The structures of classics Dubliners and Winesburg, Ohio were in my mind during my first attempt at creating a story collection. That manuscript never found a publisher, but several of its stories appeared in my first published collection, Saturday Night. At forty-seven I was proud as punch to finally have a book out, but a bias against short stories was sometimes evident even from friends and family. “These are so short. I want MORE.” “Maybe if you keep trying, you’ll be able to write something longer.”
Regarding my second and third collections, a co-worker asked, “What are those about? Just a bunch of stories?”
I began to wonder about overcoming short story bias. How do we construct a short story collection to create a unified statement, a more satisfying experience? What are these stories trying to do together?
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I took time to think about a few of my favorite collections.
The House on Mango Street has been called a novel, a novella, a collection of linked vignettes. Sandra Cisneros, in describing her process, said, “I write in little pieces. I don’t write them in linear order. I arrange them like buttons in a jar.”
The last phrase reminds me of the shorter pieces in Leeza Cross-Smith’s So We Can Glow, a collection unified by sheer vibes and talent. Her book is a brilliant example of how to combine brief, flash-length pieces with longer ones, the lyrical interludes between more narratively satisfying stories giving a sense of her breadth and variety as an artist.
When asked about the sequencing of her stories in Pardon Me for Moonwalking, Patricia Quintana Bidar described thinking of the arrangement as “a museum show, with one room following another.” Others, like Lucia Berlin and Grace Paley, attain unity through the sheer distinctiveness of their style, so that even their career-spanning collected stories wallop with a singular power.
Any hope of emulating these two towering figures brings to mind E.B. White’s straightforward yet terrifying response to the younger writer’s question, “But what if I’m a genius?”: “Then be one!”
*
Many people will tell you to frontload your best, most immediate work; to build momentum; to group like pieces together; to end with your longest stories.
For me it helps to think in simple terms. In a discussion about the annual AWP conference, a family friend remarked, “It makes me happy to think of all those books, writers, and publishers in one building.” It was the fourth of July; we were sitting on my stepdaughter’s porch to stay out of the sun. “It gives me hope.”
“Sometimes I didn’t even know what the story was,” a former classmate told me, at a library reading event. “But at the end,” she clenched her fist against her chest, “I felt something.”
In the end it’s to these two friends of the written word, and others like them, that I aim these scraps, my stories, gathered and arranged to the best of my ability. (In Stepdad on the Dance Floor, organized by setting; in Love You, Miss You, Goodbye Forever, thematically arranged in the three sections suggested by the title.)
I imagine hosting a gathering of friends and family. We provide music, food, comfortable chairs; arrange games, activities, plenty of space to dance. The readers mingle with the work. We hope the conversation flows, that everyone gets along. We sit back, proud hosts, watch everyone vibe together.
Maybe our readers will recognize something in our work, good intentions of which we weren’t aware. Like John Cheever, I send the words into the world with high hopes but reasonable expectations. “I do hope you’ll like it, but if you shouldn’t, I will understand.”
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