By Sahar Mustafah
There has been much lamentation about the decline of the short story collection. If it’s not an agent in a smart pantsuit at AWP touting the importance of a novel being an emerging writer’s first book, it’s MFA colleagues commiserating on the discouragement they faced even before producing a collection. In an article last November, The Review revealed that even renowned published authors testify to the monetary inequities between the novel and short fiction.
So, why bother?
I pose this question as a writer and reader of short stories. I have committed myself to a collection for my MFA thesis work in the fall. I applied to my program adamant about composing short stories but then experienced a moment of fearful uncertainty when a well-meaning instructor advised me to instead pursue my young adult novel, a book whose inchoate existence surprised me when it thrived over two semesters.
“You can always publish stories. A novel is more practical,” he told me.
I considered this. I was turning forty this year, a late bloomer. Perhaps I needed to be practical. I sent frantic emails to my thesis advisor who promptly called me into her office. Fortunately, she set me straight.
“These are important stories,” she told me.
Important stories.
My next task was to make them great stories. So how do I prepare?
“Read as many short story collections as you can,” my advisor commanded.
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m reading the best short fiction that still happily populates the shelves and internet (because there are more writers than agents out there). This proves how an extraordinary single story — nestled among more and less compelling ones — can create a whole experience for readers in much the same way a powerful novel does.
As a reader, I love inhabiting the space of a short story because its weight tends to crush me harder than a novel. It’s like being underwater for so many minutes before finally coming up for a satisfying gulp of air. Almost immediately after you break the surface, you can’t seem to wait to plunge into the water again, and you might hold your breath longer this time, but the time after that might be shorter. That’s what reading short stories is like for me.
So I’ll join the literary resistance by reading as many collections as I can and my war cry begins with Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins. It won the 2013 Story Prize for which Junot Diaz and Dan Chaon were finalists. Not too shabby for a debut collection.
Watkins defies the industry’s stringent expectations and traditional MFA pedagogy. Primarily, Battleborn is an unlinked collection. There are no recurring characters. Only the setting — Nevada and its uncelebrated towns — remains constant. The longest story of the collection, Diggings, is placed strategically in the middle of the book as a marker of dashed dreams — a recurring theme in the stories that precede and follow it.
Then there are fictionalized accounts of the author’s real-life experiences. In the premier story, Ghosts, Cowboys, a young woman reveals her biological father as Charles Manson’s second in command. Watkins’s own father, who died when she was a child, was a lieutenant in the Manson family. In Ghost, Cowboys, the narrator meets “Razor Blade Baby,” the product of one of the infamous Family orgies. When Razor Blade Baby moves into the flat above her, the narrator soon embraces her as the half-sibling of her father. The semi-autobiographical threads of the story are incidental and not nearly as absorbing as the way this piece is told — with new starts and interjections between past and present. As the narrator states, “At the end, I can’t stop thinking about beginnings.”
The last story, Graceland, follows two sisters struggling with their mother’s suicide. Watkins revealed in an interview that she wrote the collection only five months after her own mother took her life. The narrator in this story recalls the unfamiliarity of her distant mother’s things:
It was disorienting, gave me the feeling you get when you wake up from a nap and the sky isn’t black or blue but hazy gray, and you can’t tell whether it’s five a.m. or five p.m., can’t tell how long you’ve been asleep.
Her images are fresh and clear–not heavily gilded to detract from the moment of despair and loneliness her characters move through in each story.
Wish You Were Here explores the deteriorating relationship of new parents. Watkins writes,
As soon as Carter and Marin learn they’ve conceived the child, they begin to argue about it. What will they feed it, what will they teach it, what of this world will they allow it to see? They fight about these things before the child is more than a wafer of cells.
When the baby arrives, Marin, whose flaws were once adored, is alienated by her husband in an almost methodical, seething way.
This story exhorts a familiar theme in the entire collection: we are forced to navigate complex circumstances — sometimes imposed upon on us, sometimes chosen — in our daily lives. Watkins cultivates this in a vast backdrop of the West with all of its failings of its gold-and-fame American dream. Nearly all of her characters just want to find some peace and balance when tremendous loss has robbed them of their dignity and romantic illusions.
Watkins explores unrequited love in new and inventive ways. In The Archivist, the narrator cynically elucidates her doomed relationship to readers (and herself) through the “Museum of Love Lost” — a chronicle of moments of sheer bliss and utter rejection. Like artificially assembled exhibits and dioramas, a moment of exaltation is forever preserved:
In this one, we are papier-mâché in a restaurant alongside the Truckee. We sit at a dollhouse table on a Popsicle-stick patio stretching over a river of blue and green tissue paper, its crinkled rapids daubed white with foam…I call it Us at Our Best.
Her language aptly paints what happens when optimism finally runs out.
In Man-O-War, Harris, an old scavenger and “rock hound,” attempts to recapture lost love when he discovers a young woman, deserted and pregnant.
This girl seemed different from those kids, somehow. She was beautiful, or could have been. Her features were too weary for someone her age.
Magda fleetingly ignites passion in Harris and they share an intimate moment when he proudly puts on a fireworks display from some abandoned loot he found near a riverbed:
The last four shells whizzed into the air, all at once. When they burst–boom–boom–boom–boom–Magda jumped a little and buried herself into him. Harris turned to see her face, his home, the whole wide valley lit by dazzling yellow light. He held her.
‘And that one?’ she whispered.
‘That,’ he said. ‘That’s gold.
The larger metaphor is sustained yet never belabored: we often cling to our delusions because reality is too harsh.
Each of Watkins’ stories deftly and painfully exposes a universal sense of loneliness that her desert landscape amplifies and echoes. No two pieces are alike in their telling, further magnifying Watkins’ keen ability to wield stories. The next time someone asks me why I’m not writing a novel, I’ll give them a copy of Battleborn, and ask them why they haven’t read it yet.
Sahar Mustafah is a writer, editor, and teacher from Chicago. Her work has appeared in Word Riot, Hair Trigger 35, Mizna, New Scriptor, Chicago Literati, Ploughshares, Prime Number, and Dinarzad’s Children: an Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Literature. She is the 2012 recipient of the Guild Literary Complex Fiction Award and a 2013 Pushcart Prize nomination, and most recently won 3rd Place in the 2013 Gold Circle Awards from Columbia University Scholastic Press Association for collegiate magazines. A Follett Graduate Scholar at Columbia College Chicago, Sahar is at work on her MFA thesis collection of short stories. She the co-founder and fiction editor of Bird’s Thumb, an online literary journal.
