If you can possibly stand it, here is jean thompson's reaction to King's assertions about the state of the short story. i think she's fair, actually.
i'm grading. or procrastinating, i guess.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
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Hey, just for fun, really, (fun - remember?) can we all compile our own BASS list? Because I'm conflicted. Seriously, had I the choice to out a new voice or pick an Alice Munro story that obviously ran in the New Yorker despite the "blind" reading process, I'm not so sure I could say I'd pick J. Warback or M. Lazinczky or D. Lao, to name three. Really. Assuming you're in a position to make such broad, Best Of statements, let's hear them. The real ones that kept you awake last year or forever.
I'm working on this ambitious list, because it's fun, but here are two:
Mud by Geoffrey Forsyth (from Other Voices #40)
Where are you from? by Elizabeth Wetmore (from Clackamas Literary Review Spring/Summer 2002)
What I love about her response is the idea of elitism as an insult, "since just about the worst thing you can do in America is act like you’re smarter than somebody else." I need to chew on that one for a minute. How fully is this an American problem, and for how long, and for how much longer?
Elitism is the nastiest when it's too weak to support itself, which is a point about the old MFA argument I'll stand by. There's a brand of elitist who isn't ready to fight for it, and that's where the condition rots out.
You know, Munro's "Fiction" from Harper's made me throw the magazine across the room. Wonder if that's the one he picked.
(And the last line of Horned Pigeon)
what a great idea.
i have two as well, off the top of my head:
So This is Permanence by Stephanie Soileau (from Tin House 30)
Swimming by T Cooper (New Yoker, August 20th, 2007)
This has been driving me up a wall. I've been thinking about it all day long. And I feel a little like an imposter b/c it took me forever to find any that hadn't been suggested by someone in the program. Alice McDermot's Enough would definintely make my top three. And Kevin McIlvoy's Green house. The rest aren't American. (Go Heinrich Boll) or aren't really mine (Amy Hemple, Breece Pancake).
Karl Iagnemma's "Zilkowski's Theorem" Zoetrope 2001- I think
Nanci Kincaid's "This is Not the Picture Show" Story-1992 (though I didn't discover it until much later)
These are two that have stuck with me many years, ones I can quote lines from, ones that I wrote many grad papers about and they still haven't lost their magic.
Oh, oh... I've got to add JC Oates' "Three Girls" just because of it's liltingly beautiful prose, but I can't remember how or where I got a hold of it. But it came out in a mag before 2001, because I entered the program wanting to be her.
Dang, "Three Girls" is super. That might be on my BASS-of-all-time list. It's in I Am No One You Know, a killer collection. Dunno where it was first printed.
I'm remembering: I think we first bonded (with Jack) over our love of "Three Girls" and my fear that I was ripping off the idea for a story. Good times. I was totally ripping it off.
But it was a GOOD rip and that's what matters.
God, I had totally forgotten about that, but you're right. Now I can remember a whiskey sour special at the River Pubb that night.
i was kind of in awe of that hermit crab story. wasn't that the very first semester?
the last story i completed, i'd completely ripped alice munro's "child's play" and didn't even know it. bianca pointed out to me, gently, that my plot followed her story line EXACTLY.
Yeah, that was the first semester. There's a good scene in there, I wonder if I can harvest it..
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