I have always loved the short story, which has both the compression and concentrated feeling we associate with poetry and the narrative pull of the novel, but with a wonderful way of soaring off into metaphor, turning on a dime, or opening the ground beneath our feet at the end. Many people think that the novel evolved out of the short story, that it was an apprentice form, but in fact the novel came first and the story (as a textual not an oral form) came after, a kind of distillation of all that is best in the novel. It has continued to be the research & development branch of contemporary fiction, where much of the stylistic and narrative experiment occurs.

There are, of course, longer works that I’ve loved and returned to, but not with the frequency that I recur to short stories. I’ve read Tillie Olsen’s “Tell Me A Riddle” countless times and not once, never, did it fail to move me to tears, my appreciation of it only deepening with familiarity and age. As a university student, I went on short story binges, reading all of D.H. Lawrence, all of Hemingway, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, astonished at how versatile the form even within a continuity of style and voice. Astonished, too, at how a story can conjure a life in a single episode, and not a little unnerved that my own life might be conjured in similar fashion. Most of my favorite contemporary writers—Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Caroline Adderson, Diane Schoemperlen, Alistair MacLeod, Raymond Carver, a tip of the iceberg list—have worked largely or exclusively in the story form. What’s not to love?

And yet publishers (and perhaps some poor benighted readers) continue to be shy of story collections. Hence a group of Canadian devotees have declared this The Year of the Short Story. Sarah Selecky (whose debut collection was recently short-listed for both the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Award for Best First Book) Matthew J. Trafford, and Jessica Westhead have posted a manifesto aimed at uniting “fellow writers and readers everywhere in one cause—to bring short fiction the larger audience it deserves.” See YOSS’s official website for their spirited defense of the short story. No, make that their offense, for this is no apologia; it’s a call to arms. (They also invite you to download their cool logo, the YOSStini.) Best of all, you don’t have to march or carry placards to be part of the campaign. All you have to do is amble down to your local bookstore, ask for their short story section as though of course they have one, buy a gathering of stories, curl up on your couch with book in one hand and beverage of choice in the other, and enter a whole solar system of stories circling around a single sun.

What's new at TNQ?

Share the love!