Here’s one key thing to know about reading stories (no analysis required)
I have recently been informed that May is Short Story Month, and my feelings are mixed.
On the one hand, short stories are and have been important to me as a both a reader and a writer. Reading short stories is what made want to try to write, and writing short stories has been a near-constant presence in my life for more than 30 years.
On the other hand, we only designate months for things we think are underappreciated and underacknowledged. To my knowledge, we don’t have a “chocolate cake month,” or “Beyonce month.”
The truth is, short stories can be both vital and underappreciated, so if it takes a specially designated month to bridge the gap between those states, so be it.
Before the ubiquity of television, short stories were once the shared narrative lingua franca of the country as well as significant sources of income for writers who published in such magazines (known as slicks at the time) as The Saturday Evening Post and Vanity Fair. I have a great uncle named Allan Seager who was a writer of some prominence from the ’30s through the ’60s. In his papers, which I have copies of, there is a note about having to write something for the “slicks” to pay for a new garage that had been caved-in by a fallen tree.
In those notes, the amount $3,000 is circled, a sum that wasn’t unusual payment for a single short story in a single magazine. That’s the equivalent of more than $30,000 today. This is $10,000 more than Deesha Philyaw received for winning the 2021 The Story Prize, which goes to a single collection of short stories. The payment of the vast majority of published short stories today is $0.
There’s no doubt that short stories do not have the same traction in our culture as those bygone years. Every so often, a short story will go viral — as Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat People,” published by The New Yorker in 2017 did — but even then, its reach is still confined to a pretty select subgroup.
I comment often on how I hesitate to recommend books of short stories, because so many people say that they don’t like or don’t read them. I think a lot about why this is, and for sure some of it is a sense among readers that a novel is somehow a superior achievement to a short story, but this isn’t true. In terms of power, short stories have every bit the potential to move us and do so in a much tighter frame, suggesting that a successful short story is a superior artistic achievement in many ways.
My personal theory is that multiple generations of Americans have been turned off the short story by what we’re asked to do with them in school: to explain and interpret them as a performance of learning, as opposed to experience them as a byproduct of being human beings.
We do not need to “figure out” a short story. We merely need to allow it to do its work on us and let ourselves be moved.
My advice: If you want to be introduced to or reacquainted with the power of short stories, listen to one, rather than read it. Get comfortable and let the story wash over you as it unfolds over 10 or 15 minutes.
Recall when you were a child and you were read to and how this had the power to transform your world.