Pow Wow or Hodge Podge? Ishmael Reed and Race Fiction

Ishmael Reed and his longtime partner Carla Blank edited a collection of sixty-three short fiction pieces early in the year entitled Pow Wow, subtitled “Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience—Short Fiction from Then to Now.” Da Capo Press recently issued the hefty volume in paperback, and I have been reading it this past month.

Although the book includes several complex short stories such as Russell Banks’ “The Guinea Pig Lady,” Stanley Elkin’s “I Look Out for Ed Wolfe,” Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat,” James Alan McPherson’s “Gold Coast,” Bharati Mukherjee’s “A Wife’s Story,” and Grace Paley’s “Goodbye and Good Luck,” many other pieces are amateurish and artistically insignificant.

The problem with the book is that Reed and Blank's criteria for selection seems to have little to do with the quality of the writing and a lot to do with the subject of race prejudice. Alongside the fine stories mentioned above are numerous short, clumsy pieces that are too subjective, too polemic, too sensational, too melodramatic, or too sentimental to be of any interest except historical and social.

The problem with stories about race prejudice is they are too often, if you will pardon the inevitable expression, a matter of black and white. Many race prejudice stories feature a victim and a victimizer. The victim is usually helpless and the victimizer is usually ignorant. It is difficult to make an interesting, complex story out of such an obvious and simplistic conflict, don’t you think?

I know, of course, that there are many very fine stories about race conflict—both by white writers and by writers of color. But, the very fine stories that explore race prejudice engage us, at least it seems to me, because the characters are not merely ignorant bigots and innocent victims but because the story probes deeply into those complexities of perceived difference that separate human beings from each other.

I know this is a touchy subject. But reading the pieces in Ishmael Reed and Carla Blank’s Pow Wow raised it for me over and over again. I would appreciate hearing from how those of you who teach stories about race prejudice and those of you who write stories about race prejudice deal with this issue.

Is it risky, or even racist, to criticize a story about race prejudice because it is amateurishly written, because it is subjective or polemical and lacks artistic control and thematic complexity?

Is it difficult to write a story about race prejudice without focusing on a simplistic conflict with a predictable conclusion?

In his long polemical introduction, in which he blames the media for much race prejudice, Ishmael Reed says, “Most American critics concentrate on literature authored by whites, regardless of right-wing propaganda that falsely claims that in American universities and colleges Toni Morrison has replaced Shakespeare.”

Is it really right-wing propaganda that in many classrooms stories about race have taken the place of stories by white writers regardless of the quality and complexity of the writing?

Is it really true that most American critics nowadays concentrate on literature written by whites when so many recent critical studies seem oriented toward the cultural rather than the universal?

I probably should not even bring these things up, for I know that I will be called a right-wing bigot for doing so. But since Ishmael Reed has brought the issue up in Pow Wow’s introduction and table of contents, I reckon I have the right to challenge both his remarks and his anthology choices.

As usual, I would love to hear from those who read this blog regularly or who stumble upon it accidently.

Jay McInerney's "How It Ended": Shallow Characters and the Question of Suitable Subject Matter

As an introit to her interview with Jay McInerney in The Observer, Rachel Cook says, “There are some men who you wish would grow up, and some men you hope will remain forever the same: boyish, eager, occasionally ridiculous…fun. Jay McInerney is one of the latter.’’

Well, that may be true when you are having lunch with him in one of New York’s best restaurants. But when you are reading his latest book, a collection of stories that span his career from his 1982 debut Bright Lights, Big City to the present, he is definitely one of the former.

It took me a long time to get through this collection, entitled How it Ended in America and The Last Bachelor in England. I just found it too easy to put it down, and my shoulders sagged when I picked it up. There are twenty-six stories here, and they all begin to sound tediously the same. There are just too many characters, to quote from “It’s Six A. M. Do You Know Where You Are?” who think “decadence” and Dexedrine” are the “high points of the language of the Kings James and Lear.” As Janet Maslin, who reviewed the book for The New York Times, says, “This is the kind of guy whose idea of etiquette is to hold a girl’s hair while she snorts cocaine.”

McInerney’s first novel, and the film on which it was based, brought him a great deal of fame in the 1980’s, for which he was slammed by a number of critics who identified his own lifestyle with that of many of his characters—parties, women, drugs. I don’t think one should condemn a man’s writing for the way the man lives his life. The writing should be judged by the writing. But it’s hard to resist, after reading his story “Sleeping with Pigs,” the obvious observation that if you lie down with pigs, some crap will inevitably rub off.

McInerney says he knows that critics have questioned the legitimacy of his subject matter. “There’s a socialist bias,” he says, “to the consensus of the literary world: a 30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.” But I don’t think it is just that. After reading story after story of drinking and drugs, infidelity and cheating, men who seek serial relationships and one-night stands, and women who seek to marry powerful executives and politicians, I just get tired of it all.

I guess what really bothers me about McInerney’s stories is that whereas sometimes you think he may be satirically making fun of his shallow characters, other times you sense that he really envies the life they lead. Too often, he just just seems to be setting up wish-fulfillment fantasies of a narcissistic life without commitment.

I am not saying that such is not a suitable subject for story. I think everything that humans can imagine, or find unimaginable, is suitable for a story. The secret, however, is that all subjects must be redeemed or refined by style and form. I don’t always like the characters of Henry James or Flannery O’Connor, or Raymond Carver, but all three, in their quite different ways, use language to make their characters revelatory of the unspeakable complexity of what it means to be human. F. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom McInerney has often been compared, could be as much a hack writer as McInerney, but at other times, when he found just the right voice, such as in “Winter Dreams,” “Absolution,” or The Great Gatsby, the result was a magical transformation of superficial characters into shimmering significance. McInerney is often clever, turning a phrase in a witty way, e.g. “You have traveled from the meticulous to the slime” and “Eat, drink, and remarry.” But he does not either love his people enough to make them more than two dimensional pawns fitted out with noses to snort and genitals to exploit. And he does not seem to love the language enough to make them more than mere flesh and foolishness.

What do you think?

Do authors have to have some respect for their characters?

Do the characters have to be deserving of respect in some way?

Do readers have to like characters to like the stories they are in?

Can just the right form and style transform even the most meaningless people into meaningful literary significance?

What is a literary character anyway? What transforms real into literary?

Are there fictional characters you love, but that if you met in real life you would despise?

How is that possible?

Hard Gemlike Flames and Loose Baggy Monsters

Jay McInerney says in the preface to his recent collection of stories How it Ended, “Like most novelists I cut my teeth writing short stories,” as if writing short stories were a painful childhood prerequisite to the really adult task of writing novels. You would think that a man who studied short stories under Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, two masters of the form, would have a bit more respect for the short story than to refer to them as “warm-up exercises.”

To give him credit, McInerney says he has always been “more than a little daunted by the short story.” He rightfully acknowledges: “Whereas even a medium-sized novel—let alone the kind Henry James described as loose baggy monsters—can survive any number of false turns, boring characters and off-key sentences, the story is far less forgiving. A good one requires perfect pitch and a precise sense of form; it has to burn with a hard, gemlike flame.”

The "hard gemlike flame" phrase is from Walter Pater’s Renaissance. I reprint both the Pater and the James quote in context below, for they are, I think, worth considering.

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

--Walter Pater, The Renaissance

A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty, and is, moreover, not composed at all unless the painter knows how that principle of health and safety, working as an absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed. There may in its absence be life, incontestably, as The Newcomes has life, as Les Trois Mousquetaires, as Tolstoi's Peace and War, have it; but what do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? We have heard it maintained, we well remember, that such things are "superior to art"; but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us. There is life and life, and as waste is only life sacrificed and thereby prevented from "counting," I delight in a deep-breathing economy and an organic form.

--Henry James, Preface to The Tragic Muse

Serendipitously, on my morning walks with my aging dog Shannon (The walks take longer now than they used to), I have been listening to Tobias Wolff’s memoir-like novel Old School about a boy who attends a boarding school and who aspires to be a writer. It’s a very fine, compact little novel about the seductive nature of literature and reader worship of the author. The school has periodic competitions in which boys submit poems and stories, which are then judged by a famous writer, who visits the school and has a private audience with the boy who wrote the winning piece. At one point, Robert Frost is the invited guest. After giving a poetry reading, Frost responds to a question from one of the teachers about whether a rigidly formal arrangement of language like Frost’s poetry is adequate to express the modern consciousness created by industrialization and war. “Should form give to more spontaneous modes of expression, even at the cost of a certain disorder?” the teacher asks. Frost responds by telling about writing a poem for a friend of his who died in the Great War. He then challenges the teacher:

“Would you honor your own friend by putting words down any how, just as they come to you, with no thought for the sound they make, the meaning of their sound, the sound of their meaning? Would that give a true account of the loss? I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, that famous terrible grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Maybe it only really exists in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed toe cry. Sincere maybe for what that’s worth, but no depth or carry, no echo. You may have a grievance, but you do not have grief. And grievances are for petitions, not poetry.”

I do not know if Frost ever really said this or if Tobias Wolff invented it. I don’t really care. What I do care about is the truth of the assertion that in art, “Form is everything.” This is truer for the hard gemlike short story than it is for the loose baggy novel.

The highly formal nature of the short story has always been criticized by those critics and novelists who have argued that literature has a responsibility to be socially aware and involved. The short story was attacked by realistic writers in the nineteenth century, such as William Dean Howells, for being false to reality. James T. Farrell criticized the form in the 1930s for its failure to be a vehicle for revolutionary ideology. Maxwell Geismar lashed out against short story writers such as Salinger, Roth, Malamud, and Powers in 1964 for the narrow range of their vision and their stress on the intricate craftsmanship of the well-made story. In 1971, Malcolm Cowley criticized short story writers for having nothing to write about except their own effort in finding it difficult to write about anything. And in 1992, John Aldridge scolded short story writers for being too much technique and too little significance. All these complaints boil down to the same thing--that the short story is too much a matter of form and too little a matter of what social critics define as "real life."

But as Jose Ortega y Gasset says, "The material never saves a work of art, the gold it is made of does not hallow a statue. A work of art lives on its form, not on its material; the essential grace it emanates springs from its structure [which] forms the properly artistic part of the work." This seems so obvious it is difficult to see how anyone could deny it. The problem, of course, arises when such a statement leads the critic to ignore the human content of the work. The related problem is how to attend to the human content of the work without lapsing into the gratuitous oversimplification that the artwork is merely an information medium for the replication of everyday life or the rhetoric of ideology.

"The Five Wounds" by Kirsten Valdez Quade

Congratulations to Kirstin Valdez Quade, who has placed a story, “The Five Wounds,” in the July 27 issue of The New Yorker. According to the contributors’ notes, Quade has just finished an MFA program at the University of Oregon and will begin work in the Fall at Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow.

You have to admit, Quade has achieved two dream victories in the New Writers’ Triple Crown. What’s next? A bidding war for her first book, followed by a triple digit contract with a major publisher? I am sure all my readers join me in wishing her great good fortune in her career as an “emerging” writer.

“The Five Wounds” (which refers to the five wounds of the crucified Christ—on hands and feet and in the side) has generated a bit of discussion among bloggers, some of whom have suggested that it is the New Yorker’s token nod to new writers. I don’t know. Maybe so, maybe not. The fact that the New Yorker is willing to publish a new writer (As far as I can tell, Quade has only published one other story, in the summer 2008 issue of The Colorado Review.) should be encouraging to all struggling writers. For, to the best of my knowledge, the New Yorker pays more for a single short story than anybody else. And you do want to make some money at this, don’t you?

I recently picked up an old book at a library book sale entitled Indirections: For Those Who Want to Write, by Sidney Cox, published in 1947. Cox, a Dartmouth professor asserts: “Do not call yourself a writer, until you can include and shape enough to make a publisher and a public pay.” I wondered if the owner of the book ever reached his or her own desire to be a writer and made a publisher and a public pay. The book was only lightly read—no annotations, no underlining, no signature.

I have read “Five Wounds” three times now—the minimum, it seems to me, to give a short story that aspires to literature the kind of attention it deserves. My first reading simply follows the linear flow of the story, driven by my wish to know what happens next. My second reading is to determine the themes or motifs of the story—identified by looking for details that are almost obsessively repeated, looking for those points when the author cannot resist poking the reader, discovering whatever contexts I need to know about the story. After the third reading, I stand back from the story and try to see its shape in space. My reading model here is Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

“The Five Wounds” is a fairly conventional story, driven by a combination of something old and something new. The something old is the theme of guilt, redemption, penance. The something new is situating this theme within a cultural context that may be novel to many readers. The story takes place during Holy Week in New Mexico and focuses on a religious fraternity or brotherhood named Hermanos Penitentes, which the Catholic Encyclopedia identifies as a brotherhood of flagellants located in New Mexico and Colorado in the late nineteenth century, who, during Holy Week, name one brother to be bound to a cross. If the ritual, which is now forbidden, is still practiced, the Encyclopedia reports it is done so in secret.

I don’t know if Quade has any first hand knowledge of the brotherhood or whether she read about it and it caught her imagination as a means by which to explore the theme of penance. By choosing Amadeo Padilla as her Jesus, Quade picks someone who, if he has not committed all the deadly sins, has done enough to make him interesting. Quade also introduces, for the sake of creating a template against which Amadeo must be measured, a hermanos Jesus from the past, Manuel Garcia, who begged the brothers to use real nails, and obviously does not think Amadeo is worthy. Into this mix, Quade introduces Amadeo’s teenage daughter, Angel, who is unmarried and pregnant and who has come to stay with him. The plot development is clear enough. Whereas Amadeo thinks at first that Angel is a distraction from his role as Jesus, he inevitably comes to realize that, of course, his desertion of her when she was a child has made her the reason for his penance. When Amadeo tells her that he is carrying the cross this year, that he is Jesus, Angel says sarcastically, “And I’m the Virgin Mary.” That must have been a hard line for Quade to resist.

The complex thematic center of the story is announced when Angel, only mildly curious about Passion Week, says, “So, it’s like a play,” and Amadeo replies, “It’s not a play—it’s real. More real…” The ellipsis is Quade’s way of reminding us that whereas Amadeo does not have the language to explain the mystery of transubstantiation, her story is going to try to explore that mystery. When Amadeo takes Angel to see a wooden Christ on the cross, she asks him, “So you really want to know what it feels like?” Again, he cannot say, but he needs to know if he can ask for the nails, if he can do a performance so convincing, “he’ll transubstantiate right there on the cross into something real. He looks at the statue. Total redemption in one gesture, if only he can do it right.”

On Good Friday, the hermanos tie him to the cross, and start off “acting,” but then punch and slug him, and he is surprised that it is “actually happening.” By the second mile, he tries to “get into the part,” but is “just not feeling it.” He asks them to whip him, but Manuel Garcia, the old man, laughs at him. Then Amadeo realizes that Garcia’s mockery is a “gift,” and that Angel isn’t a distraction, but “the point. Everything Jesus did He did for his children.” He realizes that she is the one he wants with him today.

When the hermanos swing the cross upright, he asks for the nails, and the mayor Hermano, or elder brother/chief officer, sterilizes them and they pound them into his palms. It’s a powerful scene, not only because it is “actually” happening to Amadeo, but also because it is symbolically happening—a reenactment of the passion of Christ that at the moment becomes real to Amadeo. However, he realizes that he is not the son, but the father—that Angel is the suffering Christ who says to her father, “why hast thou forsaken me?”

The final image is of Angel holding out her hands toward Amadeo. He knows that she and her child will feel the pain of what it means to be human and that he is helpless to change it. He twists in agony on the cross and the people applaud as an expression of the fear and hope that the passion of Christ inspires in them. What Amadeo cannot explain and Quade’s story explores is the sin of all human beings—that we are mere flesh as a result of the Fall and must suffer pain and death. The paradox of Christ’s sacrifice that saves us all from death lies in the necessity of the Passion that makes possible the Resurrection. Christ serves as the Scapegoat, the one who becomes body and therefore must suffer the wounds and death that body is heir to, so that body can then rise from the dead, the ultimate promise of the Christian religion, the core of Christian faith: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for.” Hebrews 11:1.

Again, congratulations, Ms. Quade. Good luck on your future as a writer. I hope you make the publishers and the public pay.

Junot Diaz Urges MFA Programs for Readers

I just read an interview with Junot Diaz on Narrative. The Interviewer, Reese Kwon, said what surprised her about last year’s National Endowment for the Arts study was not that fewer people are reading, but that there has been a significant increase in the number of people who are writing—that people are reading less and writing more. She asked Diaz if he had come across this trend. Here is Diaz’s reply:

DÍAZ: “ I come across it every time I meet young writers who don’t give a shit about reading; all they give a shit about is their own work. I think that in the same way we’ve had a huge market crash, there’s a quiet market crash going on every year with writers, but we don’t get to see it as openly because there’s no way for it to be dramatized. But every year there is a huge body of young writers that there’s no room for, there’s no place for, there’s no readership for. If we were really smart, if we really cared about reading and writing, we wouldn’t be having MFA programs for writers, we would have MFA programs for readers.”

Although I am not sure there can be too many writers (After all, MFA students don’t really think they can make a living writing, do they?), I remind Diaz that we do have graduate programs to train readers; they are called MA and Ph.D. programs in literature. It is just that for various reasons many of these programs have shifted from focusing on reading to focusing on mining works for cultural and political content and contexts.

All during my forty-year teaching career, I told my students at the beginning of the semester--regardless of whether the class was a survey of American Literature, a seminar in Victorian Poetry, or an introduction to the short story—the class was primarily going to be a course in reading.

I told them that if they wanted biographical background, historical context, social ideas, cultural customs, or political debate, there were many places in the university, including the library, where they could find all that. They did not need a person at the front of the classroom to provide mere information that could be provided more efficiently and cheaply in other ways. I had no intention of being an animated footnote wandering back and forth in front of the chalkboard.

What they did need, I thought, was knowledge of and experience with the conventions of various kinds of writing and awareness of the careful way good writers manipulated language to increase awareness, make discoveries, and change them and the world. Based on my experience with these conventions and language use, I would try--by questioning, prompting, goading, aggravating, and infuriating--to get them to read carefully, closely, and sensitively. My goal was, as is the goal of all teachers, to make myself superfluous.

So, I agree with Junot Diaz. We should have MFA programs for readers. All literature and writing programs—both graduate and undergraduate—should be programs to teach reading. Reading, as all good writers know, is not a simple matter.

Reading Like a Writer, Reading Like an Editor

The July 20th issue of The New Yorker includes three letters about Louis Menand’s “Critic at Large” piece on the rise of creative writing programs in the June 8^th & 15^th issue. Allyson Stack from Edinburgh, Scotland, writes that creative writing programs teach young writers to be their own editors since publishing companies no longer have the time or money to shepherd younger writers along. “A good creative-writing program,” argues Stack, “will aim at making students better editors by requiring them to read intensively, exhaustively, and endlessly—and to read far more than one another’s work.”

Stack reminds us that reading a novel (or a story) with an eye toward writing one is a very different task from reading it with an eye toward writing a term paper, a review, or a lecture. The aim of creative writing classes should be, Stack concludes, “not so much to produce novelists or poets as to produce more astute readers of novels and poetry—which is to say, better editors.”

Stack’s argument for writers being taught to read like editors does not sound that different from Francine Prose’s argument in her book Reading Like a Writer that everyone should read like writers.

Prose’s central point is that to be a good reader, one must be knowledgeable of, and sensitive to, those elements of writing that constitute the craft: words, sentences, character, dialogue, and details. Prose reminds us of something that students of literature often find it hard to accept—that subject matter is not all that important, that what the writer most often wants to do is write really great sentences.

Over and over, Prose urges the reader to focus on words, rhythm, and pattern–not subject matter. By relentlessly insisting on the importance of language and form, Prose reinforces what William H. Gass has argued in Finding a Form: that the artist's "fundamental loyalty must be to form.” Every other diddly desire," insists Gass, "can find expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness and mark of malice, may have an hour; but it must never be allowed to carry the day."

Prose’s insistence on the importance of language and literary form seems so obvious it is difficult to see how anyone could deny it. But of course that the excellence of writing depends not on its content but its language and form is denied in classrooms around the world every day. In fact, the very idea of artistic form and excellence is often challenged in many of those classrooms as elitist.

Prose admits that many of her students complain that reading great writers makes them feel stupid. And indeed, a quick look at the hundred-plus list of “Books to Be Read Immediately” that Prose appends may have that effect. In addition to the “classic” writers who put off modern students--Austen, Babel, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, James, Joyce, Kafka, Mansfield, Melville, Proust, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Twain, and Woolf--there are a number of intimidating contemporary “writer’s writers” as well--Raymond Carver, Stuart Dybek, Deborah Eisenberg, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, William Trevor, and Joy Williams.

In her Gold Medal acceptance speech at the 1999 National Book Awards, Oprah Winfrey told a little story about calling Toni Morrison and asking, “Does anyone ever tell you that sometimes they have to go over the sentences several times to get the full meaning of what you’re really saying.” Morrison wryly and wisely replied, “That, my dear, is called reading.”

Writing that requires going over the sentence several times to get the full meaning is usually the result of the writer’s careful editing, which most often means following Chekhov’s advice that it is better to say too little than too much, or the famous advice of Strunk and White in Elements of Style: “Omit needless words, omit needless words, omit needless words.”

Perhaps the best-known example of the relationship between a writer and an editor, in which the issue of omitting needless words is crucial is the writer/editor collaboration of Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish. In my opinion, Carver’s stories that show Lish’s influence in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk When we Talk About Love are much better stories than the “more generous” stories that appeared in Cathedral after he had repudiated Lish.

Critics who have scolded Carver for his minimalist shortcomings have done so for the same reasons that in previous generations they criticized Poe, Chekhov, and Sherwood Anderson. Clearly, those who spent much of the eighties scorning Carver's so-called cryptic tales for the same reasons that previous critics have criticized the short story in general, were more comfortable with the later, more explanatory versions of such stories as “The Bath” and “So Much Water Close to Home.”

However, Carver adds explanatory information to “A Small, Good Thing” that adds nothing significant to the original version entitled “The Bath.” For example, in “The Bath” the parents are trying to fasten on to some term that will categorize and thus normalize the son's condition, but each time they use the term “coma” the doctor simply says “I wouldn't call it that.” In “A Small, Good Thing.” Carver puts into the doctor's mouth a verbatim definition of a coma from Webster's New World Dictionary as a state of “deep, prolonged unconsciousness,” which does nothing to clarify the essential mystery of the boy's inaccessibility. In “The Bath,” when orderlies come in to get the boy for a brain scan, “they wheeled a thing like a bed.” However, in “A Small, Good Thing,” Carver uses the word “gurney”--certainly a more informative term, but one that loses the sense of disorientation the parents feel.

This addition of such bits of information serves unnecessary and distracting polemical purposes in the long version of “So Much Water Close to Home.” In the short version, when the wife reads about the death of the girl in the newspaper, she sits thinking and then calls and gets a chair at the hairdresser's. In the long version, we are told what she is thinking: “Two things are certain: 1) people no longer care what happens to other people; and 2) nothing makes any difference any longer. Look at what has happened. Yet nothing will change for Stuart and me.”

Chekhov would never have approved of Carver's added explanation, which sounds more like a freshman composition essay than the muddled emotions of a woman who has identified with the image of a dead girl floating just beneath the surface of the water.

I agree with Francine Prose that the best way to teach reading is to teach students to read like writers and with Allyson Stack that the best way to teach writing is to teach students to read like editors.

I would love to hear from writers who have been in MFA programs and teachers who have been in graduate literature programs on the issue of how to teach good reading and good writing.

Forgive a Personal Indulgence: My first short story

Charles May, who has taught and written about the short story for over forty years, has finally (gasp!) published his first short story.

I begin this entry with the preceding sentence—which expresses the humility and pride I feel about this little addition to my resume-- because if this blog entry ever pops up as the result of a Google search, it is the sentence that will appear. The story is available at:
community.berea.edu/appalachianheritage/issues
Click on the summer issue icon and scroll down to my story "This is Me" and click it.

I have debated over the past two months since the story appeared whether I should devote a blog entry to this. On the one hand, it seems a little too self-serving. On the other hand, to fail to talk a bit about it seems chickenshit. I mean I have criticized so many short-story writers over the years, I should give readers to take a shot at me.

Like most teachers of English, I always wanted to write. You know the old saying—those that can do; those that can’t teach. I began writing stories when I was a kid growing up in the mountain of eastern Ky. I published them in a little broadsheet that I laboriously printed out by hand in multiple copies and “sold” to my family. In high school and college, I wrote stories and published them in newspapers, for which I was editor or feature editor.

When I was a senior in high school in Paintsville, Ky, I received a modest scholarship to attend a writer’s workshop held on the campus of Morehead State University, where I had been accepted as a freshman and got a job running a printing press. The professor who ran the workshop and gave me the scholarship was Albert Stewart, a, diminutive man who wrote poetry and was one of the Appalachian Mountain’s most energetic promoters of writers.

At the workshop, for the first time in my life, I met real, honest-to-god writers, such as Jane Mayhall and Robert Hazel, and literary agents and other aspiring wannabes like myself. It was exhilarating for a country boy who loved to read and wanted to be a writer. I think I was probably the youngest one there.

At the end of the workshop, the faculty got together and named who they thought to be the most promising writer at the workshop. I and a man from Florida, whose name I cannot recall and have never seen since, were named the winners. Oh, my friends, it was heady.

During the time I was an undergraduate at Morehead, I took classes from Al Stewart and Jim Still, the most respected writer in Eastern Kentucky, after the less-talented Jessie Stuart, that is. He introduced me to Turgenev and Chekhov and read his stories to us and talked about them. I once visited him at the Hindman Settlement School, where he was librarian, and he showed me files and files of work in progress, and I was definitely hooked. I was going to be a writer.

Then I got a fellowship to do graduate work at Ohio University, and I threw myself into that and put my desire to write fiction aside. I got my Ph.D. in three years and took a job at California State University, Long Beach. So there I was, six years out of high school, and determined to climb the tenure track ladder to provide for my family and become a professor.

In the forty years I was at Long Beach, I wrote some fiction, kept notebooks, tinkered with some drafts, but never really finished anything and never sent anything out. I was succeeding, after a fashion, writing critical articles and books on the short story, and was too chicken to send anything out that pretended to be a short story.

Finally, when I retired, I took some stuff I had saved over the years on my hard drive and started working with it. One piece, which derived from my experience of sitting in an ER waiting room for two weeks in Kentucky while my mother died, seemed to have enough detail, enough thematic significance, enough engaged point of view, that it might actually be a story. So I polished it and sent it out to a journal I had published in before: an interview with Ky writer Chris Offutt and a tribute on the death of Jim Still—Appalachian Heritage, pubished at Berea College in Kentucky. A few weeks later, the editor wrote me to say he was going to publish it in the summer 2009 issue. It is entitled “This is Me,” and women forgive me for appropriation, it is from the point of view of a female.

Those of you who have published fiction know this feeling, but it was a first for me. An editor of a periodical had read something I had written and pronounced it a story. If he thought it was a story, and he was supposed to know such things, then, By God, it must be a story.

So I have some modicum of confidence now. I have tentatively been anointed a short-story writer. The confidence that Al Stewart and Jim Still showed in me almost fifty years ago—that I had promise—might possibly be affirmed. I am writing fiction. At least I think so. I am not sure. One story is not sufficient to overcome a half-century of reticence and cowardice.