material that gives the story its “storyness.” Often writing a story is a process of making, or finding, or letting happen, that thematic link.

You don’t have to love horses to love this story, but it helps.  The central character, Atlee Rouse, is, at the end of the story an eighty-year-old horseman from Texas who, although gradually losing his memory, remembers enough to convince us that the central fact of his mind and soul is that he loves horses. And we love him because he loves horses.  Johnston has said that what he thinks we do as writers and readers is exercise “profound depths of empathy,” entering a story without judgment. He told the EFG Interviewer that he worked hard to empathize with Atlee at various moments of his life, the good and the difficult. The result is that the reader also empathizes with Atlee. The story would not work otherwise; it certainly would not have won the EFG Prize without the reader’s becoming engaged with what Atlee Rouse knows about horses.

In an interview Johnston did with J. Rentilly after the publication of Corpus Christi in 2004, he said he believed that we live by stories, that regardless of how tragic, there is some comfort in telling them. “This is linked to memory, of course,” said Johnston, “and one of the things that I’ve tried to explore… might well be called the mythology of memory.”

Although “Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses” is made up of various details about horses and several horse-related events of Atlee’s life with his daughter Tammy and his wife Laurel, the central event that keeps reoccurring is what Johnston describes as the “most beautiful thing he’d ever seen”: the wild horses in Arizona when in 1983 he makes a trip to deliver a horse to a couple in Phoenix and he sees a wild horse herd, whose playful antics charm him and impress him with their elegant beauty. There is something magical and transcendent about the horses for Atlee; when they run, they seem like one “tremulous and far ranging body, until they came together in a gorgeous line, a meridian dividing before and after.” When forty of them play frisky games in the river, “Atlee’s heart seemed too big for his chest.”

Indeed, one of the things that makes the story work is the almost supernatural magic of horses that all horse lovers are familiar with.  The animal has always the subject of many mythologies and stories, often suggesting the union of animal and human and a kind of animal-human empathy. One of the many references stitched throughout the story is Plato’s believe that the soul was a chariot pulled by two winged horses, one tame and one wild. Others are: A horse’s heart weights ten pounds. A lost horse can follow its own tracks home. After a long separation, horses will put their nostrils together and inhale each other’s breath as a welcome home greeting.

On Atlee’s last morning at the Salt River, waiting for the wild horses that seem like a miracle or a mirage, a colt comes to the water and splashes in. Atlee wants his wife to be there with him to bear witness to the sight, “to feel what he did: that his whole life had led to this moment, had always been leading here.” When the colt goes under, Atlee dives into the water to try to save it, but knows he cannot reach it in time or be of any help. It is at this point that a stallion appears and dives down, coming up with his teeth clamped on the colt’s mane and pulls it out. 

Atlee can hardly wait to call his wife and tell her about what he has witnessed. Although he says he will tell his daughter when he gets home, things get in the way and he never gets around to it. For the rest of his life, it is just an experience for him and his wife, and then with her death and the horses also, of course, it is just his and his alone.  The story ends with this self-reflexive observation: “A passing moment, scattering and shapeless, a story that wasn’t a story at all, just something stuck in his head about horses, a memory without beginning or middle or end.”

What the story thata does not seem like a story at all seems to capture is that mysterious magical nature of horses in their natural “wild” state, and how, when they are “captured” and tamed by humans, they become obsessed, like the carnival horse that is always ridden in clockwise circles and for the rest of its life never turns left.  The seemingly random factoids, anecdotes, and stories of horses that run throughout the story are not random at all, but rather unified to evoke this sense of magical union between human and animal.

Johnston has said he believes that short story collections don’t sell as well as novels because they are much more difficult to read. “Novels might require a longer commitment, but stories demand a deeper concentration and a more intense focus, and a lot of people would rather not exert themselves in that way. On the surface it would seem as though our sound-byte society would gravitate to shorter work, it it’s not the case. However, those that do buy and read literary short fiction are among the best and brightest readers we have.  They’re willing to take risks, to invest their attentions and emotions; that’s exactly the kind of reader I want.”

Indeed, it is exactly the kind of reader that all short-story writers want. A bunch of stuff becomes a story not only when a writer senses a meaningful connection between the bits and pieces that have clung to his memory, but also when a reader takes the time to read carefully enough to value that unifying connection.

David Means, Lorrie Moore, Bret Anthony Johnston: Best American Short Stories 2013

I am currently reading the 2013 Best American Short Stories, selected by general editor Heidi Pitlor and guest editor Elizabeth Strout. I am happy to say, at least so far in my reading, that they seem to have been selected on the basis of their excellence as short stories. 

And what other basis of selection might there be for a collection entitled “The Best American Short Stories?” In my opinion, too often in the past, the BASS collection has been built more on the principal of making a book that would be most appealing to those who want a book, rather than those who want the “best" stories. That is, often the stories had to be representative of gender, race, cultural concerns, contemporary subject matter, etc.; they had to be varied and diverse, conscious of relevant content and well mixed in terms of style—not too much of the same, you know, or else risk boring the fickle reader, who is often happier wandering through the diverse world of the novel than being captured by the focused world of the short story.

But this time, if you are familiar with contemporary short story writers, just a look at the table of contents should convince you that the criteria for this collection is the excellence of the work as a short story, not the relevance or variety of its content. Here are stories by great short story writers--writers who know the technical secrets of the form and how to maximize brevity. Here are stories by Alice Munro, Steven Millhauser, David Means, Lorrie Moore, George Saunders (Hell, those names alone would be worth the price of admission), as well as stories by Antonya Nelson, Jim Shephard, Elizabeth Tallent, Gish Gin, and Charles Baxter, not to mention more recent writers who have already made the short story their own, such as Daniel Alarcon, Michael Byers, Bret Anthony Johnson, Sheila Kohler, Suzanne Rivecca, and Kristen Valdez Quade.  A collection featuring these writers should convince you right away that this is indeed a collection that emphasizes the short story as a form, not just fiction as a content carrier.

I realize that Heidi Pitlor chose the first 120 stories, but I am guessing that Elizabeth Strout, who chose the top 20 is largely responsible for the focus on short story form in this collection. Her Introduction seems to confirm this. She says right up front, “If you wonder why I chose the stories I chose, I would say it had a great deal to do with voice.” She approvingly quotes from the opening story by Daniel Alcaron: “I should be clear about something: it is never the words, but how they are spoken that matters.” Strout makes no apologies for the fact that, as she says, “I did not choose a story primarily based on its subject,” adding that if the voice does not work the subject matter is not important.

As a result of Strout’s focus on form rather than subject matter, it should be no surprise that some stories deal with similar subjects, with no fear that the reader will snort that the stories are redundant or too much alike.  The first three stories I want to talk about are David Means’ “The Chair,” Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Encounters with Unexpected Animals,” and Lorrie Moore’s “Referential”-- all three of which deal with parents’ relationship to children

However, as important is that relationship is, these stories use this “content” to explore more universal human mysteries.  All three stories are quite short—between four and seven pages—and all three depend, as Elizabeth Strout reminds us , more on language, rhythm, and voice than on mere content.  Indeed, in these stories, as in most short stories, content is transformed and mere surface reality is penetrated to reveal secrets, mystery, even magic.

Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Encounters with Unsuspected Animals” is closest to recognizable reality. This is a third-person pov story about a man whose fifteen-year old son is in a relationship with a seventeen-year old girl who, in a description that lets us know what the father thinks about her, has “a reputation, a body, and a bar code tattooed on the back of her neck.” 

The dinner conversation about wildlife the girl and the boy’s family have seen in strange situations—a macaw riding on the headrest of a car’s passenger seat, goats in the tops of peach trees—sets up the central metaphor of the story suggested by its title. The father cannot understand what the girl sees in his son, since he has only recently been playing with model airplanes.  Indeed, the unspoken mystery of the story, concealed beneath his ostensibly fatherly protection of his childlike son from this experienced woman, is his own sense that what the girl needs is a man, not a boy, a man, of course, like himself, although this is something he could never admit to himself.

When he stops the car on a deserted road and tells her to cut the boy loose, that she “has been to the rodeo a few times” and that she can do better, that she is too much for his son, he even feels pleased with his superior tone and how much he thinks he sounds like a father.  The girl knows him better than he knows himself, for when he says there is no mystery in his stopping with her alone in the middle of the night, she says “There’s mystery all around us. Goats in trees. Macaws in cars.”

The incongruity of the father in the car with his son’s girlfriend is made all the more extreme by the girl’s superiority to the father’s naiveté. When he keeps insisting that she turn the boy loose, leave him be—that this is the only “takeaway tonight,” she makes it all more complex by asking him to consider what might happen if a girl came home dirty and crying. She asks him to consider if the girl might keep it to herself and it be a secret between the two of them when she marries his son and she bears his grandbabies. “These are bona fide mysteries,” she says.

He watches her jump quickly out of the car and dash across a creek, and he wants to see her as an animal he has managed to avoid, “a rare and dangerous creature.” He feels disoriented and short of breath. “He knew he was at the beginning of something, though just then he couldn’t say exactly what.”

This is a classic short story ending, with the sudden appearance of an animal when animals were not expected, coalescing the central metaphor, and the central character, who thought he knew his motivation but discovers that he did not know it at all, when he has engaged in an action based on mysterious desires that changes his life in ways that he has no way of predicting. The mystery of motivation is, as I have discussed many times, a central dynamic of the short story as a form. Bret Anthony Johnston explores it masterfully in this story.

David Means’ “The Chair” turns the narrative screw that moves his story farther away from action in the world and closer to reality as a construct of consciousness. This is a first-person pov of a man who says at home in the suburbs with his five-year-old boy while his wife goes off to work in New York City each day.  He is a man who thinks a great deal about the significance of what he does, indeed so much so that the story is more about what he thinks or what he thinks he thinks, than what he does. The initial motivation of the story is his thinking about what is involved with being a parent, which involves having an ideal image in his mind of the best way to live and trying to impose that ideal on his son, but at the same time being glad that his son resists becoming what his father tries to impose on him.

It is the rhythm of this meditative voice that makes the story move as the man considers “the sublime nature of taking care of his boy” and feels the “pristine clarity of the innumerable potential teaching moments.”  And, as usual in the short story, it is this focus on meaningful moments and what they mean that makes the story work. The narrator not only thinks about what he thinks, he also thinks about what he might think in the future about what he thinks now. As Henry James knew well, it is the rhythm of thought and the action of the mind doing the thinking that best reveals the complexity of humans in conflict.

Part of the conflict in the man’s mind is his thoughts about his wife, who has what he calls a Helen of Troy face, a beauty that gives her “a density that was prone to the pull of the city, I thought I think.” The man uses this self-reflexive reference to his thinking several times in the story, saying “I used to think, I think,” reminding us of the mysterious nature of consciousness.

He imagines his wife entering her building in the city, going up in the elevator, while he stands looking out the window of his home, feeling they are riding on an apex, with her career on one side and his own deep solitude on the other.  It is not that he feels jealous of his wife’s going out in the world or that he resents staying home with his son; it is not that he distrusts his wife or chaffs against his responsibilities as a care-giver. It is all this, but more than this.

The one physical action in the story occurs near the end when the boy ignores the father’s warning and goes too near an embankment. The man says, “In a moment he’d be looking back at me, I was thinking, the wind in my hair, feeling, as I moved, a good, manly sense of dominion over everything. This is mine, I was thinking, I think. This is my chance of glory of a sort perhaps I was thinking. I don’t remember.”

When the boy falls over the side of the embankment into the black sand, and the father must come down and lift him back to safety, he says, as he has said throughout, “It’s the chair for you, little man”--warning a punishment that he prefers to the usual “It’s time out for you.” The boy then leans over and offers his hands to the man, and for a few seconds there is a moment of what he sees as “astonishingly pure love.”  But then he takes the boy home and makes his sit in the chair, and when the boy squirms, he says “Your time’s not up.  Your time’s not even close to being up.”

It is a story that cannot be summarized, but must be read, aloud if possible, or at least with your lips moving to internalize the subtle rhythm of a father being supremely aware of the complexity of caring for his son when he is thinking about it, more when he is thinking about what he is thinking. 

I read Lorrie Moore’s story “Referential” before I read her discussion of its origins in the “Contributors’ Notes,” and I kept thinking that I had read the story before, although, for some reason, I missed it when it first appeared in The New Yorker.  The visit to a deranged son, the bottle of different jams, the mysterious phone calls at the end—all seemed so familiar, but I could not quite grasp where I had read the story until the last line when the woman in the story answers the third and final phone call and. hearing nothing on the line, wonders what would burst forth—a monkey’s paw. A lady. A tiger.  And then, I literally smacked the heel of my hand against my forehead and said to myself, in the words of a character in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “The Mockingbird”--“Idiot!” I often talk to myself in lines from short stories.

Of course, this is a story about a story. The reference to a monkey’s paw is to W. W. Jacob’s famous story of the same name.  And the lady/tiger reference is to the most famous trick ending story of all time, Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger.’ Then I remembered Vladimir Nabokov’s famous story “Signs and Symbols,” which suddenly seemed to be the same story entitled “Referential” I had just been reading.  Hell, I had even included Nabokov’s story in a textbook I edited some twenty years ago, Fiction’s Many Worlds, in the section named “The World of Story.” In the Introduction to that section I quote Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who once said, “Stories only happen to those who know how to tell them,” suggesting that it is not the content that makes a story, but rather the technique, the language, the style, the rhythm—all that is other than, but the same as, the story.

And sure enough, when I turned to the Contributors' Notes, Lorrie Moore says a rereading of Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” last year led her to a “narrative dance” with the story, with her as the hat rack and Nabokov as Fred Astaire.  Like most writers, Moore became obsessed with the story and felt compelled to write a tribute to it.  It reminds us that stories often come from stories, some very specifically so. In my textbook, I include Guy de Maupassant’s story “Confessing,” followed by Isaac Babel’s tribute to that story entitled “Guy de Maupassant.” I also include Isaac Babel’s “My First Goose,” followed by Doris Lessing’s tribute to that story, “Homage for Isaac Babel.”

Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” is about a deranged boy who has a mania that everything around him is a veiled reference to himself, that all is a pattern, and that he must always be on guard to decode things.  The primary changes Moore makes to Nabokov’s story is to make the mother in the story go to visit the boy with a reluctant lover rather than with her husband.  The result of this is to thrown the drama of the story more on to the mind of the woman than the Nabokov story does.


At the end of Moore’s story, the woman answers the second phone call and pretends that the caller id on the phone indicates that the call is coming from the man’s apartment.   Although it is an invention, his response makes it true, when he says he has to go home and diffidently leaves her.  And at the end, she is completely alone; the third phone call, with no one on the line, emphasizes her isolation. Usually, in tribute stories, the tribute moves the story farther away from reality into symbolic significance. However, here, Moore’s tribute pushes Nabokov’s story away from his aesthetic exploration of referentiality back to the original referent itself, that is, the woman’s loneliness and despair about what to do about her son.

More discussions of BASS 2013 in a few days.  If you are reading these stories (and if you love the short story, you will be glad you did), please let me know what you think about them.