Quoting from two short stories (and referencing a Nobel Prize winner without reading her) to prove a global point wouldn't pass muster in an undergraduate lit class! This piece is hilarious as grumpy satire but would get a B- in Short Story 101.
The thing about Alice Munro is that it is clear *nobody* was reading her, even the people who read her. Attitudes towards her fiction were determined, firstly, by what people thought of the well-wrought mfa short story, pro or con. Her stories *are* well-wrought, but she had more of a Great Books sort of education and all this is pretty peripheral to what made her interesting. (In the context of the heavily subsidized effort to produce Canadian Literature—motivated by something like Ernest Bevin's worry that to be taken seriously Britain needed to have its own atomic bomb with a bloody Union Jack on it—she was very much expected to write the Great Canadian Novel. She could have written a northerly Rabbit is Rich, but because she was a much better writer than Updike she wouldn't settle for something so disjointed.) Secondly, people admire her supposed feminism, although she always insisted that she wasn't a feminist. It is interesting to catch a glimpse of Updike/Roth/Bellow territory from a woman who was as obsessed with sex and adultery as they were, she sees all sorts of things that the men didn't. But you'd have to be very checked out to confuse Munro with Margret Atwood. (Atwood does indeed seem to have assumed that Munro shared her ethical vision and was just expressing it differently, but artists are egoists this way.)
The stories are a series of reflections on Munro's life and that of her family, with versions of the same incidents and characters reappearing over and over (an extramarital sexual encounter on the train from Vancouver to Toronto, for instance). The comparison to Chekov is terribly unfair to her because the number of character-types in her stories is so small. The stories gain great power when read as a whole (and earn comparison to Faulkner) because what's being conveyed is an archetypical, mythic story of modernization. Her subject is the physical and economic transformation of the provincial world she grew up in, and the effects of this transformation on sex and family relations. (This is what Almoldovar likes in them, his movies—which good though they are are far more sentimental than her stories—are all about the even more sudden transformation of Spain and how it affected everybody's relationship with their mother.) If the fiction is all about her, this is because she makes herself Everywoman, or rather Twentieth Century Woman.
Her stories are indeed about moments of precarious happiness or consolation. But her work is better than the mfa flim-flam her admirers mistake it for because (in addition to her wide historical lens) she had a profoundly grim sense that erotic and artistic fulfillment is something beyond good and evil, something you can only achieve by disregarding your moral obligations to other people. The old Christian Canada lied to itself about what it valued, she thought, but Pierre Trudeau's swinging sixties Canada also lies to itself, because society and even the individual psyche needs a diet of moral lies in order to function. Like David Lynch (and without the need for new age bullshit to keep her grounded), she thought that only art could express the mysteries of love. The epigrammatic valediction of Munro's final set of stories is her declaration that "we say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time." People acted like this phrase belonged on a throw pillow but it expresses a frightening sentiment, even if it occurs in a book of well-wrought short stories.
This is one of my bugbears as you can see. I would hate her work on the basis of the analysis you quote too, I almost can't think of an artist less appreciated by her admirers.
The stories *are* organized around epiphanies like in Dubliners, but the epiphanies aren't very consoling. Some of her fans esp. in Canada did get the historical dimension. None of them noticed her amoralism, she would tell fawning interviewers things like "I am a person with no moral scruples" and they would call her "Saint Alice" and the "fairy godmother" (really! in print!) of Canadian literature.
I never gave one second’s thought to reading anything by Alice Munro, but now you make me want to! The idea that her stories are a set of snapshots depicting the social transformation of Canada, and modernization in general, makes them sound appealing. Stories about actual things in the real world, the impact of large forces on individual lives, and individual decisions and actions and sufferings, are a particularly valuable type when done well.
On the basis of the stuff Phillip quotes I wouldn't want to read her either! Her reputation is the prisoner of mfa discourse, she had her faults but always thought that teaching writing was a fraudulent activity (she did it a bit to make ends meet post-divorce but got out of the racket as soon as possible).
Excellent critique. I especially appreciate the lightly handled philosophy, from Weber to Lukács, in lines like: "'make it read like it’s been edited at least ten times, for no reason.' As a result, the prose hangs on truncated metaphors whose only function is ‘being metaphors’... The overall goal of this kind of short story seems to be: ‘break out of Weberian disenchantment by paying a bit more attention to things.’" (Though I don't think you need those scare quotes.)
Two thoughts:
(1) It's an interesting move to posit a work-in-progress "method" like autofiction and an outlier like "Pond" as your counterweights. Especially because both are so open to objections: Bennett as an updated form of re-enchantment, autofiction as a grossly enlarged "I." If you were to name a larger, more stable counterweight, what might it be? And could it in fact be philosophy?
(2) There's also the question of readership. How many people, interested in the minute life support of re-enchantment in the everyday, will see themselves in this? What kind of discussion might find those writers and readers? I notice from some of the comments that your philosophic argument didn't register, and I wonder if it might be possible to expand it by introducing the short story, as it were, to its historical lineage.
And last, to the Republic of Letters: this seems like an exemplary use of Substack, because it has argument and historically based philosophy, and yet is contentious in a way that's too broad for academia or even most literary websites. How about other forums? On maximalist fiction? On literary fiction? On fiction that does not report the world at all?
I don't think it's a bad thing if people happen to break out of Weberian disenchantment, but as a goal, it's self-cancelling (to conceive it as a goal is only to further entrench that disenchantment). In other words, where Bennett immanently enacts enchantment - 'she enchants' - the others I quoted effectively 'write reports of various attempts at enchantment.'
For research, I read a bit about the history/theory of short story, but I didn't find it all that interesting; I had the feeling it would be impossible to say anything interesting about the short story as such (if it exists 'as such'), and only possible to speak about a certain strand. But I think that strand is or was dominant enough that it's not ridiculous to refer to it as 'the short story' (with 'the short story' as shorthand for 'one plausible destiny' of the form).
I don't think there's any more stable counterweight; maybe God (viewed under the auspices of philosophy or some other way). It wouldn't surprise me if 'the popularity of the short story form' and 'non-belief in God' correlate extremely tightly, but I don't think they're related. Aesthetically, though, I think there's an infinite number of stable-counterweights, though they're to some extent destabilised by not existing any more (it's not possible anymore to lean on Kafka's shoulder, and the veracity of Gustav Janouch's reports of doing just that (back in the day) are - so I've heard - extremely questionable).
Just to say that your ¶ 2 isn't quite what I was intending. I meant to say, Wouldn't it be interesting to try to find a way to convince writers who love short stories but don't know about the history of disenchantment, the everyday, etc., that their practice depends on assumptions about those philosophic positions? It's what I do in my job, teaching undergraduate visual art students, showing them how the history of philosophy and criticism is pertinent to what they do.
Regarding ¶ 3: perhaps I shouldn't have used that metaphor of the stable counterweight. There I meant in 20th and 21st century literary practice. I couldn't tell, from your piece, what shape that history has for you. (I find it easy to imagine literature in the last 100 years without much attention to postwar North American short stories.)
ah, gotcha! Yes, it's strange, I would have thought that anyone with an MFA - in all honesty, I don't even know what an MFA is, I only know what the acronym stands for - would have been exposed to / forced to read Adorno / Marx / Weber et al., and would quite likely be writing from a sort of 'cultural Marxist' standpoint. I'd expect them also to have more or less no money, so it's strange to find 'the sanctified apartment' so central to their practice.
The 21st is totally uncharted for me, I really liked Matthew Gasda's novel, and Bennett's Pond is the only thing I'm really aware of on the UK side [insert some kind 'I live on this side of Pond dad-joke]. I was reading Justin Isis a lot recently; it occured to me while reading him that 'The Quest for Chinese People' is the best short story written in the 21st century (it's from 'I wonder what human flesh tastes like' [2011]). Beyond that, I really feel like most of the best writing is happening in various places on Substack, often quite unread [e.g., I love https://simonmirk.substack.com/p/a-simps-serenade].
For the 20th, I think the shape it has for me is vaguely normal (Kafka, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche above all; for the more recent part of it, Nádas, Bernhard and Alexievich above all) with a slight skew away from America / towards central Europe and Japan. I don't think there are many great 20th c writers who were primarily 'short story practitioners' but I think Kōno Taeko and McCarthy were very great.
I think of great short stories like I think of great novels - as complete and compelling worlds.
Everything else is an exercise. Maybe an interesting exercise, maybe not. The great ones are complete and compelling events or experience - complete and compelling characters and concepts - moving and illuminating that help convey so much of what is known about people and the world, people in the world. Great short stories seem easier to remember all at once than great novels because they are bite size novels, or worlds.
You can imagine great short stories blown up into novels, of the worlds that they are, not that they should be. Short stories that come off as exercises need to end, whether much worthwhile or not.
Most editors and publishers cultivate dogmatic or highly curtailed exercises, wittingly or not, typically within unspoken constraints, or garbed in nebulous language. It's systemic.
I actually kind of agree with the analysis here but it would make more sense to package it as a critique of the ideology of a certain type of short story rather than the form (which is incredibly diverse) rit large. Like, none of this applies to Borges, right? There are plenty of contemporary writers, too, who are not writing garden stories. But yeah, the 'severing of history' is a neat point.
Yes! It's a certain kind of short story that this piece skewers, and there are great short stories that do not do what Hempel's and Moody's and other MFA-style short stories do.
I feel like this is "cut to the chase" day. So here's how it cuts.
Publishing has been slowly stalked and cornered by a two headed beast: one head feeds on those blockbuster "Netflix series in the making," and the other head nibbles on sniveling MFA shoegazer confessions.
And why should we expect anything different? Do we expect the mainstream machinery to get this one right? I sure don't.
To me, a good short story is readable in one sitting and has at least one powerful emotional moment (usually a climax). My copy of Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior has praise from Alice Munro: "[contains] fine moments that flatten you out when you don't expect it." Alice Munro's stories have moments like that too.
So when you provide excerpts to highlight style and talk about form, theory, aesthetic, and setting, it's mostly beside the point to me. What sticks with you long after you finish reading a story are the emotional high points. The relevant question is: does the story have a moment where your stomach turns over? If so, it's a good story.
I guess we just have entirely different approaches; I have strong emotional reactions to people, but never to art, or at least the kinds of reactions to art that I have are so different from those I have to people that it would be crazy (for me) to use the same word (emotion) to descibe them. I suspect that if I responded to art and people the same way - with the same emotions - I would probably go insane, in that I'd become functionally unable to tell people and art objects apart. For this reason, the only kind of criticism I can write is 'aesthetic/formal' etc. -
I don't understand why anyone would seek out art if they don't get any emotion from it. To me, the point of art is the transmission of emotion. You don't feel any emotion at the thought of Prufrock pinned to the wall by his interlocutors?
Nada! I think the human face and the human voice transmit emotion extremely well, almost too well; art seems to me more like a backstop to such transparency than a magnification of it.
Human contact has a certain overwhelming immediacy. The emotions I get from art are more muted and private, but they're still there.
I think you should include a disclaimer at the starting of all your criticism stating that art has never made you feel anything. It's like a blind man writing a blog about colors.
Well, it makes me feel alive, but I don't think 'feeling alive' is considered an emotion. But I would much rather read a blog about colours written by a blind man than one written by someone who can see.
“But a poem exists in the mouth. Where does the short story exist? In the garden? Inside its own digestive tissue?”
I always thought of it as starting as a tale told around a dinner table, campfire, over drinks, whatever. Telling stories like everybody does late at night or over dinner. Except, you know, written down.
I love short stories – even some of those written by authors mentioned here – but this piece cracked me up, and there are some undeniably great lines here. Next short story I write, I'm going to put it through ChatGPT with this instruction: “make it read like it’s been edited at least ten times, for no reason”.
I’m almost smart, but not quite smart, so I can’t fully engage with this glorious essay. But what I understood, I loved. I remember a critique of New Yorker fiction in the ‘90s as being only about women in Westchester with migraines. There was a decade where every serious literary short story used a migraine to describe a character in crisis. That or a heroin addiction if it was written by a man. Migraines and needles were the vampires and zombies of literary fiction.
Quoting from two short stories (and referencing a Nobel Prize winner without reading her) to prove a global point wouldn't pass muster in an undergraduate lit class! This piece is hilarious as grumpy satire but would get a B- in Short Story 101.
Very tough grading in your Short Story 101 class!
Hahahaha
The thing about Alice Munro is that it is clear *nobody* was reading her, even the people who read her. Attitudes towards her fiction were determined, firstly, by what people thought of the well-wrought mfa short story, pro or con. Her stories *are* well-wrought, but she had more of a Great Books sort of education and all this is pretty peripheral to what made her interesting. (In the context of the heavily subsidized effort to produce Canadian Literature—motivated by something like Ernest Bevin's worry that to be taken seriously Britain needed to have its own atomic bomb with a bloody Union Jack on it—she was very much expected to write the Great Canadian Novel. She could have written a northerly Rabbit is Rich, but because she was a much better writer than Updike she wouldn't settle for something so disjointed.) Secondly, people admire her supposed feminism, although she always insisted that she wasn't a feminist. It is interesting to catch a glimpse of Updike/Roth/Bellow territory from a woman who was as obsessed with sex and adultery as they were, she sees all sorts of things that the men didn't. But you'd have to be very checked out to confuse Munro with Margret Atwood. (Atwood does indeed seem to have assumed that Munro shared her ethical vision and was just expressing it differently, but artists are egoists this way.)
The stories are a series of reflections on Munro's life and that of her family, with versions of the same incidents and characters reappearing over and over (an extramarital sexual encounter on the train from Vancouver to Toronto, for instance). The comparison to Chekov is terribly unfair to her because the number of character-types in her stories is so small. The stories gain great power when read as a whole (and earn comparison to Faulkner) because what's being conveyed is an archetypical, mythic story of modernization. Her subject is the physical and economic transformation of the provincial world she grew up in, and the effects of this transformation on sex and family relations. (This is what Almoldovar likes in them, his movies—which good though they are are far more sentimental than her stories—are all about the even more sudden transformation of Spain and how it affected everybody's relationship with their mother.) If the fiction is all about her, this is because she makes herself Everywoman, or rather Twentieth Century Woman.
Her stories are indeed about moments of precarious happiness or consolation. But her work is better than the mfa flim-flam her admirers mistake it for because (in addition to her wide historical lens) she had a profoundly grim sense that erotic and artistic fulfillment is something beyond good and evil, something you can only achieve by disregarding your moral obligations to other people. The old Christian Canada lied to itself about what it valued, she thought, but Pierre Trudeau's swinging sixties Canada also lies to itself, because society and even the individual psyche needs a diet of moral lies in order to function. Like David Lynch (and without the need for new age bullshit to keep her grounded), she thought that only art could express the mysteries of love. The epigrammatic valediction of Munro's final set of stories is her declaration that "we say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time." People acted like this phrase belonged on a throw pillow but it expresses a frightening sentiment, even if it occurs in a book of well-wrought short stories.
Thank you Squirrel, I will read some
This is one of my bugbears as you can see. I would hate her work on the basis of the analysis you quote too, I almost can't think of an artist less appreciated by her admirers.
The stories *are* organized around epiphanies like in Dubliners, but the epiphanies aren't very consoling. Some of her fans esp. in Canada did get the historical dimension. None of them noticed her amoralism, she would tell fawning interviewers things like "I am a person with no moral scruples" and they would call her "Saint Alice" and the "fairy godmother" (really! in print!) of Canadian literature.
I never gave one second’s thought to reading anything by Alice Munro, but now you make me want to! The idea that her stories are a set of snapshots depicting the social transformation of Canada, and modernization in general, makes them sound appealing. Stories about actual things in the real world, the impact of large forces on individual lives, and individual decisions and actions and sufferings, are a particularly valuable type when done well.
On the basis of the stuff Phillip quotes I wouldn't want to read her either! Her reputation is the prisoner of mfa discourse, she had her faults but always thought that teaching writing was a fraudulent activity (she did it a bit to make ends meet post-divorce but got out of the racket as soon as possible).
What is a good point of entry? One book that I can find a cheap used paperback?
Dear Life, she retired on a high note.
Got a cheapie for $4.04.
“I haven’t read anything by Alice Munro” pretty much disqualifies the writer from expounding on the contemporary short story, no?
That did cross my mind tbh, but I think it only burnishes his credentials as a curmudgeon.
I think the opposite
No one reads Munro now.
i do
Who says stuff like this?
https://theconversation.com/the-gothic-horror-of-alice-munro-a-reckoning-with-the-darkness-behind-a-feminist-icon-234265
A short-story writer has the reader’s time politely in consideration; novelists often do not. Story writers win on manners alone.
This is very funny.
Excellent critique. I especially appreciate the lightly handled philosophy, from Weber to Lukács, in lines like: "'make it read like it’s been edited at least ten times, for no reason.' As a result, the prose hangs on truncated metaphors whose only function is ‘being metaphors’... The overall goal of this kind of short story seems to be: ‘break out of Weberian disenchantment by paying a bit more attention to things.’" (Though I don't think you need those scare quotes.)
Two thoughts:
(1) It's an interesting move to posit a work-in-progress "method" like autofiction and an outlier like "Pond" as your counterweights. Especially because both are so open to objections: Bennett as an updated form of re-enchantment, autofiction as a grossly enlarged "I." If you were to name a larger, more stable counterweight, what might it be? And could it in fact be philosophy?
(2) There's also the question of readership. How many people, interested in the minute life support of re-enchantment in the everyday, will see themselves in this? What kind of discussion might find those writers and readers? I notice from some of the comments that your philosophic argument didn't register, and I wonder if it might be possible to expand it by introducing the short story, as it were, to its historical lineage.
And last, to the Republic of Letters: this seems like an exemplary use of Substack, because it has argument and historically based philosophy, and yet is contentious in a way that's too broad for academia or even most literary websites. How about other forums? On maximalist fiction? On literary fiction? On fiction that does not report the world at all?
Thank you for your thoughtful response, James.
I don't think it's a bad thing if people happen to break out of Weberian disenchantment, but as a goal, it's self-cancelling (to conceive it as a goal is only to further entrench that disenchantment). In other words, where Bennett immanently enacts enchantment - 'she enchants' - the others I quoted effectively 'write reports of various attempts at enchantment.'
For research, I read a bit about the history/theory of short story, but I didn't find it all that interesting; I had the feeling it would be impossible to say anything interesting about the short story as such (if it exists 'as such'), and only possible to speak about a certain strand. But I think that strand is or was dominant enough that it's not ridiculous to refer to it as 'the short story' (with 'the short story' as shorthand for 'one plausible destiny' of the form).
I don't think there's any more stable counterweight; maybe God (viewed under the auspices of philosophy or some other way). It wouldn't surprise me if 'the popularity of the short story form' and 'non-belief in God' correlate extremely tightly, but I don't think they're related. Aesthetically, though, I think there's an infinite number of stable-counterweights, though they're to some extent destabilised by not existing any more (it's not possible anymore to lean on Kafka's shoulder, and the veracity of Gustav Janouch's reports of doing just that (back in the day) are - so I've heard - extremely questionable).
Just to say that your ¶ 2 isn't quite what I was intending. I meant to say, Wouldn't it be interesting to try to find a way to convince writers who love short stories but don't know about the history of disenchantment, the everyday, etc., that their practice depends on assumptions about those philosophic positions? It's what I do in my job, teaching undergraduate visual art students, showing them how the history of philosophy and criticism is pertinent to what they do.
Regarding ¶ 3: perhaps I shouldn't have used that metaphor of the stable counterweight. There I meant in 20th and 21st century literary practice. I couldn't tell, from your piece, what shape that history has for you. (I find it easy to imagine literature in the last 100 years without much attention to postwar North American short stories.)
ah, gotcha! Yes, it's strange, I would have thought that anyone with an MFA - in all honesty, I don't even know what an MFA is, I only know what the acronym stands for - would have been exposed to / forced to read Adorno / Marx / Weber et al., and would quite likely be writing from a sort of 'cultural Marxist' standpoint. I'd expect them also to have more or less no money, so it's strange to find 'the sanctified apartment' so central to their practice.
The 21st is totally uncharted for me, I really liked Matthew Gasda's novel, and Bennett's Pond is the only thing I'm really aware of on the UK side [insert some kind 'I live on this side of Pond dad-joke]. I was reading Justin Isis a lot recently; it occured to me while reading him that 'The Quest for Chinese People' is the best short story written in the 21st century (it's from 'I wonder what human flesh tastes like' [2011]). Beyond that, I really feel like most of the best writing is happening in various places on Substack, often quite unread [e.g., I love https://simonmirk.substack.com/p/a-simps-serenade].
For the 20th, I think the shape it has for me is vaguely normal (Kafka, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche above all; for the more recent part of it, Nádas, Bernhard and Alexievich above all) with a slight skew away from America / towards central Europe and Japan. I don't think there are many great 20th c writers who were primarily 'short story practitioners' but I think Kōno Taeko and McCarthy were very great.
Thanks for Simon Mirk. On MFAs: this hasn't been edited for some time, and the topic is nonfiction, but the distinction in ¶2 remains true. Most North American MFAs are largely free of critical theory. https://305737.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2013-02-10T10:00:00-06:00
I think of great short stories like I think of great novels - as complete and compelling worlds.
Everything else is an exercise. Maybe an interesting exercise, maybe not. The great ones are complete and compelling events or experience - complete and compelling characters and concepts - moving and illuminating that help convey so much of what is known about people and the world, people in the world. Great short stories seem easier to remember all at once than great novels because they are bite size novels, or worlds.
You can imagine great short stories blown up into novels, of the worlds that they are, not that they should be. Short stories that come off as exercises need to end, whether much worthwhile or not.
Most editors and publishers cultivate dogmatic or highly curtailed exercises, wittingly or not, typically within unspoken constraints, or garbed in nebulous language. It's systemic.
I actually kind of agree with the analysis here but it would make more sense to package it as a critique of the ideology of a certain type of short story rather than the form (which is incredibly diverse) rit large. Like, none of this applies to Borges, right? There are plenty of contemporary writers, too, who are not writing garden stories. But yeah, the 'severing of history' is a neat point.
Yes! It's a certain kind of short story that this piece skewers, and there are great short stories that do not do what Hempel's and Moody's and other MFA-style short stories do.
I feel like this is "cut to the chase" day. So here's how it cuts.
Publishing has been slowly stalked and cornered by a two headed beast: one head feeds on those blockbuster "Netflix series in the making," and the other head nibbles on sniveling MFA shoegazer confessions.
And why should we expect anything different? Do we expect the mainstream machinery to get this one right? I sure don't.
So much the worse for "publishing" and "mainstream machinery."
Choose not to participate in the machine.
🎯
This is amazing.
"Don’t wake yourself up, rather wake up history. Tread softly on its dreams. Maybe let it go down on you." Dude, you funny.
To me, a good short story is readable in one sitting and has at least one powerful emotional moment (usually a climax). My copy of Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior has praise from Alice Munro: "[contains] fine moments that flatten you out when you don't expect it." Alice Munro's stories have moments like that too.
So when you provide excerpts to highlight style and talk about form, theory, aesthetic, and setting, it's mostly beside the point to me. What sticks with you long after you finish reading a story are the emotional high points. The relevant question is: does the story have a moment where your stomach turns over? If so, it's a good story.
I guess we just have entirely different approaches; I have strong emotional reactions to people, but never to art, or at least the kinds of reactions to art that I have are so different from those I have to people that it would be crazy (for me) to use the same word (emotion) to descibe them. I suspect that if I responded to art and people the same way - with the same emotions - I would probably go insane, in that I'd become functionally unable to tell people and art objects apart. For this reason, the only kind of criticism I can write is 'aesthetic/formal' etc. -
I don't understand why anyone would seek out art if they don't get any emotion from it. To me, the point of art is the transmission of emotion. You don't feel any emotion at the thought of Prufrock pinned to the wall by his interlocutors?
Nada! I think the human face and the human voice transmit emotion extremely well, almost too well; art seems to me more like a backstop to such transparency than a magnification of it.
Human contact has a certain overwhelming immediacy. The emotions I get from art are more muted and private, but they're still there.
I think you should include a disclaimer at the starting of all your criticism stating that art has never made you feel anything. It's like a blind man writing a blog about colors.
Well, it makes me feel alive, but I don't think 'feeling alive' is considered an emotion. But I would much rather read a blog about colours written by a blind man than one written by someone who can see.
Chekhov?
Chekhov?
have you ever cried looking at a picture
No, but I cry at a lot of films, especially bad films, I suppose because bad films are very much like people
“But a poem exists in the mouth. Where does the short story exist? In the garden? Inside its own digestive tissue?”
I always thought of it as starting as a tale told around a dinner table, campfire, over drinks, whatever. Telling stories like everybody does late at night or over dinner. Except, you know, written down.
I love short stories – even some of those written by authors mentioned here – but this piece cracked me up, and there are some undeniably great lines here. Next short story I write, I'm going to put it through ChatGPT with this instruction: “make it read like it’s been edited at least ten times, for no reason”.
Ha!
Now, write a funny essay on why Flash Fiction should exist!
I’m almost smart, but not quite smart, so I can’t fully engage with this glorious essay. But what I understood, I loved. I remember a critique of New Yorker fiction in the ‘90s as being only about women in Westchester with migraines. There was a decade where every serious literary short story used a migraine to describe a character in crisis. That or a heroin addiction if it was written by a man. Migraines and needles were the vampires and zombies of literary fiction.
i like this though you've itched people's hair trigger for 'mfa stories.' unconscionable!