Book Review: YOU WOULD HAVE TOLD ME NOT TO

You Would Have Told Me Not To

by Christopher Coake

Encino, CA: Delphinium Books, 2020

Hardcover, 304pp, $25.95
Release date: July 29, 2020

The title of this collection is a clue to what unfolds in the stories as, with unfailing empathy for his characters and a flawless ear for natural dialogue, author Christopher Coake takes readers down one surprising life path after another. And if I say that I looked back to check the name on the cover more than once, confirming that indeed a man had written this book, I intend that as a high compliment: I’m talking about the way Coake gets inside each character’s head so successfully that he seems to be narrating from a life other than his own. Each character, regardless of gender or age, is fully realized, that is, fully real.

In “The First Time,” the opening story in the book, we meet Bob Kline, on the verge of divorce from Yvonne, the girl he took to the prom years before. Out of the blue, Bob receives an e-mail from a woman whose name he does not recognize, telling him that another woman, also with an unfamiliar name, has recently died and wanted her friend to notify Bob. Who was this Annabeth, anyway, and why would she have wanted Bob to know of her death? Looking for answers, Bob agrees to meet Vicky, the e-mailer, for drinks, and as he gradually learns why long-ago events he barely recalls mean so much to a surviving friend, he also relives his own “first time” with his soon-to-be ex-wife.

Often in life, what is essentially important to one person in a relationship plays a much smaller role in the mental furniture of another. In the haunting story simply titled “Waste,” the near-homeless narrator, a day laborer in an urban setting that could be Anywhere, U.S.A., is reminded of a teenage girl (he was "first time”) he knew briefly once in Reno, Nevada. The reminder comes when a new young kid joins their cleanup crew in a building scheduled to be gutted from top to bottom. As is true of all the stories in You Would Have Told Me Not To, this story does not telegraph its destination ahead of time. Rather, it unfolds – like life.

The title story involves a mother, her adult son, the son’s wife, and the mother’s ex-husband (son’s father). A fractured family, these four come together following a shooting incident, but in coming together they still have difficult waters to navigate. Doesn't the title sound like something someone would say to a parent when explaining why important news had not been communicated?

An abused ex-wife (“This Will Come as a Surprise To You”) wonders if she should warn another woman about getting involved with the same man. Has he changed, or is he the same? … A college student (“Getaway”) is separated for the summer, as punishment, from a girlfriend whom he is not sure he loves but with whom he maintains forced, lukewarm telephone contact even as he finds himself in another sexual relationship. Each story, characters and setting, forms a movie in a reader's mind. 

Those with a penchant for longer fiction may want to begin with the novella that closes the volume, “Big Guy.” 

Doug Ritchie had heard the nickname for years, and he’d never allowed himself to mind it. He had no right to mind—he was after all, a fat man….

As was true of the first story (in this sense, “The First Time” and “Big Guy” bookend the collection), Doug is also being divorced against his wishes by a slim, beautiful, successful woman who wants to move on. When after an initial period of wallowing in junk food, Doug vows to lose weight and become a new man, his high school English students become his cheering section. A colleague, Nancy, joins him on the school track every morning, and after a while they appear to have embarked on a new life of weight loss, new clothes, attractive appearances, and happiness. How hard will it be, though, for Doug to see not only himself but another as deserving of understanding and encouragement? And how hard will it be for him to leave behind dreams of the old life with Wendy?

Individual growth, sometimes painful struggle, miscommunication and unrequited (or unequally requited) feelings – as well as daydreams, speculations, fantasies, and newfound happiness – these are the author's subjects. And while Christopher Coake’s stories do not all wear the adjective ‘domestic fiction' comfortably, all focus closely on individuals both as they are in themselves and as they are in relationship. Do we ever “move on” without taking with us everything from the past that formed us, terrible errors as well as youthful dreams?

Want a series of little vacations from your own life? This book will do it for you. Look for it when it comes out in July.

Book Review: TERRARIUM: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES

Fresh ARC in hand from a writer whose work I have long admired -- always exciting! 

Valerie Trueblood’s new collection, to be released on August 7 of this year, will be a joy to those encountering her work for the first time, as well as to her long-time admirers. To call the book a “joy,” however, is in no way to suggest escapist fiction. Far from it. New stories in the Terrarium section, like those from earlier collections and from her novel, Seven Loves, run the gamut in tone from quixotic to grim, but all are realistic and compelling. This writer’s characters are real people — dreaming, trying, stumbling, falling, and going on as long as they can.

In any collection, it’s difficult not to have favorites, and the story that hit me hardest in this new group was “Crisco.” In only four pages, the author weaves different strands together — the global world of spies and other news, a local high school basketball star, a young reporter, a beautiful killer horse, a baby given up for adoption, losses inflicted by a distant war —  to form a complete world. 

“She did talk about her work,” Madeline told me when I asked. “Who, what, when, where why.” Was that all? “Well, she said you have to do that in her job. Know what the story is. She said that to John when he was shy.” But how, that was my question, how do you know what the story is? And if you do, how do you pull it, like a Slinky in the toy bin, out of the mass of everything else?

The quote above comes from the middle of the story (nearly its geographical center), and the question recurs in the final paragraph, where the narrator suggests possible answers to “What is the story?” That list of possibilities was nearly enough to break this reader’s heart! As always with Trueblood’s writing, however, all remains simplicity, even the all-too-human confusion brought to the question — and this is a paradox, friends, not a contradiction. Again, realistic.

As a terrarium is a small, enclosed world, a miniature portion of earth, just so do many of the Terrarium stories show the author experimenting with more condensed pieces than appeared in her earlier short story collections, Search Party; Marry or Burn, and Criminals: Love Stories. One of the stories in the volume Criminals, “Sleepover,” almost feels like novella, whereas “Harvest,” in the new book, is a single paragraph, and neither, of course, is wrong. A story (like a poem) should be as long as it needs to be and no longer. It is Trueblood’s gift to have such an unerring feel for what is necessary and to pare away the rest.

I’ve been thinking once again in general about short stories, a recurrent subject of my bookseller musings, and it strikes me that the readers who most appreciate the form are other writers. Whether their own work is fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, long or short forms, writers are more aware than any other readers of the level of craft that short fiction (like poetry) demands. A novel may wander or digress, without injury, but the writer of short stories must deny herself that self-indulgent luxury. In a short story, every word has to count.

And here’s something else I noticed in the Terrarium stories. While not every question is answered and many puzzles are left unresolved, at any particular story’s last line I never had the feeling of having been pushed out of a speeding car and left on the side of the highway. I felt satisfied. Not necessarily in every case optimistic or relieved but always, in a literary sense, satisfied. 

Shall I add that dogs figure into many of the stories? Is that an extraneous, irrelevant detail? I have nothing like Valerie’s gift for writing, but her stories are gifts to all readers.

Try a Different Path Once in a While

Nothing has been planted along our old driveway. What grows there is of Nature’s choosing. Like any more carefully landscaped drive, however, its flowers change with the season’s advance. Just now it is the turn of gaudy wild sweet peas, happy daisies, bright yellow St. John’s-wort, delicate, pale bladder campion, and the sweet lavender blue rays of chicory. Early in the morning, greeting the sun, chicory flowers are both wide-eyed and eye-catching. Unfortunately, I left my camera's memory card in the card reader at the shop so couldn't photograph the chicory this morning as I'd planned.

Monday inserts (after original posting:

A woods road presents a very different aspect, mostly green now that the canopy has filled in and the blooming of spring ephemerals long past. But there are ferns, and you may find the wild rose-like petals that promise blackberries in the near future. Little wild geraniums, storksbill and cranesbill, seem to be happy anywhere, in the sun or in the shade.

Beaches, bogs, wandering creeks, lakesides – each habitat offers something different out of nature's variety. The same diversity holds true with fiction. Each genre, in all different lengths, presents a different kind of reading experience, all of them valuable.

Two of my Michigan guest authors in July are writers of adult fiction, and both their new books are short story collections. Some bookstore customers, I know, resist short stories, not wanting to meet and have to get to know new characters in every new “chapter,” as it were, but Kelly Fordon and L.E. (Lynn) Kimball have demolished that objection by linking their stories, so that the overall effect in each case is very similar to that a reader experiences in reading a novel.

Garden for the Blind, by Kelly Fordon, is set in the contrasting worlds of suburban materialism and urban decay of southeast Michigan. (Here is a good review.) Alice can perhaps be thought of as the central character, for it is Alice we meet first, as a child, in “The Great Gatsby Party,” and it is Alice and her daughter’s story, “Garden for the Blind,” that conclude the volume, though the cast of characters as a whole is large and diverse. This is a book that overcomes your aesthetic distance (and, at times, moral repugnance) gradually, pulling you in slowly and almost imperceptibly, until you catch your breath, literally, having arrived at empathy.

L.E. Kimball’s Seasonal Roads is set in the Upper Peninsula and features three generations of U.P. women. I reviewed this book in the spring but want to reiterate here the sense the stories give of a longer work, what some would call a “nonlinear novel.”

Wayne State University, the publisher of both these books, does not publish novels. They do publish short story collections. But what I’m telling you is that if you’re a reader of novels who generally eschews short stories, you need to give these two WSU titles the benefit of the doubt. Either one is an excellent introduction to the high literary quality of today’s Michigan fiction. The authors are coming to Dog Ears Books not only because they want to come but because I am able to recommend their work without qualification.

Kelly Fordon is coming to Dog Ears Books on Thursday, July 14, from 1-3 p.m., to read from her book and sign books for customers.

Lynn Kimball will be here the following week, on Friday, July 22, from 1-3 p.m. She also will read excerpts and sign books.

I hope all local readers of fiction will decide to give these short story authors a hearing and reading. It is a privilege to have them come to Northport.

Reading Alice Munro on a Blustery Day

Freshly turned soil drew gulls on Monday

Imagine you are home alone with a big tin full to the brim of Oreo cookies. I don’t know if Oreo cookies were ever available in tins, but imagine that they were, and that you have a tinful. You also have a supply of more grownup treats – maybe rice crackers and rolled anchovies or fresh avocadoes and slabs of good bakery rye bread. Whatever you love that gives you a feeling of sybaritic luxury. Something exotic to drink, too, like a bottle of Calvados, taken in small, languorous sips. But those Oreo cookies, too, don’t forget, and no one else in the house. Maybe the wind is from the east, as it was on Monday, a cold, blustery wind driving everyone indoors who had a choice in the matter. Driving you indoors to cozy down with your factory-made cookies and high-status alcohol and upper-class foodie treats. No, I didn't have all those: it just felt like it, reading this book. Alone with adolescent dreams and adult memories -- that’s the atmosphere created by the stories of Alice Munro in Lives of Girls and Women.

It isn’t necessary to have grown up in Ontario. The American Midwest will do, or the South. Why not the Great Plains? The East or West Coast, no, probably not. This is fiction from the interior of the continent, recollected dreams of anticipation, from places young people dream of escaping, although the majority never do.

*   *   *

This coming Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day, but I’d rather think of a week, or at least part of one – beginning, let’s say, on Wednesday, so make that Wednesday through Saturday, this week. Come in any of those days, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and find new titles waiting for you, along with a number of newly arrived used books, some shelved with their subject companions, others – temporarily -- in the “Newly Arrived” section, simplifying browsing for frequent visitors. At Dog Ears Books, every day is potluck and a treasure hunt, to boot.

And now, meanwhile, and à propos of none of the foregoing, if you’re looking for a good movie, I recommend “Bridge of Spies,” starring Tom Hanks. Hanks plays Jim Donovan, an insurance lawyer asked to defend a Soviet spy because the Americans want to show that in the U.S., even a spy is allowed a defense in a court of law. (The Fifties were more than Ozzie and Harriet: they were also the Cold War.) The arrangement is more for show than anything else, but Donovan takes it seriously. That's the first complication. Meanwhile, the C.I.A. has hand-picked a group of pilots to fly the new U-2 planes and take photographs of Soviet ground installations. Also, Donovan's kids are shown a movie of the atom bomb in school. They learn about the kind of destruction of brings and get taught the "Duck and cover" routine. (The son, like Jim, takes things seriously: he comes home and fills the bathtub with water, telling his dad there wouldn't be time to do it if they were caught unprepared.) Donovan attracts public hatred for defending the spy, and his wife and children become targets. Then Gary Powers is shot down (and, coincidentally and close in time, a young university student gets caught on the wrong side of the new wall in Berlin), and Donovan is asked to go secretly to East Berlin – not even his family is to know he’s gone, and he has no official government role or protection -- to negotiate with the Soviets for a trade, Abel (the Soviet spy) for Powers. Period details are beautifully done, as is every other aspect of the film, but it's the character of Jim Donovan that carries the story.

And for Paris dreaming, here at last is a new offering on my kitchen blog.

I am not working outdoors today!

Book Review: CRIMINALS: LOVE STORIES

Previous and current collections

Criminals: Love Stories

by Valerie Trueblood

Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2016

Paper, $16.95

Valerie Trueblood’s writing has called elegant, and the word is apt, but her stories also possess a decidedly feral quality. Found earlier in her nonlinear novel, Seven Loves (2007), as well as in her previous collection of short stories, Search Party (2013), wildness comes to the fore in this new volume, Criminals: Love Stories.

In this new book, within the most ordinary family or inside a quiet older woman’s heart or deep in the past of a gentle and generous young man run subterranean currents of violence. But if we are surprised, we should not be (except for the specifics of each story given us by Trueblood’s imagination and craft), for there is real life in these fictions. Here, as in the best of novels and short stories, reality -- the ambiguity of surfaces and the hiddenness of truth -- is the source of the writing’s power.

The collection’s stories range in length from two to 37 pages. In some, action unfolds chronologically for the most part, while in others readers are quickly transported from present to past, where lengthy flashbacks set the stage to explain the present to which we eventually, if briefly, return. In all the stories, as whenever we meet someone who is at first a stranger, it is only gradually, one puzzle piece at a time, that we can form -- and then correct and re-form, sometimes repeatedly -- a picture of who these people might be.

In “Skylab,” set in Malaysia, an American doctor’s wife finds herself doubting her old family legend that she, the only daughter, was protected by a magic spell. In the Koran study group where she meets with other foreign women, she notes the moment “when the planned topic would wilt of its own accord like a parachute that had made it to earth,” and at her own cocktail party she wonders why there are so many people she can’t stand in her life now. In the story's present, Skylab is falling to earth. Where will it land? On the innocent or the guilty? And which is she, and how did she come to land in this strange place?

Another young married woman, Shannon, in “Kisses,” puts together a business plan and persuades the bank to loan money to her and her husband, a veteran of the fighting in Afghanistan. She had to see the loan officer by herself.

Garth looked good to the bank. The military, the jobs in high school. Knowing how to lay sod and bed stone looked good, she could tell, despite the fact that the man behind the desk spent the whole time studying her, up and down.

She remembers the way her husband had been in high school.

A boy born to kiss finds that out the way you might realize you can draw, or do math. His ways come naturally to him.

What became of that boy, now so silent and removed, perhaps a container of potential violence? Can he even be trusted with a dog?

I rationed my reading of this book to one story per morning, not wanting to rush from one to the next, losing sight of each in the one that followed, but instead giving myself the luxury of a longer experience -- and also giving each story its due consideration. So it was Sunday when I reached “Sleepover,” perfect for that long, quiet morning.

The story “Sleepover,” the longest in the book, felt the most like a film or a stage play. Like others in the collection, it employs flashbacks, but there is a large cast of characters in the present, onstage, as it were, and things keep happening, one thing after another, the situation continually in flux. Yet the action never becomes comic or even hectic. The author is in control through every line.

Here is the setup: A grandmother recovering from heart surgery has come to visit her daughter and granddaughter. The granddaughter celebrates her 14^th birthday, and the following night, after her mother leaves town on business, she has a slumber party with four girlfriends, chaperoned by her visiting grandmother and the Cambodian housekeeper. A teenage boy breaches the home security with the help of the granddaughter, but later the expensive system is tripped, bringing onto the scene the bodyguard of one of the girls, followed by two city policemen. Who is in danger and from whom? Assaults come from both expected and unexpected quarters, and new evidence casts a changing light on all present. (Cham, the housekeeper, has her own horrific background, as does the uninvited boy.) Time, meanwhile, folds upon itself, bringing past and present together.

(No spoilers! You have to read it yourself. I think it is the necessarily careful pace of the grandmother, who must guard her still-recovering heart, that serves to contain the action, but I'll need to re-read the story again to test my hypothesis.)

One of the most surprising pieces in the book declines to be called a story at all. In “Novel of Rose,” the author gives a sketch of what we would learn about a set of characters if a novel were to be written about them. Four pages, inconclusive – and yet leaving haunting images in its wake.

Trueblood’s accomplishments in Criminals: Love Stories will not surprise readers of her previous books. They, like I, will have been eager for new stories from this gifted writer, and now the new stories are here. What a glorious gift in bleak midwinter!

What Does a Story Need?

Critics and fans alike have struggled for decades over what to call The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett, and so I suggested to the Fearless Leader of our Ulysses Reading Circle that when we discussed Pointed Firs we should address the question, “Is it a novel?” He was somewhat shocked, but I raised the question, anyway. We were only seven that evening, and I abstained from answering right away. Only one person immediately answered with a resounding “No!”

“Why not?” others asked.

“Nothing happens!”

Voices were raised around the table, five people eagerly and simultaneously enumerating various events from Jewett’s pages. “They go out to the island!” “She visits the old man!” “They go to the reunion!”

Yes, there are these quietly related events, but what is lacking is conflict, or, to put it more generally, tension.

“I loved it!” “I did, too!” Pointed Firs defenders were staunch and vocal around the table, although one of them admitted the story had “no dramatic arc.”

I said I meant nothing derogatory by saying it wasn’t a novel. Neither was I was saying it should have been different. I loved the book, too. I think the place itself is the main character, and it’s a charming place -- although I couldn’t help thinking the narrator’s impressions of the place might be different if she were a fulltime, year-round resident. It’s easy for annual visitors to see a place through rose-colored glasses. I admitted that Grand Marais is my Dunnet Landing. Perhaps Willcox, Arizona, even if I never return, is another, but I recognize that my feelings for those places don’t take into account the struggles people making Grand Marais or Willcox their homes and needing to make a living there. Vacation, after all, is a very different kettle of fish. But I digress....

Jewett herself, according to Willa Cather, never referred to this work as a novel or even as stories. Her term was sketches. (See “Miss Jewett,” in Cather’s Not Under Forty, published in 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf.) That intrigues me, as it suggests that there might be a form of fiction besides novels and stories.

Perhaps no tension is required of a sketch? In visual art, we do not expect of something is called a sketch all the qualities of a finished oil painting. And yet sketches have their own charm. Done well, literary sketches, too, can be delightful. And who is to say that a sketch lacks anything if it is everything its author intended?

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by Stephen Leacock, is in a very different vein from Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. Whereas Jewett shows the beauty and dignity of ordinary lives in a remote place, Leacock’s intent is humor. He holds up and exposes his main characters to our ridicule and laughter – and yet, he does so gently, even lovingly. Truly, we must laugh at ourselves when we laugh at the people in Leacock’s little Canadian village, for inflated self-worth and self-importance can be found in towns of all sizes. Doesn’t each one of us imagine ourselves the center of our world? And how silly is that, in all the enormity of the universe?

In Leacock’s book, as in Jewett’s, there is chronology, and there is one major event (the sinking of the picnic boat) to which smaller events lead, as in Pointed Firs (the reunion), but at no time in either book do we fear disaster. Whatever there is of pain in Jewett lies in the past and has been smoothed and mellowed by the passage of time. In Leacock, conflicts arise in the story as it develops, but the reader cannot be terribly concerned, since the author’s tone is saying all along, “Tempest in a teapot, isn’t it silly?”

On Saturday, looking for something else on my store shelf of writers’ helps, my eye stopped on The Essence of Fiction, by Malcolm McConnell. I have a friend who wants to turn a piece of memoir writing into fiction and isn’t sure how to proceed. Maybe she wonders where to start. Anyway, I brought the book home with the thought that it might shed light on my friend’s problem, as well as on my own meditations on what constitutes a story.

Malcolm takes a clear stand: fiction is drama. What the playwright creates for the stage, the novelist or short story writer must bring alive for readers on the printed page, but the very essence of fiction is always a dramatic core. Take Malcolm seriously on this point, and you’ll hardly be surprised to have him tell you next that the scene is the basic building block of all fiction.

Here is the list of scenic elements from Malcolm’s assignment sheet to his students:

o    Believable and Relevant Physical Setting
o    Point of View
o    Problem or Conflict Situation
o    Dialogue (or Monologue or Thought)
o    Relevant Physical Action
o    Relevant, Original Descriptive Metaphor
 From The Essence of Fiction: A Practical handbook for Successful Writing, by Malcolm McConnell (NY: Norton, 1986), p 37

(I have highlighted “problem or conflict situation” in red, since it is my major concern.)

In his discussion of the “problem or conflict situation,” McConnell does not even bother to argue that conflict is necessary. There is no drama without conflict; therefore, if fiction is drama, conflict must be present in all fiction, if it is to be worthy of the name. That’s a given, not something that needs stating except as it must be part of each scene:

Somewhere in any scene there must be dramatically revealed some aspect of the overall conflict of the story.

Malcolm quotes a friend and fellow writing teacher, Will Knott, who wrote in The Craft of Fiction that fiction is always about people in trouble.

...I take this one step further. Fiction is never about people with no problem or conflict in their lives. At first examination, this may seem perverse, that literature, one of the most respected art forms of Western civilization, is entirely devoted to the negative aspects of life. Be that as it may, the fact remains, that all effective drama, on the stage or in the pages of a fictional work, involves characters faced with one kind of problem or another.

Lest his reader turn away from all this gloom, he adds,

This central core of conflict, of course, does not necessarily mean that the writer must accentuate the negative side of life.

Perhaps the central character will rise to a challenging occasion, triumph over adversity, learn valuable lessons for the future. Whether or not there is a happy ending, however, drama and fiction, unlike the chronicle of factual events most of us recognize as history, allow us a special way to share emotionally in the experience of characters onstage and in books. Like us, the writing teachers say, fictional characters face problems, and that is what captures our interest. Without a problem, without a conflict -- no reason for the reader to keep turning pages.

What, then, accounts for the love so many readers feel for The Country of the Pointed Firs?

Nature is never static, and no one season of the year and no single day, not even the solstices, give us time in which “nothing happens.” If we are very fortunate, however, there may be moments or days or even seasons in our lives that seem uneventful, stretches that flow so gently we have the illusion of time standing still. Those peaceful moments will be lost, and time will resume its headlong rush. But recollection of an illusory season of stillness – perhaps that is inspiration for the literary sketch.

What do you think? Can a sketch be called fiction if it has no conflict? Can something that lacks tension be called a story? Or is it dealing in contradictions to say so? 

And finally, in your limited reading time (because reading time is always limited for all of us), are such slight productions, whatever we call them, worth reading?

A Lot More to It Than Word Count

I. Revisiting an Old Question

A while back -- and not for the first time -- I was musing on the difference between novels and short stories. I revert to this subject again and again, in part because so many modern fiction readers avoid short stories like the plague, and, as a bookseller, I’m always trying to figure out why.

So many gifted writers work in short forms, and you’d think that, with busy schedules and multiple demands on limited time, readers would embrace the short story eagerly. Such is not my experience as a bookseller, however, and it is not, with a few outstanding exceptions, the experience of most writers trying to place short story collections, either. I’ve heard writers blame agents and publishers for treating novelists like stars and fending off short story collections, but agents want what they can sell to publishers, and publishers want what the public will buy. The question is why short stories are such a hard sell. Because they are. So I’m continually looking at the forms themselves for clues to an answer.

What I came up with in my last musing session was that a short story is more like a movie, a novel more like a long television series. Clearly, that distinction (whether you buy it or not) is made from the reader/viewer’s point of view, but it hardly solves the avoidance problem, since very few watchers of series programs avoid movies. I guess my distinction gave a pitch for stories (“Try them!”) rather than answering the question I’d posed.

The brilliant fiction writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, in a recent interview, gave as analogy to the short story/novel distinction the contrast between dating and marriage.

No need to be honest or consistent or thorough on a date—just be interesting. Mysterious is good on a date.

Flash fiction, she adds, is like a one-night stand. Campbell sees the short story reader as taking a brief dip into “a magical world of suspended disbelief,” easily entered, easily left behind (a date), unlike the experience of being immersed in a novel (committed to marriage).

Well, as good as that sounds, I wonder. I believe in the characters and situations of good short stories as much as those in good novels. They feel very real to me. Besides that, short stories can have downright haunting power. (Campbell’s are definitely haunting!) Continuing to push on her analogy, I’d say that even a one-night stand can be a life-changer, for better or for worse. (“Novels can brilliant, life-changing.”) “Trailing the novel’s blood” into your real life after you lay the book down? A reader coming to the last page of a short story has no guarantee she will not trail its blood through her real life for days and weeks to come! Exiting the world of the short story does not necessarily mean leaving it behind, since that world can enter the reader and inhabit the heart and mind in a most disturbing way long after the book has been closed.

II. Stumbling Upon a Path

“By appointment or chance” is a good description of my reading life. Our reading circle discussions, review copies, long-awaited books by favorite authors: all of these might be called reading by appointment. The vast majority of my reading, however, falls into the “by chance” category, especially since the majority of books in my bookshop are used volumes. Chance is a lovely feature of life! While a planned experience may disappoint or exceed expectations, the chance encounter carries no baggage. A book comes to hand. I open it and begin to read. Either I set it aside or continue. Not much lost either way.

[Digression. This is for authors and publishers, something I have learned in my years as a bookseller. The cover of a book must say “Pick me up!” The open book in hand must say, “Don’t put me down!” I told this to Bonnie Jo Campbell, and she urged me to write it somewhere, so here it is, and now it's yours to do with what you will.]

And so, not long ago, into my hands came a little volume called The Reaper Essays. The Reaper was a journal not of but about poetry. Criticism, that is. In the journal two writers (both poets themselves), Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell, created a persona from which to expound their views on modern poetry.

Most fundamentally, they decried the absence of narrative, and they were nothing if not prescriptive. The first of their ten demands (“How to Write Narrative Poetry: A Reaper Checklist”) was for a poem to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Just as it is hard to get the whole story, it is hard to allow a story to tell itself. Poets become enamored of a segment, an anecdote, and are content with nothing more. When this occurs, like the detached tail of a lizard, the story just wriggles and dies.

That, you understand, is a prescription for narrative poetry and criticism of modern poetry the authors see as failing, from two writers. Their view is not the view of the literary majority of critics (and how would it pertain to something like haiku?), but it can hardly be dismissed as uninteresting, uninformed, or incoherent. The entire book of essays is one I recommend to any writer of poetry or prose. Agree of disagree, you will find food for thought.

Okay, now fast forward a couple of days, when my new issue of New York Review of Books (January 14, 2016) arrives and turn to a review by Charles Baxter of a new volume of short stories, Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories, by Joy Williams. Baxter examines the short fiction in Williams’s book through the lens of Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, first published in book form (earlier O’Connor gave lectures on the subject) in 1963. Baxter seems to agree with O’Connor’s claim that “we do not identify with most short-story characters.” (I’m not sure about that, but for the sake of argument....) O’Connor believed short fiction to be, as O’Connor puts it, “a more private art than that of the novel,” its characters “more solitary, isolated, and uncommunicative,” the main feeling delivered, therefore, that of loneliness.

Baxter goes from there to the stories in Visiting Privilege, narratives he finds thriving on

...impulsive action that comes out of nowhere, that is unpremeditated, unplanned, and unconsidered and is therefore inexplicable.

Baxter notes that short stories don’t have time to develop lengthy histories.

But if you cut out much of a character’s history, you also cut out much of his motivation for action. ...[W]ith the contraction of narrative time, and with the character’s past chopped off and a possible future truncated or missing altogether, the protagonist simply acts, going from here to there without entirely grasping why she did what she did and often having no idea of how she ended up where she is now. She experiences the tyranny of the present presiding over an obliterated past.

I should confess that I have not yet read any fiction by Joy Williams. I will in the near future. My interest today, however, is the way her stories are characterized by Charles Baxter.

A few years ago I devoted a winter to writing fiction and achieved a complete draft of what I called a “cycle” of ten short stories (still homeless, by the way) linked by a common setting. More than one reader was intrigued and pleased while reading individual stories but ultimately frustrated by not having any answer to the question, “Then what happens?” I felt the question was unfair. These were short stories, not novel summaries!

But now, having read Jarman & McDowell, and in the wake of chewing over the Baxter review, looking back over my own short story collection and what I still think of as the most successful poem I ever wrote (that's my opinion and perhaps only mine) and recalling conversations with bookstore customers who shook their heads and told me, “I don’t like short stories,” I think I’m finally getting a handle on what frustrates modern readers about the short story form.

III. My Tentative, Perhaps Temporary “Conclusion”

In terms of narrative, a modern short story is all middle.

The reader of a modern short story is plunged willy-nilly into a situation, shoved up against strange, unfamiliar characters, shaken up and spun around, and then left by the side of the road. Some short fictional encounters are gentler, and some much more violent, but the common denominator, I believe, is absence of beginning and end. That is, introduction to character or characters and resolution to the situation are equally lacking.

Metaphorically, if not actually, in a short story someone we know nothing about has been tied up and thrown in the water. We see a flailing about, a struggle to survive. We begin to fear. And then the lights go out, and the curtain comes down. How did the character come to be in this situation? Will he or she survive? How? We have no idea.

Let me be clear. Please! I am not faulting the modern short story or saying that every story should have a beginning, middle, and end. It is what it is, as the young people say, and a raw slice of fictional life can be insightful as well as brilliant. I would not wish the best of our modern short story writers to abandon what they do or tailor their work into something else. What I’m going back to, yet again, is my question (which is really only one question but can be phrased many different ways) about audience: Why is the audience for short stories not larger? Why do more people not read short stories? Why do so many readers consciously avoid short fiction?

We are – and we are constantly told that we are – story-telling animals. “Tell me a story” is the child’s constant refrain. Finding meaning to one’s life is largely a matter of being able to see one’s life as a coherent story. Every culture is shaped by its stories.

In so many ways, the cutting edge of modern Western culture has left telos behind. Science concerns itself with how and no longer asks why. Evolution, we are told, is not purposeful but blind. Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood will not be coming back out of the woods. And yet the yearning of our species for the “whole story” remains. We would not be satisfied to wake with no memory and to live with no vision of a future, and that dramatic, narrative arc -- from beginning to end -- is clearly what readers continue to hunger for in fiction, however that hunger may be characterized as unsophisticated by those on the cutting edge.

Perhaps we can do without a fictional beginning more easily than we can sacrifice the end. Plunge us directly into the story with the first sentence, and we’ll find our way. That works. What’s hard is that being left on the side of the road with no words of parting. It is not a question of authors manipulating endings to satisfy readers, either, because a manipulated end is as unsatisfying as or worse than no end at all.

Again, I am neither criticizing nor prescribing but simply trying to understand what is missing in the short story experience for so many readers, and I think I’ve finally hit upon it. What do you think? I really want to know!

But now, in closing, to veer into prescription, I still encourage readers to be adventurous and try the short story experience! When you travel, you wouldn’t turn down interesting street food because it isn’t a five-course meal, would you? Or, if a different analogy will better serve my purpose, don’t expect the short story to be a trip from Point A to Point B. Think of it instead as an exciting carnival ride – frightening and exhilarating at the same time.

Literary Gathering, Northport Style

Bonnie Jo Campbell, Flannery O'Connor, & Joyce Carol Oates

Some days, everything seems to go right, just when you've worried the most. I mean, start with a rainy, cold morning with an author event scheduled for noon. In the middle of the week. In the fall. Did I mention rain? What if the rain kept up? What if only two or three people came for the reading?

Then skies clear to cloudless blue, the author arrives, and a crowd assembles. The visiting author – Bonnie Jo Campbell, in Northport for her third time at Dog Ears Books -- is frank, funny, honest, and engaging, and the audience is enthralled without being intimidated. There are questions and lively conversation. People buy books and have Bonnie sign them. Lots of pictures are taken with big cutout figures of Flannery O’Connor and Joyce Carol Oates, two authors near and dear to Campbell’s literary heart. Contagious smiles and laughter fill the air.

Nick & Kelsey

In the middle of everything else, a couple married just last Saturday and honeymooning on Spider Lake near Traverse City finds their way into the bookstore. She works at Literati in Ann Arbor. They were touring M-22 and could not pass by Dog Ears Books. A bookstore honeymoon! Plus, for the bride, a fortuitous meeting with author Bonnie Jo Campbell, who will be at Literati Bookstore on October 20. 

Bonnie Jo Campbell says “dang,” can you believe it? I may have caught the habit from her. She said it a couple of times last night onstage at the Opera House in Traverse City, where she was part of the National Writers Series first-ever Bookmania Week. Sounds like something a cowgirl would say, doesn’t it?

I feel honored to be a small part of Michigan’s literary community. And it is so much dang fun, too!

Happiness in Repetition (Because Nothing Is Exactly the Same Twice, Is It?)

Another busy week is underway. Tonight Bonnie Jo Campbell will be at the Opera House in Traverse City, as part of the National Writers Series Bookmania Week, and tomorrow she will be here in Northport at Dog Ears Books. She's been getting national press right and left, and I'm pinching myself to confirm that I'm not dreaming. She's coming to my bookstore -- again? I am so lucky!

On Friday we're expecting family and hope to arrange for a little sunshine by then, but even under cloudy skies the fall colors are coming on, as you can see from these scenes along my morning commute. Sumac is blazing, as are many maples, and tamarack and popples are starting the annual shift from green to yellow in Leelanau County, as they were last week up in the U.P. 

Sunshine or clouds, summery or chilly, whatever the weather, it's always good to be with writers we admire and friends and family we love.