Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It/Maile Meloy: Reflections

Though there was a period of time when I wrote and published short stories (in literary magazines like Alaska Quarterly Review or Sonora Review or International Quarterly), I never fooled myself into thinking I'd mastered the form.  In short stories big things (or ideas or discoveries or defeats) happen in small spaces; back story is many times a trick of innuendo; there's no The Passage-sized lean toward what is really going to happen.  Writers of short fiction have no veils behind which to ...