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November 01, 2007
THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT (To continue on from article in Victorian Writers Centre Magazine)
Start with an interview with Stephen King in The New York Times -- he was series editor of the last Best American Short Stories 2007. Some of this content is in his introduction to the series. Particularly funny is his account of searching for the literary magazine section in bookstores.
Roy Kesey's story Waiting is the first one I went to. I gave feedback on this story when he invented it. It was wonderful then and I was thinking to read the story I had already read and was blown away by edits which changed the story again, a whole new level of fabulous! A new ending and more that I could not detect. This must mean that a great story is never finished till it is.
And here is Jean Thomson's response to the King article. I finished reading her SSC Throw Like A Girl and found recommend it highly.
Moving on to interviews with favorite writers on the website of the National Book Foundation. Denis Johnson who published a well-received SSC some years ago has come out with a novel, Tree of Smoke, that is sitting on my reading table. From his interview:
BAJ: In a country such as ours, where reading is in such a state of crisis, what is the role of the fiction writer? Does being a finalist for such a prestigious award affect how you view yourself in that role?
DJ: Storytellers have enjoyed quite a wide audience over the last few centuries. Now it's dwindling, and if the world's leaders have their way they'll probably return us to an era when we tell tales around small fires in caves. But we'll always have stories to tell. It's nice to be doing it when folks still think it's something worth giving out awards for.
Then there is another finalist, of my favorite minimalist writers, Lydia Davis, whose SSC I read a few months ago. She says:
BAJ: What drew you to the stories?
LD: A few of the stories, especially the longer ones, were inspired by other texts and incorporate the language of other people, including non-writers (as, for instance, the study of the fourth-graders' get-well letters called "We Miss You"). I find the writing of non-writers, in particular, wonderfully fresh and surprising, and in some of the stories in this book I enjoyed taking it up and combining it with my own writing. More generally, what lies at the source of these stories is some strong emotion, whether that emotion is grief, anger, indignation, love, pity, or even delight in a piece of language.
Here is the main page of the National Book Foundation for further reading.
Over the years, FAVORITES:
Julie Orringer How to Breathe Under Water
Tobias Wolff The Night In Question
Anything written by Kawabata
TO BE CONTINUED...
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