A.J.'s comments (member since Aug 27, 2008)

A.J.'s comments from the Short Story lovers group.

In short, magic realism is the use of magical or fantastic elements in an otherwise realistic story.

For example, in Rooke's "Magi Dogs," a painter is in his studio, painting a picture of a cottage. A dog enters the studio, wanders into the painting, and lies down on the cottage steps. Later, it bites the painter's father. This is not treated as fantastic in the story; we're simply to accept that things like this happen.

See Wikipedia for a thorough discussion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_reali...

The reason I'm not usually a fan is that this is often a cheap device to create interest.

The Last Shot - A Novella and Ten stories by Leon Rooke is, I think, very impressive.

And this considering that I'm not ordinarily a fan of magic realism in the short story.

From an interview with Richard Ford:
What about the novel compared to short stories?

Well, novels are harder to write and more important if you get them right.

More easy to mess up?

No, short stories are more easy to mess up. Novels are very forgiving forms, because they have so many formal elements about them that forgive the other formal elements about them. I mean, whereas with short stories... I mean, a messed-up short story or a short story that’s unsuccessful – it really isn’t a short story. It isn’t really anything.

But a novel can be busted in some way and still be a successful novel. You think about The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. You think about The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner. You think about Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald. Those novels all have serious misfeasances in them – all three of them do – and yet, they’re thought of as elegant, wonderful, plausible novels. They get past it because they have many other formal features beside their structure to forgive their structural inadequacies.

What I'm getting at is that the short story is in the same boat as poetry: its readership is small, and grows smaller when you subtract the people who also write it. And this is the way it's going to be, until there's a change in how people read.

As soon as you put words to paper, you start limiting your audience in one way or another.

As to the quality of short stories these days, well, I like bashing MFA programs as much as the next guy, but there's still a lot of good work being done out there.

Oh, and Joseph, thanks for mentioning the storySouth essay. I found it here:

http://www.storysouth.com/fall2004/short...

Tsk, tsk; he's talking about flash fiction, not short stories. But still, many of the same points do hold. He identifies why a lot of short fiction is bad. And best of all, he links to this essay:

http://www.cosmoetica.com/D4-BS1.htm

Which, although it has an agenda of its own, pretty much eviscerates MFA programs, and shines the light on some obvious truths:
"....a lot of people, especially graduate students, don’t really have the self-confidence or even the reading ability to form their own critical judgements."

Indeed.

And I'm curious, frankly, having read some very bad MFA work: is it possible, in fact, to enter an MFA program and fail to get the degree?

I think not. No one in the academic world wants to deal with the inevitable appeals process that follows when you deny a degree in something as subjective as creative writing.

Moaning that the short story is dead is like moaning that poetry is dead: it ain't dead, it's only sleeping. The problem is simply that it doesn't sell.

So some bad fiction is published. It was ever so; there has always been more bad fiction than good fiction. This was never truer than during the pre-TV heyday of the short story, when the field was dominated by cheap, formulaic romance and pulp fiction.

Honestly, I think this is a problem related to an overall decline in literacy.

Literacy rates are higher now than in the heyday of the short story (pre-TV), but it's not the same literacy. People are literate in specialized ways; you can read all about computers, for example, or marketing surveys or operations theory, but still have weak literacy when it comes to, well, actual literature.

Witness a recent discussion I read, in which someone defended bloated, 150,000 word fantasy novels on the grounds that 75,000 words just isn't enough for you to get to know a character.

Short stories demand a kind of attention that many people aren't prepared to give them.

It seems most writer's of short stories have been forced to the back of the bus.That includes some pretty good writer's like Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, James Joyce, wonderful Flannery and Ernest himself.

With the disappearance of fiction from mainstream magazines, the short story fell on hard times.

You would think it the perfect form for our times. You can read a short story on your way to work (unless you're driving, I guess), or on your lunch, or whenever you get a little time. But readers now prefer to be swept up in some huge, ongoing (bloated) story, preferably in a setting far from our reality.

One recent collection that I thought was very good is The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla.

Rust and Bone is a pretty good collection, but it's one to take in small doses.

My White Planet by Mark Anthony Jarman.