Recently, I went back and read ZZ Packer’s short story “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.” At the beginning the protagonist Dina is participating in a series of college orientation games among a group of her mostly white peers. Packer does a lot to show the difference between Dina and the rest of the group. The one other black person is overly enthusiastic and appeasing. He too, it’s assumed, is vastly different than the people she’s grown up with in her neighborhood of Baltimore.

Dina and the rest of the group play a game in which each member explains what inanimate object they’d want to be and why. Making an already uncomfortable situation worse, Dinah says that the object she wants to be is a revolver.

What interests me most about this scene are the lines that come afterward. “Until that moment I’d been good in all the ways that were meant to matter. I was an honor roll student—though I’d learned long ago not to mention it in the part of Baltimore where I lived. Suddenly, I was hard-bitten and recalcitrant.”

I once brought this story in one of my workshops to talk about. I remember a guy in my workshop getting upset over it. “I’m tired of this sort of thing,” he’d said, further explaining that he’d read enough stories of racism. He felt put-off and irritated by the story. I was young then and didn’t know how to stand up for myself. If I had, I’d have told him that he’d had a superficial reading of the story. The issues concerning it involve more than just race. Up until now Dinah’s learned to fit into whatever box necessary. She’s been a good student, but pretends otherwise elsewhere to fit in with her neighborhood. As her psychiatrist tells her, she offers up stories to people, not those that belong to her or even those she wants to tell. She dishes these stories out like ice cream, using them to pretend to be what others have come to expect.  At its heart this is a story of identity–of being forced to navigate a world which continues to label you. Her anger, I believe, came from finally deciding she’d had enough.

I thought of this story again while reading an essay that was published on The Nervous Breakdown a couple of weeks ago. The essay attempts to talk about issues regarding writing about race in MFA programs and in publishing. There were several concerns that got lost within that essay that I hope to point out here. The first—can a person write a story across their race? What does it mean if a white male wrote a story about blacks in a urban ghetto? What would it mean if I, a black female, wrote a story about white hipsters in New York? Do we look at the stories differently knowing the writer is of a different cultural background? Should it even matter?

This is what I’ve told myself consistently over and over again—be so good that the reader never questions otherwise, that there’s never a moment of doubt in the believability of the author’s voice. Write a good story and it won’t matter if you’re a minority, or female, or whatever other marginalized group you fit into. The story will always transcend all of these markers.

But then I read articles like this:  This is just one of many that discuss the disparities in publishing. I read these articles and I am left to wonder—is the story enough?

As much as I’d like to believe that I am simply a writer, and no matter how hard I may fight against the addition of other labels, I know that the culture we live in doesn’t currently allow that. As a woman and a minority, anything I write is automatically going to be associated with those labels because in our culture there is that tendency to label, to put into groups, to differentiate—these are ethnic stories, these are women writers—because somehow it’s hard for us to even consider the possibility that we could relate to the situations in these stories, that we could ever identify with the characters in them.

Sometimes it seems as if we get so caught up in the difference that it gets in the way of the story. I long for the time when there are no white or black or brown, male or female, stories. When we don’t have to differentiate, to put into boxes. When there are just stories about people, about experiences—heartache and loss, happiness and regret. Our lives may be different, but at their core, the experiences are the same, and that is what I feel an imperative to tell.

Today’s working writer is Q Lindsey Barrett.

Tell us a little bit about yourself:

I came to writing late, but once I got here, I knew the entirety of my life had led me to being a fiction writer. My first publication was, literally, the first thing I wrote – a poem. Back in 1990 when Cosmopolitan magazine was still publishing fiction and poetry, I sent my little poem off, it was accepted, published, and I was paid $25. I thought, ‘What’s all this about the difficulty of getting published?’ It was 2003 before my next acceptance.

TMR played a role in my perseverance. I studied lit journals like getting my work in them was a test I had to pass; started taking community college writing courses, reading writing craft books, attending writers’ conferences, and writing writing writing. I had a more-than-full-time, high-pressure job as a legal administrator and was raising two daughters, so it took until 1995 before I felt I had a story ready for publication. Early on I connected with The Missouri Review’s style and editorial sensibility and my goal became to have my first short story publication be in TMR. I sent the story off and a few months later received my SASE with a form reject of the ‘we won’t be publishing this piece, but send us more’ variety. A hand-written ‘Thanks!’ was scrawled on the paper and the ‘send more’ part was underlined in blue ink. Ah how that tiny taste of encouragement kept me at it.

I decided I needed more education, so I applied to the University of Washington’s two-year graduate (non-degree) Fiction Writing Program (focused on short stories). After earning my certificate, I wrote and submitted, wrote and submitted, often rewarded with ‘send us more’ rejects. I repeated the second year of the program, but in the novel-writing track. An excerpt of my in-progress novel was selected for publication and my professor described me as her ‘most gifted natural writer,’ which I’ve since learned means little in terms of getting published–chatting with agents at conferences about my novel had them stifling yawns. (Took me a while to learn how bad I am at the big hook, at the one-sentence pitch.) Still no success with short stories, another poem won a contest and was published, and I had an ever-longer, yet still unfinished novel.” Decided I needed more education.

I applied to five highly regarded low-residency MFA programs and was accepted at four. I choose Vermont College. I switched to a less all-consuming job so I’d have brain power for my studies and continued to submit during my MFA pursuit, fueled by personal, full letter rejects (Esquire), no but send more (The New Yorker), and the occasional word of encouragement among the billion standard rejects. I graduated in 2010, and received my first short story acceptance a few months later (though it was another year and a half before it was actually published). I started shopping in earnest for an agent and pursuing teaching opportunities at conferences (I had attended many) and at local continuing education–family obligations prevent relocation for university teaching. I began reading slush for Hunger Mountain. 2011 brought several short story acceptances, 2012 a couple, one so far in 2013, and a few contest ‘honorable mentions.’ Agents often kindly tell me I’m a very good writer while turning my books down, usually with talk of the brutality of today’s publishing market, always with the news that what I’ve written isn’t quite ‘there,’ in terms of what publishers are looking for.

I love teaching! Though, at best, teaching at conferences is a break-even proposition; more often the cost of getting to a conference exceeds the honorarium. My students are always appreciative, and often ask if I’ll take on their books as editorial projects. I have occasionally done so, but find that immersion-level editing uses up all my creative mind, leaving none for my own work. Last December I was asked to step into the role of Assistant Fiction Editor at Hunger Mountain. I continue to teach and write and submit and seek agent representation and still believe ‘writer’ is what I was meant to be. I occasionally think I’ll write a book called “My Unpaid Writing Life.”

What was it that made you step into writing and, throughout the (incredibly too common) rejection process, what made you keep at it?

I blame my mother. She created a books-are-magical monster by reading to me in utero (well, she was reading to my older sister) and by continuing the practice regularly after I was born. Since she wasn’t continuously available, I was forced to teach myself to read while still toddling around and I spent my childhood with a book seemly glued to my hand. In high school and college I was one of those freaks who loved essay questions and the writing part of every job was always my favorite, but I never thought of being a ‘writer’ (which to me back then meant novelist) because I thought you had to be anointed or canonized or touched by the right hand of God in the Sistine Chapel to gain the required magical powers.

Having temped at law firms in college and by then needing an actual full-time paying job, (and possessing neither time nor money for full-on law school), I became a paralegal. My specialty was drafting estate planning document for clients that were layperson-intelligible while containing all the legally-tested language. I thought it would be useful to people if I were to write a book making legal concepts everyone should understand understandable. I also was in the process of becoming single again and thought other single moms could benefit from me sharing the stuff I knew how to do—home repairs, car maintenance, in addition to legal issues with visitation and child support. Since I didn’t know how to go about getting a how-to book written and published, I looked for classes at my local community college. The first available class was on fiction writing. I signed up, figuring whatever I learned would be useful. Oh how I loved fiction writing! I discovered that, unlike every other kind of writing I’d done, a fiction writer didn’t have to be tied to ‘the facts,’ wasn’t constrained by ‘what really happened.’ Even better, no matter what sparked the story, the writer could go anywhere in service of that story. I took several other classes more related to my initial plan, but nothing could match the joy of making something out of nothing, of overhearing an interesting conversation and turning it into a story, of meeting a person and making up a whole life based on a brief encounter. I started keeping a writing notebook, jotting down things and people and sounds and sights and events that captured my attention. Wool gathering for future story-sweaters.

It’s ironic that my first publication was a poem, first, because I suffered Severe Poetry Trauma when I was eight (curse you Miss Divorce), and second, because I am so not a poet. I’m too much about narrative arc and too little about imagery. Even my two published poems tell stories. It makes (real) poets a little crazy when I tell them I had scribbled notes on a page and when I went to turn those bits of wool, those words into a story, the scribbles looked like a poem. I tidied the lines up a bit, sent scribbles-newly-christened-poem off and received an acceptance shortly thereafter. No credentials, no writerly education, no record of publication. I did this twice, albeit thirteen years apart. Poets toil over each line, each word, for years without publication or recognition. But my hard reality is that in the intervening and much of the subsequent years, the dozens of short stories and novel, which is what I agonize over, slave over, brought nothing but rejects. (I realize this holds a lesson for me—don’t revise whatever spark of life my raw prose has right out of it—but so far this is a lesson I am unable to learn. I have to beat a story insensible before circling back to the original inspiration and resuscitating the thing.)

So why do I keep at it for years and years on each piece? People who run casinos have studied what keeps folks at the game tables or dropping coins into slots. It’s not the size of the jackpot or the regularity of payoffs. Rather it is intermittent reinforcement at random intervals.

In the big crap shoot that is the publishing biz, I have received intermittent reinforcement at random intervals–in the form of minor encouragement from major publications (with zero Big Kahuna Journal acceptances); a plethora of honorable-mention-long-list-short-list-finalist, not-quite wins; the occasional selected-for-publication from journals I admire; adulation from audiences when I have a chance to teach what I know or to read my work aloud; seemingly heartfelt and generous praise for my work from agents as they are declining representation. I stand as Exhibit A in answer to the question of whether the casino experts’ research applies to publishing.

Much as the odds in Vegas are more favorable to the gambler in games with an element of skill – Black Jack, Poker – than those which are pure chance – Slots, Keno – I continuously strive to improve my skills in hope that writing ability will increase my chances of winning (however you describe winning at the publishing game). One thing I know is that the Oprah Lottery is only open to those who keep writing until a publisher chooses to turn their manuscript into a book. Another thing I know for certain is that giving up is the only sure way to fail.

Even so, I do think about giving up from time to time. I work though the death of a tiny bit of my soul each reject brings (like the way booze kills brain cells, but we keep drinking) by forcing myself to move forward. I require myself to have at least ten submissions out there at all times. I require myself to re-submit each rejected piece within a week, often with a bit of tweaking word choice or story order before tossing that paper airplane back into the jet stream. I’m publication picky—I don’t want publication for publication sake—and it’s a lot of work rematching a story to yet another publication I think is a good fit, but this process gives me specific tasks to keep my mind away from the dark place where I start to think all these years have been a wasted enterprise. Most days are sunny (mentally, not literally – I live in the Pacific Northwest) and I feel like what I’m reaching for is just off the tips of my fingers. Bit more stretching will do it.

And then there is the childhood me. The little girl who had a lot of interesting and terrifying and (theoretically) traumatizing experiences (which I, so far, don’t write about), but whose mom read to her. No matter what was happening in my (real) life, I knew I could submerge myself in the world of characters in a book. All was well when I was reading or being read to, and I would always emerge newly optimistic. The short answer to why I keep at this writing thing (and the length of this response no doubt gives you insight into yet another reason I am not a poet), is, I suppose, (having discovered this by setting out an answer to your question), that I’m writing to make magic for that little girl. And who would give up on her?

You mentioned creating a whole story from a small moment, perhaps a conversation with a stranger that you may never meet again. How do you pop that small kernel into a full fledged story?

Perhaps the best way to answer is to provide an example. My flash fiction, “Warrior Blues,” started when I heard a guy telling another guy about how much he hated San Diego. That caught my attention since it’s my home town and because most folks love San Diego. I gathered that he was in boot camp there, so the association with an unpleasant experience might explain why he hated it. It wouldn’t have stuck with me if that’s all there was to it, but he went on to talk about marrying his high school girlfriend when he was home on leave before he shipped out. He said the minute he drove away, (immediately after the ceremony), off to San Francisco which would be his new home base, he knew marrying her had been a mistake. He had BB King cranked to the max on his car stereo, playing “The Thrill Is Gone,” and that’s exactly how he felt. That was note-worthy – as in, that struck me as one of my wool bits. I wrote it down.

When I’m not feeling inspired at the time I have set aside to write, I’ll page through my notebooks seeing what catches my eye. The TV news had been showing troops leaving for Iraq, so when I revisited the BB King note, it jumped off the page. I made up a whole back story for the guy based on what I know about who’s signing up to go to war these days. I wondered what he’d be like—a guy who joins the military right out of high school, hates everything about it, but is stuck until his service obligation is done. I pictured him longing to have his old life back and decided to have his girlfriend show up the night before he shipped out to surprise him. That let me have her represent the life he’s leaving behind and that’s what motivates the character in my version to marry her, right then. (As though that will solve his blues.) I was working toward the ending, toward the bit I had written down at the time I overheard his conversation. Because I had much more material in the back story I gave him, it could have turned into a longer piece, but I was pleased with a couple phrases I had written to describe how much he hated the heat in San Diego. He seemed like a cold person and I thought ‘cold blooded like a lizard in the heat.’ Once I had him being a lizard, a few more sentences came to me and it seemed complete, in that certain things I had written struck me as telling his whole story without needing more. So I did use the backstory I’d written though most of it isn’t on the page, and it turned out to be a short short.

The process is slightly different when I’m working on something specific at the time I discover a kernel. I’ll use my story “Fissures” as an example. I had been reading about the plight of Russian/Eastern European mail order brides in terrible/abusive marriages, trapped in rural places, far from large cities or transportation, or any resources that might help them get away. They’re like modern day indentured servants who are also required to have sex with their bosses. Once they start popping out babies it’s much more difficult for them to get out of their sad situation. When I sat down to write, I wasn’t consciously thinking about the Russian brides, I was working on a completely unrelated novel.

I decided to give one of my characters in that novel a voice ‘like a squeaky toy was stuck in her throat.” This came from another of my wool bits, a description of a former co-worker who was strikingly beautiful and had a horrifically high voice. It was note-worthy, the reaction people would have when the gorgeous creature would open her mouth. This real woman’s name was Vickie, and I inadvertently typed, “Vivkie,” when typing up a description. That typo reminded me of a Russian girl I know, one of my daughter’s friends, whose name is Vika. Her mother works on a Russian fishing trawler, a floating fish processing factory, and she married off her older daughter, Anzela, at eighteen to an American to keep her from having the same awful life cutting fish open below decks on churning seas day and night for months at a time in long nauseating shifts. (Not a mail-order bride, a lovely young entrepreneur importing Russian fish married her [she is very beautiful]. He ended up adopting the much-younger sister, eight year old Vika, so she could come to America too.)

My family and I had just driven cross county and the plains felt so desolate. I could see how trapped a person—say a person imported from the other side of the world–could feel in the wide-open spaces. There were towns clustered around factories which provided the only work available. The typo, “Vivkie,” melded with the factories and the plains and Russian mail order brides and fish processors and a whole character along with her entire life story came in a flood. Then, thinking of how pregnancy makes a woman in a bad situation even more trapped, I remembered being nine-months pregnant and my (former) mother-in-law nagging/whining/manipulating me into climbing her apricot tree and picking her damn apricots around my giant belly. She became the factory owner whose (undocumented) employees are essentially indentured servants, the woman whose son rapes and impregnates Vivkie in “Fissures.”

I think the secret to popping that kernel is to be open to whatever character or story is triggered by the kernel, whether serendipitous typo, long-remembered personal experience, overheard conversation, interesting description of a person, or current events. Then being willing to combine the seemingly unrelated wool bits that your subconscious mind wants together. Your mind tells you it wants the connection by foisting distracting memories/thoughts on you when you’re trying to write something else. Gather wool. Pay attention.

Since last month was national short story month, could you recommend us one that you think is a must-read for any writer?

“Zolaria” by Caitlin Horrocks, which, halleluiah! can be downloaded as a pdf off her website. So there’s no excuse for every writer not to read it and study it and absorb its lessons. Fabulous story, excellent writer.

I discovered Ms Horrocks’ work when she taught a class I took at a tiny lit festival in a smallish Eastern Washington town. I don’t know if Spokane, Washington is downwind from the shuttered Hanford Nuclear Power Plant (‘the most contaminated nuclear site in the western world’ wheee!) and leaking radiation is expanding their minds there at Eastern Washington University. But the awesome Jess Walter (We Live In Water) and Greg Spatz (Half As Happy) also sprang forth from Eastern.

Once folks have read “Zolaria,” they should buy Horrocks’ book,This is Not Your City. (“Zolaria” is the first story in the collection.) As I tell everyone who’ll listen, whether you derive equal enjoyment from all the stories in the collection or not, you can learn everything there is to know about short story writing from reading This Is Not Your City.

 You can follow Q Lindsey Barrett on facebook or find her at: http://www.qlindseybarrett.com

Who would condemn the grieving parents of a long-lost, likely murdered boy? Who would turn these parents’ tears to treacle, their mourning into manipulation— and make the reader hate them, too?

Dan Chaon would. It’s a nifty trick. And it’s one of the reasons I adore “A Little Something To Remember Me By,” from Chaon’s second collection, Among the Missing.

“Here’s A Little Something To Remember Me By” opens with an unremarkable statement: “I was grown up now, married with a family of my own, but still the Ormsons wanted to see me, just like always.” Tom, the narrator, is with his family on a trip to his childhood home, where his mother’s voice has taken on a “stern, combative tone” in the wake of his father’s death.

At the center of this story is a remarkable absence: the disappearance, fifteen years earlier, of Tom’s friend, Ricky Ormson, from a local park. “As far as anyone knew, I was the last person to ever see Ricky Ormson,” Tom says, claiming to accept the loss. He’s not surprised the police have never found a body: “Really, the only surprise was the Ormsons’ insistence, year after year, that there was still the possibility of Ricky’s return. I often thought that if there was a ghost haunting me, it wasn’t Ricky; it was them— Mr. and Mrs. Ormson.”

Like other Chaon stories, “Here’s a Little Something…” works like a centrifuge: past and present spin together, ever more tightly, around a character’s central anxiety. By the end, a typical Chaon main character is even more detached from loved ones— perhaps following strangers on a street, perhaps burning down a house. What begins as a seemingly cohesive whole becomes particulate.

On the surface, Tom’s central anxiety is the devotion of Ricky’s grieving parents: now thirty, he’s tired of the being the Best Friend of Missing Ricky Ormson. The Ormsons are always sitting in the audience for his achievements, “applauding with their sad, hollow clapping.” The Ormsons “trail” him everywhere, sending gifts after the births of his children, and fixing him with their “soft, magnetic gaze” whenever they visit with him on his mother’s couch.

At the same time, Tom never fully inhabits his present-day, adult life. His wife often looks at him with “puzzled eyes.” He sits in a fog at dinner, angering his mother, contemplating how he’s “a good actor, a good liar.” He’s the parent of two sons who barely register on the page. In fact, whenever his wife and mother sympathize with the Ormsons as parents, Tom finds their attitude “infuriating…willfully childish, like someone who flirted using babytalk.” He complains that he’s living “the hypothetical life of Ricky Ormson,” but he has no idea how to move on.

Perhaps that’s because of Tom’s secret.

Halfway through the story, Tom reveals what really happened on the day of Ricky’s disappearance. At their high school, Ricky is showing off cash he’s earned for doing something “sick,” like “a lot of guys” have done. In the park, Ricky leads Tom to a car, where an older man is waiting. For what happens next, Tom is paid $50. Afterward, at the edge of the lilac bushes, Ricky waves, then disappears, saying, “See you tomorrow, I guess.”

This new information is stunning, clarifying, and Chaon’s placement of it — halfway through the story— spins the centrifuge into high gear.  Of course, Chaon puts all his characters at a dinner table with the Ormsons, who greet Tom’s children with kisses and loving murmurs. Of course, Tom sits near his brother Bryce, now a police officer, a sweet bear of a man in whom Tom almost confides. But how can he, now, after years immobilized by guilt and shame? He rationalizes: “What would I have said? Imagine telling this to… two policemen, men your father’s age. Imagine your parents hearing about it…and what if it got in the newspapers, what if the other kids in school heard about it?”

The story closes with Tom climbing into his childhood bed with his wife, at the end of their visit. On the surface, Tom’s life still looks perfectly coherent. But underneath it all, we’re deeply unsettled. What would have happened if Ricky Ormson hadn’t disappeared? What would the story of Tom have become? Is there even such a story to tell?

Rebecca Meacham’s debut story collection, Let’s Do, was published in 2004 as the winner of UNT Press’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” program selection. Her stories have been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, West Branch, Paper Darts, SunDog Lit, and elsewhere, and her nonfiction appears on the blog for Ploughshares. Rebecca lives with her family in the woods of Wisconsin, where she’s an Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Today’s Interview is with Darci Schummer.

Tell us a little about yourself.

I fit the description of a working writer who hasn’t yet published a book or published widely.  I have completed a short story collection, which I am trying to publish, and am currently at work on a novel.  I also teach developmental writing and college-level writing full-time at a technical college. Trying to balance teaching and writing has been a continual struggle for me, although I do feel that two feed each other.  There is something important about being an artist who teaches:  the passion for teaching grows directly from being a writer and teaching writing drives me to continually practice what I preach.  Nearly everyday I learn something new about writing because of teaching it.  Further, all day I collect stories from the people around me. I teach many immigrant and non-traditional students, which is fascinating because my students bring experiences into my classroom so vastly different from my own.  They bring stories of war, stories of cultural tradition, stories of obstacles overcome.  Absorbing their stories helps me shape plots and characters and also allow me to look at the world through different lenses, which I may have never found had I not heard them.

I am a graduate of Hamline University’s MFA program, and my fiction has appeared in places such as Bartleby Snopes, Paper Darts, Conclave:  A Journal of Character, Feile Festa, The Diverse Arts Project, and Open to Interpretation:  Intimate Landscape.  I live, write, and teach in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the winters stretch longer than is good for anyone.  But we tighten our jackets and shoulder forth, doing the best we can with what we’ve got.

What do you feel is the importance of being a writer who teaches? There is that romantic image of the writer who writes all by himself, and there’s the belief rolling around that writing, especially creative, cannot be taught. What are your feelings on this?

My students also benefit from the fact that I’m a teaching artist.  Because I’m teaching required classes and none of my students are English majors, I’m always selling writing to my students.  One way to get them interested is to show them I practice what I teach.   For example, an editor recently asked me to make some changes to a story before it was published.  I brought in the draft with all the editor’s comments on it and showed it to my students.  Seeing that even the person teaching the class is subject to criticism encouraged them not to feel as much anxiety about getting feedback from their classmates and me.  It also allowed me to talk more in-depth about my own process.  I told them how long I spend writing stories and just how many revisions I make.  Whenever we have peer workshops, I share bad experiences I’ve had in workshops so that students know what type of feedback not to give.  In one workshop I had during my undergraduate program, a guy just wrote “Is there a plot to this damn thing?” on my story.  Everyone gets a laugh, but they also see the difference between what is helpful and what isn’t.  Next semester, I’m planning to include a visiting writers’ series in my classroom where I’ll ask writers I know to come in, share their work, and talk about the writing process.  Many of these people write creatively and professionally, which is important given that I teach at a technical college.  If I were not a writer who teaches, I wouldn’t be able to create these types of experiences for my students.  I’m best at teaching when my own creative life is active and rich.

To answer the second part of the question, there is of course something lonely about being a writer:  in a sense you’re always on the outside observing and making notes about the world around you.  However, being engaged with the world around you is also a large part of where inspiration comes from.  Teaching is one way that I engage with the world.  As far as whether or not writing can be taught, as a teacher, I read writing coming from people working at all levels and all abilities.  There is a certain spark I see in some people’s writing that can’t be taught.  Some people have it; some people don’t.  The people who have it will go on to write stories and poems or great essays.  But that doesn’t mean the people who don’t have it can’t learn to write proficiently enough to communicate clearly if they have enough practice.  One of the biggest obstacles I face as a teacher is students who think they can’t write or who have been made to believe they are awful writers.  Once their confidence is built, and they are given some encouragement, they can go on to write some pretty great pieces.

Have you had the experience when you’re workshopping a student piece and the class is hostile to them? How do you negotiate letting the class have their say while also keeping it civil and helpful to the writer?

I really haven’t had a situation where the class was hostile to a student piece.  One of the things I stress before we do any workshops is that we are all learners who are in the class to help each other.  I also have a PowerPoint that I show sometimes where two people are in a workshop, and each thinks something horrible about the other’s piece but finds a way to state the opinion in a constructive way.  So, instead of saying “This is boring,” I encourage them to say things like “Could you add more descriptive detail here to make this more engaging?”

When you say that you collect stories from the people around you – do you use those in your own work?

There are times when I use bits and pieces of what students tell me in my own writing. A few semesters ago, a student talked a lot about having been in the military when he was a young man.  The way that he described his experiences and his voice really stuck with me.  That voice ended up coming out in a story I wrote awhile after I had him.  It was a voice that my protagonist, who had suffered a mental breakdown, heard while he was lost– physically and psychologically.  It was a voice that seemed to guide him.  Another student wrote about experiences in Afghanistan, which were vivid and affecting, and some of what he said helped me develop a character in the novel I’m working on right now.

How do you balance the time/energy it takes to teach full-time while also continuously writing? Even as a grad student, I scoff on the myth that teachers have so much free time to run wild through the streets.

Although I love teaching, balancing writing and teaching can be very difficult.  I am constantly reading and writing, but often times I’m reading student papers and writing feedback on them.  It can be pretty draining, and after I finish reading a set of essays, I am pretty exhausted.  I also put a lot of creative energy into preparing my classes.  While I love being creative at work, the energy I put into making class enjoyable for my students comes from the same well as the energy I use for writing.  So, I have to find ways to refill the creative well:  I take walks, I read poems, I meet with my writing group.  Aside from working to recharge myself creatively, I have to work hard to carve out time to write, to revise, and to submit stories.  Trying to stick to some type of writing routine has been the most helpful way I’ve found to do this.  But, I also have to give myself permission to break that routine when need be.  Feeling like a terrible person when I get too busy working to write isn’t helpful; in fact, it’s harmful.  I have to remind myself that I will have extra time in the summer, on other breaks from school, and at the beginning of the semesters and that I will be diligent about getting as much done as possible during those times.

How do you handle the inevitable rejection of the business?

This past winter was the winter of rejection.  I went six months without any acceptances.  During that time I had several personal rejections, which was encouraging, but a personal rejection still isn’t an acceptance.  Also, when time is limited, as it always is, I sometimes have to either write or submit because I didn’t have time to do both.  Oddly enough, writing always makes me feel better.  Creating something imbues me with a sense of confidence, and I feel like I can face rejection again.  Sometimes I need to take a break from submitting and just write.  Also, talking to other writers–especially those more experienced than me–really helps.  I have a friend, Richard Carr, who is a wonderful poet and has several books of poetry published.  He just published a book that was a finalist in 14 different competitions before it finally won one.  I don’t know how many times he submitted it even to become a finalist 14 times.  Seeing that type of hard work and dedication is inspiring and also helps me get through.

Can you talk a little bit about the themes/inspirations for your work?

My writing is character driven, place driven and focuses on the connection and disconnection in human relationships, and all the joy, anxiety, and loneliness that result from those states.  I have a reputation for writing sad stories.  And it’s true:  rarely does anything I write have a happy ending.  But, as Charles Baxter said, “Hell is story-friendly.”  I think the existence of sad stories is crucial.   Sad stories prepare us for futures we are too brittle to imagine or too ignorant to recognize as possible. They allow us to experience death and loss and desperation with only a modicum of real pain. They are precursors to experiences we have not yet lived.

I recently finished a book of short stories called Six Months in the Midwest.  All of the stories are set in Minneapolis in the winter, and some have been published in magazines and journals such as Paper Darts, Revolver, Conclave: A Journal of Character, and Bartleby Snopes. I have been entering the manuscript in contests and sending it out to various small presses in hopes of finding it a good home.  Currently, I am working on a novel called The Ballad of Two Sisters.  As a short story writer, I never really pictured myself writing a novel, but I started writing short stories focused on two sisters—Helen and Stella, who die on the same day—and soon I was writing about their mother, their grandmother, Stella’s husband and son, and the mortician who prepares them for their joint funeral.  The project became too big in scope not to be a novel, but it is told in stories and in different points of view.  Spending so much time with the same characters has been both challenging and fascinating.  I’ve grown quite attached to the sisters and the people in their periphery; I know I’ll miss them when I’m done with the project.

That form – the novel in stories – were you attracted to it because of how concise the pieces are – and that they can be broken up and published separately – or do you feel that it allows you a certain freedom or constraint that you find appealing?

Since I do consider myself primarily a short story writer, writing a novel in stories seems more manageable to me.  Also, I think it does allow a great deal of freedom.  It doesn’t need to have the same relationship to time as many conventional novels do.  (And when I say “conventional” here, I’m thinking of a novel with one protagonist that progresses linearly.)   I can focus in on pivotal moments of the characters’ lives and then jump forward in time or back in time as I want to, while not jarring readers based on expectations they might have of a conventional novel. I also like the idea that readers will be putting together a whole picture based on glimpses into these people’s lives.  The relationship its given me with my characters is also beneficial. Since they’re all stars of their own stories, I never view them solely in relation to each other.

You can follow Darci Schummer at her blog: http://darcidawn.blogspot.com/

My first experience with Rebecca Makkai’s “The November Story” was actually not in print, but from a This American Life podcast I listened to on my way to my parents’ house for two Thanksgivings ago.  I’m a fan of Makkai’s work, had read several of her other short stories, and knew I’d enjoy it the moment I heard her name.  Still, I was blown away—surprised by how quickly the story pulled me in, how deeply it affected me, how long it has stuck with me.

The narrator, Christine, is a producer for a reality television show—an American Idol-like contest where artists create work based on weekly prompts, which is then judged to decide if they should continue to the next round—and the story takes place almost exclusively on the set.  Parts of the story made me laugh out loud: the way the narrator and the other producers manipulate the artist-competitors into saying negative things about each other and having the most dramatic facial expressions on camera, a description of producers and set-workers standing on ladders to pull leaves off the trees to make it look like November two months early, lines like “Eight days in, the producers tell us we need a romance arc. Kenneth says, ‘It has to be Leo and Astrid, because she’s the hottest girl, and he’s the only straight guy. We have to go hetero on this.’”

As the story progresses, we watch Christine and her co-worker, Inez, try to manufacture a romance between Leo, the musician, and Astrid, the glass-blower, while Christine’s relationship with her partner, Beth, is falling apart.  The tension of Christine and Inez manipulating Astrid and Leo into “falling in love,” while Christine and Beth struggle to figure out why they are each still together and whether or not they should stay that way, is the stuff of great fiction.  The tension quietly builds between these two storylines until they intersect, when Christine starts to feel guilty for meddling in Astrid and Leo’s personal lives—something she is paid to do and has always done—and jeopardizes the show (and her job) by promising Astrid that they’ll stop.

One of the last scenes of the story—after Christine says, “By the end, I never see Beth awake. I don’t know if we’re broken up, if we’re reconciled, if we’re the same as we always were. All I have is her unconscious body, beside me in the dark when I get into bed and beside me in the earliest gray light when I roll out. It might be a nice way to fade out of things: a life-sized Beth doll to wean me off the real thing.”—she is in the attic when she sees Leo and Astrid through the window, standing by the edge of the woods, kissing in secret.  The producer thinks for a moment about getting one of the camera guys to come up to the attic, so they can use it on the show, but she instead stands there for a few moments, watching this display of affection—not love manufactured for television, but the real thing.

I was driving along I-86 in western New York when I listened to Makkai read this story, and while I know I was paying attention to the road enough not to cause an accident, I am certain I was on autopilot.  I remember looking up at the road after the story ended and not remembering how I had gotten there.  For weeks after, entire lines of the story were still stuck in my head.  I listened again and again.  I bought on a copy of Crazyhorse 78, where it was originally published, and have read it several times over the past year and a half.  This past fall, when Rebecca Makkai read at Ohio State, and she read the first line of the story, I think I may have audibly cheered.  It’s really just that good.

One of the things I love most about this story is the oddness of the setting.  I’ve never read a story about reality television shows before—never been interested in doing so, never even watched a reality television show before this—and yet I was invested almost immediately.  It’s weird, and it’s funny, but it never feels contrived or unbelievable or cartoonish.  Instead, Makkai makes it seem like any other job and uses Christine’s work to complicate her relationship with Beth.  When Inez asks Christine why she’s with Beth, even though she seems so unhappy, Christine narrates:

[…] the whole time I’m tearing at my thumbnail and trying to answer her question, as if I’m a contestant and must answer the question, and must rephrase the question as part of the answer.

I am with Beth because:

I’ve been fighting against her leaving for so long it’s the only thing I know how to do. It’s like that’s my character arc, like some producer has said, “We need you to be the quirky girl with the short hair who doesn’t want her girlfriend to leave.” And, like the best contestants, the ones chosen for their compliance, the ones who are secretly actors in their real lives as well as pianists or dancers, I go along with it. Because what other role do I have? Because who else am I?

One of my creative writing professors from undergrad, Anne Panning, told us that setting is one of the most underutilized devices in contemporary fiction.  I agree—it’s hard to do right, and few people manage it.  There’s either not enough about the setting, or there’s too much and it starts to take over; it either doesn’t do enough work, or it does too much.  Makkai, though, has struck that balance.  It never feels heavy-handed or too obvious, but without it, the story of the demise of Beth and Christine’s relationship wouldn’t be fully realized.

Silas Hansen earned his MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University.  His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, Colorado Review, The Normal School, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere, and have earned two Pushcart nominations and an AWP Intro Journals Project Award.  He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he is working on a collection of essays.  You can find him at silashansen.net.

The movie stars Billy Campbell and Peter Fonda, and is based on the 1893 novel by Harold Frederic and is set to release in theaters all across the country at the end of June. Edmund Wilson praised Frederic’s creation as a brave and singular book that “differs fundamentally from any other Civil War fiction.”

You can check out the film’s website here.

In addition to the screening of Copperhead, attendees will have an opportunity to meet director Ron Maxwell. He’s directed several terrific films, including Gettysburg and Gods and Generals. Several local organizations, including The Blue Note, True/False Film Festival, Citizen Jane Film Festival, and many others, have been kind enough to donate free items that will be available to attendees.

We’re also thrilled that director Ron Maxwell will be in town to meet moviegoers and challenge you in a game of Plinko. Okay, we made that Plinko part up. But it might happen! You’ll have know if you don’t come hang out with us!

Copperhead will be screened at Jesse Auditorium in Jesse Hall on the University of Missouri Campus at 7 p.m. on Saturday June 8th. The event is open to the public; admission price is $10 for MU students and $12 for the public. Tickets are available through the MSA/GPC box office on campus or through www.ticketmaster.com. We hope to see you there!

Follow Michael on Twitter: @mpnye

When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, way back when I was an undergraduate at Ohio State, I gravitated toward F. Scott Fitzgerald. I don’t know why. I bought and read all his novels. His collected stories was my Bible. When people asked me who my favorite writer was, I said Fitzgerald. Without thinking much about why. Fitzgerald is now best known for The Great Gatsby, but during his lifetime, he was a short story writer, writing stories that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Red Book, Liberty, and McCall’s.

I’m thirty four years old, and have only recently reached (some) level of comfort with admitting I haven’t read The Famous Book You Want To Talk About and Are Shocked I Have Not Read. I’ve also begun to question the books I have read. When I read The Grapes of Wrath, I didn’t like it: would that be true if I reread it today? Moby Dick was brilliant when I was in my late twenties; how would I feel about the book now? How many other books do I need to revisit, reconsider? Fortunately for me, this is National Short Story Month, not National Novel Month. So it seems appropriate to close May by rereading  my favorite (allegedly!) short story writer and what’s considered one of his greatest stories.

“Babylon Revisited” is the story of Charles Wales, an American living in Prague after the boom years of the Roaring Twenties have crashed and burned. The story is set in Paris, and when the story opens, Charlie has just arrived. He finds the city is, of course, not the way he remembers it; old friends are broke or just flat out gone; all his old haunts are still and quiet. None of it feels right to Charlie: nothing is quite recognizable and he’s softly embarrassed by all the things he can’t remember or never did when he lived in Paris. He tries to convince himself that the past doesn’t matter. Instead, he focuses on his nine-year-old daughter Honoria, who he hasn’t seen for ten months, in the hope of convincing her guardians, his sister-in-law Marion and her husband Lincoln, to let him take his daughter back to Prague. He hopes they can forgive him for what happened to his deceased wife Helen, which Fitzgerald is careful not to reveal too soon.

The melancholy and the hopeful stubbornness Charlie shows in the first scene resonates in each of the story’s five sections. The large, bustling city he remembers is gone, and Charlie is both relieved and nostalgic for the days when he was filthy rich and frequently drunk. It was a party that never should have ended.

Helen haunts the story. Naturally, Marion is unconvinced that Charlie has changed. Every word she speaks, every gesture she makes, is cautious, icy, a thinly veiled contempt for her brother-in-law. Charlie’s mind never focuses on Helen, too painful to linger on, too incompatible with his hopeful view of the future. Helen reminds both characters of their past—my wonderful and flawless sister; my carefree partner-in-crime wife—that no longer exists and probably wasn’t a true image of Helen anyway. They both need Helen to be a martyr, to serve their own needs.

But the story gives Charlie, and the reader, a second type of ghost: Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarrles, “one of a crowd who had helped them make the months into days in the lavish times of three years ago.” They are doppelgängers for Charlie and Helen, the presence of the past that can be shaken off and turned into pretty memories. They are still drunk and lascivious, and Charlie tries and fails repeatedly to duck them. All of which brings the story to its apex when they corner Charlie by storming into Helen and Lincoln’s living room.

Honoria is more of a device than a character, and I wondered more than once how deliberate this characterization was. To see her as a token to be fought over seems to fit the story, fit how Charlie wants possession of her (of his past, of his change) without really contemplating why. There is little signs of love for her from Helen and Lincoln, who are simply doing their duty more than anything. It’s American of them, in the most derisive of ways, to want to have something solely for the purpose of having it, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. Even of their own lives.

This week, after rereading “Babylon Revisited” once, I wrote one of my friends and said that Fitzgerald’s story really seems to be of an era rather than timelessness. I’m less convinced this is true now. All great stories are of their time … and of our own. Experiencing Charlie’s decadence and decay recalls our recent booms and busts. Whether it was the Great Recession and the housing bubble, the tech boom, Dow 36000, the Post War Boom … well, you’ve seen and heard this dance before. This time it’s different, they say. It never is. Any student of history knows better. Any reader of fiction.

Charlie’s collapse, both mental and financial, could be from any era. So too could his stubborn American view of the morning—”football weather”, he calls it—when anything is possible, anything can be done. But Fitzgerald shows us what Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This constant fragility of our lives, of what we’ve done, is the kind of tragedy that Fitzgerald orchestrated these moments better than any other writer of his era. The story’s devastating last line perfectly captures this fragility. I won’t give away the ending of this story, just in case, but close with this from the end of the first section:

It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that now he would always remember—his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.

If you haven’t already, you can read “Babylon Revisited” here.

Follow Michael on Twitter: @mpnye

Italo Calvino’s “Theft in a Pastry Shop” has the illustrious distinction of being the story I’ve most often read aloud to people on road trips.

Probably that’s not incidental. Calvino’s narration—an all-knowing 3^rd—makes it easy for listeners to orient themselves. And the story’s not hard to find your way around in the first place. It’s whole and direct, like a melody, and gives pleasures, I think, much the same.

So what is there to say about it? What’s there to say about an infectious tune, beyond stressing your enthusiasm?

I’ll start with some bibliographical stuff. The version I have—translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Peggy Wright—is from the 1984 HBJ collection DIFFICULT LOVES. According to a brief foreword, the story was written sometime in the mid-to-late 1940′s and first published in book form in 1949, in ULTIMO VIENE IL CORVO.

That would put it in the heyday of Neorealism, and you can definitely see the signs. The leader of the gang, Dritto, “[walks] along in silence, through streets empty as dry rivers, with the moon following them along the tramlines.” The lookout man, Uora-Uora, has to stand out in the cold, hungry. He’s dressed “in his best, God knows why, complete with hat, tie and raincoat,” but with his long wrists “jutting out of his sleeves.”

If there’s the stark, social poetry of Neorealism in “Theft,” however, there’s also something more immediate and more easily identified: genre. Like the title says, this is crime fiction, and we run into certain conventions right away. We learn that the men are accustomed to the life: they’re out with “two jobs to do.” We observe in their group rigid hierarchy: Dritto, the leader, is imperious and grim; the two underlings, Uora-Uora and Baby, ask questions we might end up taking as dumb—because Dritto sees no need to answer.

Have I given you enough for you to imagine you’ve pegged this story by now?

Wait.

“It was then that he became aware of the smell; he took a deep breath and up through his nostrils wafted an aroma of freshly baked cakes. It gave him a feeling of shy excitement, of remote tenderness, rather than of actual greed.

Oh, what a lot of cakes there must be in here, he thought. It was years since he had eaten a proper piece of cake, not since before the war perhaps. He decided to search around until he found them. He jumped down into the darkness, kicked against a telephone, got a broomstick up his trouser leg, and then hit the ground.

At this in point in the story—two pages in—things take a definite turn. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that the story goes more Chaplin’s way than De Sica’s. And if you were thinking that the men would either get the desired lire or become subjects of a meditation on iniquity—no. The crime-fiction scaffold goes sailing. We get something wild. Psychological. Metaphysical. Both. Or neither. Vital, anyway.

Calvino’s “Theft in a Pastry Shop” is a story of happenstance liberty, fleeting deliverance in a garden of instinct. If you’re like me, you will pretty much never forget the last line, which involves Baby and Tuscan Mary. If you’re like me, this story will keep calling your name. It will seem the kind of story you can always use.

 Scott Garson’s collection of stories–Is That You, John Wayne?–is just out from Queen’s Ferry Press.

Only one story I’ve taught has made a student cry in class. Moreover, it wasn’t even a particularly moving passage in the story whose lyricism plucked the heartstrings and brought a tear to the eye; it was the discussion of the story that made the student cry. I reckon that to be some serious narrative power. The story is Judy Budnitz’s “Guilt,” from her 1998 collection Flying Leap.

Budnitz is an accomplished fabulist, and “Guilt” is built on a straightforward “What if?” conceit. Arnie’s mother has just had a heart attack. The story opens with him and his two aunts sitting in the hospital waiting room.

The doctors told us her heart won’t last much longer. Her old ticker is ticking its last, unless something is done. “What can be done?” the aunts cried.

“We can’t fix it,” the doctors said. “She needs a new one, a transplant.”

“Then give her one!” the aunts cried.

“It’s not that easy,” said the doctors. “We need a donor.”

The doctors went away. The aunts looked at me.

“Arnie,” Nina said, “what about your heart?”

Unlike the fantastical conceits of a lot of fabulism, the premise of “Guilt” is disturbingly plausible. When I teach this story some student almost invariably asks, “They can’t actually do that, can they?” In fact, I’m not entirely sure that they couldn’t; but advances in medical technology are not really the crux of “Guilt.” The “What if?” here is not really “What if it were possible to donate your heart to your parent?” but rather “What if you were expected to?”

Arnie is not onboard with this particular form of self-sacrifice. He protests that he needs his heart, that it’s not right that he should give up his life to for his mother:

“We can’t both have my heart,” I say.

“Of course not,” says Nina. “You could get one of those monkey hearts, or that artificial heart they made such a fuss about on the news awhile back.”

“Why can’t Mother get one of those? Or a transplant from someone else?”

“Do you want your mother should have a stranger’s heart? Or a monkey’s heart? Your poor mother? Do you remember how she never used to take you to the zoo because she couldn’t stand to see the filthy monkeys? And you want her to have a monkey’s heart? It would kill her!” Fran cries.

Budnitz has some fun with the stereotypes of Jewish mothers and sons as the aunts continue to needle Arnie, but what’s at stake is the very definition of what it means to be a loving son. The language of love and debt is soon inextricably entangled. The aunts remind Arnie of the sacrifices his mother made to put him through college and of the fact that since graduating all he does is “sit in front of a typewriter all day, call yourself a writer, smoke those cigarettes, never get a haircut–” The accusation is clear: Arnie has been a bad son, a burden on his saintly and long-suffering mother. Donating his heart goes beyond simply the duty of a good son. It becomes the means by which Arnie might finally redeem himself.

Or so the aunts say. Arnie sees the absurdity of their argument and expects reality to come crashing down on them when they present him to the doctor as a potential donor.

“Surely you don’t do that sort of thing?” I say incredulously.

He gazes at me. “It’s very rare, very rare indeed that a son will be so good as to donate his heart. In a few cases it has been done. But it’s so rare to find such a son. A rare and beautiful thing.”

At this point the story adopts a pattern familiar to any fan of The Twilight Zone, in which the rules of the world have changed, but only our protagonist recognizes the difference. Even Arnie’s girlfriend, whom he thinks must surely support him, must surely reject the madness of his relatives, sees the heart donation as not a sacrifice, but a wonderful opportunity:

“Isn’t technology incredible?” Mandy says. “These days doctors can do anything. Now you can share yourself, really give yourself to someone else in ways you never thought were possible before. Your mother must be thrilled.”

In workshop, one of the axes that we use to track tension is connection/disconnection. Are characters growing closer or pulling apart? “Guilt” takes this axis and ties it into knots. We normally think of connection as the positive value and disconnection as the negative. In the classical model, comedies, which end in marriage, are ultimately stories of connection, and tragedies, which end in death, embody disconnection (at least from one perspective). But in “Guilt,” that polarity becomes the point of view of the upside-down world that Arnie finds himself trapped in. It is the aunts and Mandy who insist that Arnie’s reluctance to give up his heart for his dying mother is proof of irredeemable selfishness, who praise connection as the highest virtue, and yet we (at least most of us, I hope) empathize with Arnie. We shiver when Arnie’s mother, ostensibly taking his side and excusing him from any obligation, lays the ultimate guilt trip on her son:

“You have your whole life ahead of you, after all,” my mother says. She looks down at her arms, at the branching veins that creep up them like tendrils of a vine. “I never expected anything from you, you know,” she says. “Of course nothing like this.”

Connection becomes emotional extortion, and disconnection takes the form of a kind of outlaw freedom. Is it right for our parents to expect anything from us? Is it wrong for us to disregard our parents’ expectations of us? Essentially, we all owe a debt to our parents that cannot be repaid, short of repaying a life with a life. Arnie doesn’t get to decide or even debate what he owes his mother; no one will listen to his arguments about whether or not it is fair to ask him to give up his heart. Arnie is left only to decide whether he wants to live in debt or get free of it. As such, the option of giving his very own heart to his mother becomes not the ultimate act of connection and intimacy that all our symbolic traditions would assume it is, but is rather a route to being truly free from her forever.

It was working out this brutal calculus that brought my student to tears. He was trying to articulate what he would say to his mother if they found themselves in such a situation. He didn’t quite get through the whole equation. As he began to get choked up, he simply said, “She wouldn’t — she couldn’t — ask that of me.” For him, Arnie’s dilemma was a “what if?” that had to be kept firmly in the realm of fable and fantasy.

For those aurally inclined, a recording of “Guilt” as read by actor Matt Malloy was featured on This American Life as part of episode #256, “Living Without.” Audio of the episode with the performance of “Guilt” (which is how I first encountered Budnitz’s work) is available at the This American Life website.

Patrick Lane is the Missouri Review’s web editor.

“Every personal existence was upheld by a secret,” writes Chekhov in “The Lady with the Little[1] Dog.” [2]

That line kept running through my head when I saw Sarah Polley’s beautiful documentary “Stories We Tell” last weekend. The film is an investigation of her late mother and the secrets she kept. Polley interviews all of her siblings, her father, and her mother’s friends in an attempt to make sense of her family’s past. I often think about secrets, about how hard it can be to know another person completely, and about how much we humans need our hidden, interior lives. And so it’s not surprising that I return again and again to my favorite Chekhov story.

On the surface “The Lady with the Little Dog” is a love story, and a romantic one at that, but it’s also about the tension between the person we show the world and the one we keep to ourselves. The older I get, the more the story resonates with me.

I must have been in high school the first time I read “The Lady with the Little Dog.” Chekhov’s story can be found on many syllabi, of course, so I read it again in college and again in Russian at the Middlebury language school one summer. In college classrooms, I learned about what the critic D.S. Mirsky refers to as Chekhov’s “lyric constructions” (he notes the musicality of Chekhov’s stories, which tend to end on a minor note) and the “leitmotif of mutual isolation” (there is a lot of loneliness in Chekhov stories). I learned about how Chekhov revolutionized the short story and about his influence on modern American writers. And when I read the story in Russian, our professor, Lyudmila Parts, pointed out its intertextual relationship with Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s novel about an adulterous love affair was published in 1877, a full twenty-two years before Chekhov’s story. And aside from their shared subject matter, and the fact that both women are named Anna, there are scenes in “The Lady with the Lap Dog” that directly reference Tolstoy’s book. As my sister Katharine Holt, a Russian literature scholar, recently reminded me, one could read “The Lady with the Little Dog” as a lower-stakes version of Anna Karenina. It’s a short story, not a novel. It’s an affair in which the woman feels guilty and sad, but doesn’t kill herself. We don’t see the unhappiness of the heroine’s home life the way we see Anna Karenina’s misery in the novel. It’s a snapshot of an affair, rather than the full narrative, yet it’s still deeply affecting.

Gurov is “not yet forty”[3] when he meets “the lady with the little dog,” while on holiday in Yalta. His wife and children are at home in Moscow. Gurov’s marriage is not a happy one: “he secretly considered [his wife] none too bright, narrow-minded, graceless, was afraid of her and disliked being at home. He had begun to be unfaithful to her long ago, was unfaithful often…” From the very beginning, “the lady with the little dog” is his target, and we know that he will succeed in sleeping with her.

I have read this story at least thirty times, but I still think of her as “the lady with the lap dog.” And that is surely Chekhov’s intention because he doesn’t reveal her name until the third page. At the beginning of the story, she is introduced as “a new face on the embankment: a lady with a little dog.” She is “a young woman, not very tall, blond, in a beret, walking along the embankment; behind her ran a white spitz.” People at the hotel refer to her as “the lady with the little dog.” When he finally learns her name once the flirtation is well underway, it’s an after thought: “And Gurov also learned that her name was Anna Sergeevna.”

Anna is married, but has never before been unfaithful to her husband. Gurov’s romantic history is more complicated. He observes that most of the women who have loved him didn’t really know him:

Women had always taken him to be other than he was, and they had loved in him, not himself, but a man their imagination had created, whom they had greedily sought all their lives; and then, when they had noticed their mistake, they had still loved him.

 But earlier in the story he admits that he doesn’t let anyone in completely. Intimacy “grows into a major task” and “becomes burdensome.” When Gurov loses interest in women, “their beauty aroused hatred in him, and the lace of their underwear seemed to him like scales.” (That is a brilliant description, not just because it’s a surprising, specific image, but also because it tells us so much about Gurov’s character.)

Gurov is detached from the people around him. He’s surprised that he falls in love with Anna. And despite his professed love for her, Anna Sergeevna remains an abstract figure in the story. Gurov projects romantic notions onto her the same way women have projected things onto him. When he goes to find her in the city of S., he sees her in the theater (a place of projections and roles) and thinks, “this small woman, lost in the provincial crowd, not remarkable for anything with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand, now filled his whole life.” Gurov is convinced that he has never really been in love before, but he doesn’t know Anna very well.

I would argue that this story is less about Anna than about Gurov’s need to escape his conventional life:

He had two lives: an apparent one, seen and known by all who needed it, filled with conventional truth and conventional deceit, which perfectly resembled the lives of his acquaintances and friends, and another that went on in secret. And by some strange coincidence, perhaps an accidental one, everything he found important, interesting, necessary, in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, which constituted the core of his life, occurred in secret from others…

He needs his secret life. It sustains him. It’s like the watermelon he eats after he has sex with Anna Sergeevna for the first time. Before you slice open a watermelon, you can’t see the juicy, bright red fruit inside. I can’t help but wonder if such a “secret” life is essential to artists, who need to preserve private emotional space in which to compose or write or paint. The “secret” life is one where the imagination flourishes. Perhaps Chekhov’s own marriage worked because he and Olga Knipper saw each other so rarely—she was in Moscow acting in his plays, he was in Yalta because of his poor health. They conducted most of their relationship by letter.[4]

Gurov lives in Moscow, Anna lives in the provincial city referred to as S.  She visits him occasionally in Moscow, but they know they can’t continue to live this way, married to other people and seeing each other only in secret. The secrecy is not sustainable. It’s making them miserable. (In Sarah Polley’s film, someone wisely observes that love affairs “need witnesses” to legitimize them.) Yet if the relationship were not secret, I can’t help but think it would lose its appeal to Gurov. Gurov doesn’t know himself as well as he thinks he does. The story ends on an ambiguous note:

And it seemed that, just a little more—and the solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.

Even after reading it dozens of times, this strikes me as a really ballsy way to end a story. (After all those years reading this story in literature classes, I now read it as a writer. I admire Chekhov’s craft; it’s enormously instructive.) He finishes a story by saying that the end is far off and that the most complicated part is just beginning. He subverts traditional notions of endings by putting the word “beginning,” at the end. And in doing so, he underscores the fact that for all the hope that Gurov and Anna have for their future, this relationship is doomed. As readers, we know their love can’t last. Gurov and Anna really believe that it will work out, but Chekhov’s minor key suggests otherwise. It’s heartbreaking because it’s true.