Savvy Verse and Wit – Best Books of 2013
Many thanks to Serena at Savvy Verse and Wit for selecting SURVIVAL SKILLS as one of the best books of 2013. If you’re an avid reader, this blog is a must.
Nine Glorious Days
Many thanks to Ian Chung for publishing my short story, “Nine Glorious Days,” in the Eunoia Review, on online literary journal committed to sharing ‘the fruits of beautiful thinking.’
http://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/nine-glorious-days/
A Few Of My Favorite Books
This is a guest post I wrote for Carla Sarett’s inspiring blog: carlasarett.blogspot.com
This list includes some of my all-time favorite books.
There is another book I’d like to mention, one that is especially appropriate as a gift from mothers to daughters. Veterans Day reminded me of this illuminating and fascinating read.
Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II by Emily Yellin
To Alice Munro
Recently a friend commented on a story from my collection. She told me how much she despised one of the characters (an attractive, unscrupulous woman), and then she proposed alternate outcomes for her. Had I considered doing this with her instead of that? Was I going to write another story about her? Maybe next time she could be overweight, deep in debt—in trouble with the feds! In other words: What Happens Next?
I am often surprised by how invested people can be in the stories they read, how unwilling they are to let go of them. When I told my friend that I had no plans to continue this story line, that when I was done with a story, I was done with it, her face fell. “Maybe you will,” she said, “later.” I smiled and said, “You never know.”
Rousing this degree of interest is of course a good thing, indicating that I did my job as a writer. Still, I wish she had said something about the style of the story. Was it a smooth read? Did she have any favorite passages or images? Had I chosen the best point of view? Did she notice the alliteration? Was the dialogue convincing? Was the setting real?
As I writer I notice all these things when I read. I can tell right away if an author has labored hard, or if he has taken short cuts. If the sentences aren’t clean, if the images aren’t striking, if the writing does not make me pause, think and admire, I probably won’t be finishing the book. Life is short. I want to read the sort of stories that make me wish I had written them, like the carefully crafted work of Alice Munro.
Readers are travelers; books are vehicles. Unless they are writers themselves, most readers don’t seem to care much about how the vehicle works, the machinery behind the journey. Imperfections, even outright errors, are forgiven, if they are noticed at all, so long as pace is maintained. While they may enjoy the passing scenery, what readers want most is to get where they’re going. If the destination pleases them, they will want to go back, hang out with the same characters, see what new trouble they can get into, learn what happens next.
The Da Vinci Code. Harry Potter. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Fifty Shades of Grey. These are wildly popular rides, and I respect the authors. A gift to the masses is no small thing.
Blockbusters like these are what makes the latest literary news such a nice surprise. It was Alice Munro who just received the Nobel Prize, and not for crowd-pleasing novels, but for her unstinting effort in the improbable short story genre. Cheers to you, Alice, for giving the world your very best again and again, for writing against the grain and from the heart. That’s showing them.
Many Thanks to the Colorado Review
Reviews of SURVIVAL SKILLS are still coming in, and this latest, by Brent Walth, made my week.
http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/survival-skills/
The Story Prize Blog
For those who are not yet aware of this, Larry Dark, director of the Story Prize, hosts a lively blog, an ongoing series of Q&As with authors who have submitted their collections to The Story Prize. http://thestoryprize.blogspot.com/
These are interesting reads, and I hope you enjoy them. Here is the link to my own Q&A. Thank you for stopping by.
http://thestoryprize.blogspot.com/2013/07/jean-ryan-and-abandoned-story.html
The Tipping Point
At what point do you take your writing seriously? When do you start believing you’re a writer?
Certainly passion is a criterion. You can’t be much of a writer without an irrepressible urge to put ideas into words. You may resist this urge, resenting the time it takes you away from other activities, other people, but eventually it wins, and you find yourself once again opening your toolbox of words in hopes of revealing what is obscured. These words will never be precise enough, will always fall short of perfection, but you can’t be dissuaded from trying. In your desire to find meaning, in your focus on the page, you will miss out on many wondrous things. You know this. You write anyway.
But passion isn’t all, is it? There must be something else: a growing suspicion, a fear almost, that what you’re creating has merit. I don’t know precisely when this happened for me, only that it did.
I don’t think it has much to with publishing credits, or the occasional encouraging comment from an editor. That’s like being told you’re pretty—a nice thing to hear, but unless you believe it yourself, you remain unconvinced. You can write a bestseller and still feel like a fake. The tipping point must be different for every writer. Some never find it, while others acknowledge their gift early on.
I was dubious of my talent for a very long time, discouraged by the genius and productivity of so many superior authors. Eventually it dawned on me that these writers were not my competition but my comrades, and I could acknowledge their excellence and still proceed with my own work. I didn’t have to be a prodigy, didn’t have to produce a book a year or win the Nobel prize, I just had recognize my own skills so that I could start measuring up to…myself. Once I saw what I might do, my efforts gained momentum.
What do I think of my work? Enough to make it better.
An excerpt from “The Side Bar”
I’ve always been fascinated by people who can endure the stark realities of desert life. Here is an excerpt from “The Side Bar,” one of the stories in my collection SURVIVAL SKILLS. Set in the Nevada desert, this story concerns a handful of characters who work in a hotel casino.
It’s not just the people here who have stories, it’s the land. In Elko County there’s a town that was built on a blizzard-whipped mountaintop where someone found gold in the 1860s. The elevation was 10,000 feet and nearly everything the townsfolk needed had to be hauled up the icy slopes—whiskey was cheaper than water.
Every month or so I drive to a ghost town I haven’t been to before. I’ve walked into listing, cobwebbed shacks, found tin cups and plates still on the tables. Today I’m in Rosamund, about two hours east of White Horse. There isn’t much left: stone foundations, a roofless drugstore, parts of the sagging saloon. Dealers and collectors have picked the place clean, but roughing up the dirt I find two unbroken bottles: “Hamlin’s Wizard Oil Liniment” and “SOS Vermin Killer.”
While April is usually a cool month in the high desert, the temperature today is over eighty, so I hike up a stony slope and eat lunch in the scant shade of a juniper. The sky is blue, the mountains brown, just two colors taking care of everything. There is no sound, no chirping birds, no babbling brooks, no car engines, just a huge silence to slip into. I could be the last person on earth.
I take a bite of my ham sandwich and ponder the crumbling square of a house where people once ate, slept, fought, made love, had children, got sick and died. Looking at the drugstore, I have no trouble envisioning the miners, dirty, coughing, walking in and out of the door. I conjure up an old yellow dog lying in the shade, a couple of prostitutes leaning up against the posts, laughter and piano music coming from the saloon. It doesn’t take much imagination to evoke those days. Nevada has more ghosts than living people and the land is strewn with what’s left of their dreams.
It’s dark by the time I got to the outskirts of White Horse and there’s a gorgeous pink line in the west, just above the black horizon. I stop the car and roll down the window, let the night air wash over my face. It smells of sage and silver, of mica and cold clean bone. Out there, all around me, are creatures I can’t see, small desperate animals darting over the rocks. What I can see are the neon lights of town and, even from this distance, the White Horse Casino sign: a tall smiling cowboy holding the ace of hearts.
The coyotes are howling. They do this almost every night, launch their plaintive chorus into the starry heavens. Are they joining forces, organizing a hunt? Or do they just need to know they’re not alone?
Last month a chef in Reno pricked his thumb on a contaminated chicken bone and died ten days later. A friend of mine was struck and killed by a falling eucalyptus tree while she was jogging. Take all the precautions you want, staying alive is a stroke of luck.
I think that’s why I like the desert so much—all this terrifying space, this nothingness, and me just a dot in the middle of it.
Okay. Here I am. Come get me.
The Ready Feast
This post originally appeared on a terrific review site, Booklover Book Reviews http://www.bookloverbookreviews.com/
Why do most readers avoid short stories? I’ve posed this question to several people, who have offered a small range of reasons. Some say that short stories end too abruptly, or that they often have no resolution at all. Others mention a lack of plot, claiming that writers of this genre are more concerned with style than story. But the most common complaint is that short stories are simply too short. When it comes to reading material, people favor long-term investments and will not consider other options, even with the possibility of greater returns. “I make friends with the characters,” someone told me yesterday. “I want them to stick around.”
I find this both odd and poignant, basing the value of something on how long it keeps us company. You don’t see this more-is-better mentality applied to other art forms. A symphony does not trump a song, nor is a portrait less important than a mural, or a statue more impressive than a figurine. And poetry—no one accuses poems of being too short. I wish I could write poetry; the audience is small but ferociously loyal.
I understand the preference for novels only in theory. Being a writer, maybe my own characters edge out the competition, but I don’t think of characters as company—entertainers, yes; companions, no. I ask other things of the people I meet in books. They must be credible, first of all, and informative, and interesting. No matter how scant the time I spend with them, if the author has succeeded, if the characters are well done, I will remember them, and their troubles, all my life.
Novels run the opposite risk, often drowning in their own excess. Sometimes, reading a novel, I get the feeling that the author is figuring things out bit by bit and I am wading through his thoughts, bumping into the clutter. While I’ve read many wonderful novels, I am in greater awe of the spare clean rooms, the potent distillation, of a good short story. There is a bounty of them, from the deliciously chilling tales of Edgar Allen Poe to the devastating brilliance of Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories. At least once a year I reread Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” just to remind myself what a writer is capable of, and I am no less stunned by the short works of Jean Thompson, Antonya Nelson, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Alice Munro and so many others.
Despite these masters of the genre, the popularity of short stories has been declining for decades, and rare is the author who can make a living off them. Who would guess that in this age of texts and tweets, the short form would be struggling for attention? Maybe this techno world we live in is just the point. People need to escape, to lose themselves in more tantalizing realms, in which case, a short story can be the quickest route, the ideal restorative, the ready feast.
In their heyday, short stories appeared every month in popular magazines. Later they were found only in published collections or literary journals. Today, with increasing frequency, they are popping up in e-readers. Now that readers have an instant and inexpensive way to access short stories, I am hoping the genre will enjoy a renaissance, that people will set aside their fat beach reads, at least occasionally, and try something more slimming. Maybe even delicious.
Accountable
This is an excerpt from a forthcoming short story on the ways in which people intersect with nature, with unexpected results.
This morning I was having coffee on the deck when I noticed a spider web, about the width of a grapefruit, strung up between two of my potted vegetable plants. Three minute strands stretched from either side, anchoring a tightly rigged web of breathless perfection, each miniscule partition exactly the same. Sitting in the middle of the web was an auburn spider the size of a pea. If the light had come from a slightly different angle, if I had not been looking that way at that instant, I would have missed him altogether and my world would be unchanged.
Nothing had flown into this web, at least not recently, and I wondered if the spider was hungry and how long he went between meals, and if every web he made was this exquisite, and if they were all productive or if some webs proved worthless, and if a spider could become disheartened. A tiny movement on the periphery turned my attention to another bug, a green beetle with black stripes crawling out of a yellow cucumber flower. Knowing these beetles are trouble, I plucked it from the plant and held it between my thumb and forefinger, regarding the waving twin hairs of its antennae and the tiny hooked feet. It was nearly the size of the spider, and I thought what a feast it would be. I looked from one to the other. Here was the problem, here the solution. I could help a beneficial species and practice organic pest control at the same time.
Still, I had to get up the nerve to toss the beetle at the web; I was half hoping it would bounce off. It didn’t. It stuck fast. In a blink, the spider shot down the web, seized the poor thing and stilled it just like that. Expertly, rapidly, the spider then began wrapping the carcass, enfolding it in sticky strands. In less than ten seconds the beetle was a white mummy, and the spider, more leisurely this time, returned to the center of its web.
I’ve crushed more than few troublesome bugs under my shoe, and I’m not sure why this death was so disturbing. Maybe because I trespassed, bullied my way into a place not designed for me, used another innocent creature to do my dirty work. How can I apologize? God was the only witness.
Jean Ryan 