apologies for taking a long time with the silly blog. there’s like four or five simultaneous geopolitical catastrophes (links to aggregate ways to support Sudan, the DRC, Palestine, Artsakh, Ukraine), everyone i know including myself is collectively experiencing the Creative Depression Season, and i need to finish a bunch of stuff with Mar for Philly Zinefest at the end of the month. so having a blog feels extra stupid but i did read two short story collections and am so annoyed at the way that short story collections are constructed that i have to post about it somewhere.
the two short story collections i’ve most recently read are:
Evil Flowers - Gunnhild Øyehaug. Translated from Norwegian by Kari Dickson
i wish i had anything at all to say about this one. i guess i can say it mostly went over my head because i didn’t find myself feeling anything at all about it but it was short so putting it down felt like it would have been rude.
a lot of very very short stories that were interconnected with each other, a lot of fourth wall breaking, a lot of “this is a narrative about a narrative.” some autofictitious asides about the naming of the collection including the thought that perhaps the reason Baudelaire looks so grumpy in his photo is because he suspects Oyehaug will use the title of his poetry book for her own book later and he hates her book.
at least one story stands out: a woman accidentally sneezes part of her brain out and forgets everything about the birds she’s writing her dissertation on. we’ve all been there, metaphorically
Emergency: Stories - Kathleen Alcott
Kathleen Alcott mostly writes novels which I haven’t read but which I suspect are all very good because her writing itself is beautiful but why was every single one of these stories functionally the same?
With like one exception (for a story about a woman who writes fluff pieces for a seedy “reputation management” firm and has a moral crisis that ultimately doesn’t matter) every single story is “there’s a younger woman from a lower-class background, she married an older man from an upper-class background, they are divorced, she misses him and feels adrift, she does something drastic.” many of these women are unnamed and all the men have names like Peter, Josh, and Gavin. the women are mostly doing things like “teaching creative writing” or “painting.” the men are wealthy but how? they are simply wealthy.
to that point - thoughts on collections
so forever ago when an agent solicited me for what i was thinking of as “my short story collection” and then turned around and went “thank you for sharing but no :)” (she didn’t use an emoji.) what she actually literally wrote was “often short stories written for their own realities and then later packaged together in a collection feel more like a mosaic from that recycling, versus being written for one overarching aesthetic intention or effect. I think ultimately the stories aren’t as tightly constrained and linked enough to transcend its bounds, which is the goal of any collection (and to read like a novel).1” and this is perfectly reasonable but also i have been haunted by it since the start of this year when i got this e-mail because is that the goal of any collection? does it have to be?
since starting this silly blog project i’ve read six short story collections and four novels (well, three novels and a friend’s novella) and i’m aware of the differences between the ways of telling in these forms and also now exceedingly aware of how the expectation that a collection of short stories somehow resemble a novel actually makes these collections both predictable and forgettable. like, how many times can Kathleen Alcott show us her very specific tropes before it feels, like, “why did you write this six times?”
not to be, like, a tiktok adhd cocomelon2 reader or whatever but can we get some variety in here? can i get a little change of topic to keep me on my toes? the agent wasn’t wrong - when i write a short story it lives in its own world because it’s within the bounds of its own form3. if i wanted to write a novel wouldn’t i write a novel?4 the number one thing i try to avoid doing in my fiction is repeating myself. there might be multiple permutations on an idea or a character archetype, sure, but if i can’t meaningfully distinguish it from something i’ve already done then i keep the little variations to myself. the more i read short story collections that are “unified” around a theme or a type of character the less distinct those characters and themes become. for me it isn’t the same as a novel at all - a novel at least might have, say, six characters all responding to the Theme but at least these six characters aren’t, usually, all functionally indistinguishable from one another.
i know people do put their stories together into collections with the aforementioned goal of having “one overarching aesthetic intention or effect” (i’m thinking of a collection of thesis short stories i read from a colleague who went immediately from an mfa to having a novel and a collection and an agent and likely soon a book deal5) but the more i see these carefully curated collections the more i feel like the pressure to make a single aesthetic statement with six to ten short stories is a huge disservice to the form of short stories overall. i know nothing i’m saying on a blog read by my friends and nice randos who found this via substack will change an entire industry but @ publishing can we consider the benefits of a diversified portfolio in a short story collection rather than a selection of ultimately forgettable stories that faintly make up “one” narrative like some kind of silhouette. no? okay. thanks.
the only collection so far, shockingly, that has varied the stories within it enough that each one was distinct was Games and Rituals, which you could say had an overarching theme of “middle aged women facing a turning point in their lives” and an overarching voice of “optimistic suburban upper-middle class narrator like it’s still the 90s” but which had the courtesy to make no two turning points the same and had the range to slide in and out of that established voice for dramatic effect.
final thoughts, silly edtion
as anarchist icon maia arson crimew once said “i stay silly :36” if you or your loved one has suffered emotional injury due to a beloved media franchise doing your fave dirty amidst everything else in the world, you may be entitled to this image7
i did waffle a little bit on sharing direct correspondences but given that nothing in the e-mail exchange was tremendously personal or somehow inappropriate i think it’s fine. this is the kind of advice you could probably get by googling how to submit a short story collection, just directly specifically to me. i feel like naming the agent on a public post gets into a bit of, like, i don’t want to contribute to SEO against her or whatever. she was at aevitas and if you’re very curious you can e-mail me for her name.
i may be using these three words in order wrong but give me a break - i’m aware that all three are shorthand for “desiring constant new stimuli” with a layer of “adult who wants, explicitly or not, to be treated as a child”
one aside i guess on the topic of the world of the stories, AJ Archer and I were talking a while ago and she mentioned that she did see all my work taking place in the same Conceptual World which I appreciate the differentiation about. I think a lot of writers do end up writing in the same Conceptual World (like, what values are reinforced, etc) but not always in the same, like, fictive world (the actual world portrayed on the page) and that overusing the same fictive world weakens the conceptual world
eventually i will actually try to write a novel again but i am bad at them, so
more power to her!
“the horrors are endless but i stay silly” is a variant of this
sourced from twitter, shockingly still a page accessible without needing to log in, thank god. do you know how long i spent looking for this on my tumblr? it wasn’t there.