By Christine Rice
“A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story – you can work more by suggestion – than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.” – Eudora Welty
I am definitely drawn to the fact that ‘more is suggested’ in a short story. The reader is free to draw conclusions, perhaps, and that’s a beautiful thing. While Garnett Kilberg Cohen’s latest collection of stories, Swarm to Glory, evokes a great sense of mood, each story is also novelistic in scope. When I finished one, I’d get that same yearning feeling as when I finish a novel (it’s something about not wanting to leave the characters behind, I guess).
CR: For me, reaching the end of a short story seems to be more bracing than finishing a novel because I’ve only just gotten to know the characters, it’s only been ten or fifteen pages for God’s sake! Can you talk about how you distill characters, place, plot in your short stories? I’m particularly thinking of “Bottle of Wine,” “Theives,” and “Casa Del Mar Azul.”
GKC: I don’t plot short stories in advance so when writing I am frequently racing to see what happens to the character, what he or she decides to do. When I am lucky I have managed to get myself so immersed in the characters’ heads that I am as anxious as they are to find out how it will all turn out. I’m in sort of a fugue state, which dissipates when I go back to do final revisions (I also do a lot of recursive revision while working on a first draft), allowing me to bring a more critical eye to the piece.
It is interesting that you found my stories novelistic in scope because I often think that myself but usually only after I’ve published a story. I look at it in print and think that I could have stayed with the people longer, that I would have liked to explore other aspects of their lives. In my last book, How We Move the Air, I was able to do that (after some of the stories were published individually) by going back to some of the characters again in new stories, until it became a linked collection.
Of the stories you mention, I thought of returning to “Bottle of Wine” and making it into a novel (in fact, it was originally going to be one of the stories in How We Move the Air, as Edge was a peripheral character in one of those stories). But since Edge had already experienced the intense moment of change that I was seeking, to go back would mainly be to spend more time with her–and it seemed preferable to explore someone else’s situation, another character’s moment of change or revelation. I do believe that we all have many transformative moments in our lives, but the literary power feels greater if we only see one or two of them per character in a condensed form.
I am a short story writer at heart. I might write a novel at some point in the future. I have tried a few times in the past, but was never able to be motivated enough to revise them or go beyond halfheartedly submitting them. The urgency of leaving a piece behind to discover a new character in a new setting, perhaps with a new point of view, has always been more seductive.
CR: This is your third published collection of short stories (Lost Women, Banished Souls & How We Move the Air). As a devotee and devourer and writer of short stories myself, I’m curious about what draws you to the short story form?
GKC: I think the main thing is the intensity, the fact that a story usually focuses on one of the most defining moments of a character’s life. I also like that the length allows for experimentation in lots of ways, particularly with voice and point of view.
CR: With the success of so many short story collections (Lorrie Moore, Julian Barnes, Alice Munro, etc.), why do you think mainstream agents and publishers still buck at the notion of publishing short story collections?
GKC: I think short stories are a little harder to market than novels. It’s easier to sum up (and therefore, sell) the plot or narrative arc of a novel than a collection. Also, though I think that short stories are the perfect literary form–providing a length that invites the lyricism and compression of poetry while allowing for the development and insights into character that novels do–I believe that many readers feel as you do; they aren’t ready to leave particular characters (I sometimes feel that way myself) at the end of fifteen or twenty pages. You’ve made an investment and you want it to last a bit longer. That said, I usually find more power in stories, more lasting meaning. Linked stories (perhaps my favorite form) provides both: the intensity of a single moment and the ability to stay with characters longer. I hope that with the success of Olive Kitteridge, mainstream agents and publishers will become more open to stories of all kinds.
CR: In this article, Sam Baker declares the short story the perfect form for the 21st century. Agree or disagree?
GKC: I agree with much of what Baker says in the article. However, I do not like to think that a shorter attention span is the (or even “a”) primary reason. I believe that people crave stories of all kinds and many of the best narratives out today come in the short story form, a form that has fallen in and out of style over the past century. Think of Raymond Carver in the late seventies/early eighties. At that time, folks were pondering all the reasons the story was coming back on the scene. I actually feel that novels are more conducive to shorter attention spans than stories. Once you sit down to read, you have made a commitment to a piece—and making a commitment is easier and less time-consuming with a novel because one can go back to it again and again for days or weeks without having to get completely acclimated all over again.
CR: You are an indie and university press author. Do you see agents and/or mainstream publishing catching up to these presses in terms of what readers demand? Or do you think they’ll continue to look for the next movie adaption?
GKC: I think that mainstream publishing does follow successful trends initiated by indie and small press houses but usually only when a particular approach or form (and often an author) has become so successful in the indie world that help is no longer needed. The mainstream places aren’t taking any kind of risk—many of the successful mainstream short story writers were proven first in the indie world. They are so risk adverse that I don’t see this likely to change in the near future. I hope I’m wrong.
CR: A number of stories in Swarm to Glory touch on or deal explicitly with relationships — often magnifying their final, excruciating gasps (“The Woman with the Longest Hair,” “Bottle of Wine,” “Triangulation,” “The Wedding Invitation,” “Casa Del Mar Azul”). Can you comment on how these stories found their way into this collection? Were you thinking particularly about a certain time in your life or were you drawn to them for other reasons?
GKC: I think that collections need cohesion. Even if they are not linked by specific characters or places, they need some device or theme that connects them. That said, the stories should not be so similar that the reader feels he or she is reading the same thing over and over. For my first collection, I included all but a few of the stories that I had written since I didn’t have a lot to choose from. For this more recent collection, I had a lot to choose from, but I tried to use only stories that dealt with relationships in particular way. Also, most of them take place primarily in the Midwest.
CR: How do you decide on the order of stories in your short story collections?
GKC: I play around with them until I feel I get it right. “Bad News” used to be first. I sort of liked having “Casa Del Mar Azul” at the end because the character were elderly. There is no formula—or I should say the formula is reinvented for each new collection. I try not to place two stories that are too similar in a row. If I was to do this collection over, there are a few changes I would make.
CR: “Thieves” and “Abstract Faces” were two of my favorite stories in the collection. I just wanted to say that.
GKC: Thank you. What is funny about that is that “Thieves” is definitely the oldest story in the collection and “Abstract Faces” is, I think, the most recent.
CR: “Abstract Faces” is one of the stories that really compressed time and events. Can you talk about the evolution of that story?
GKC: The spark was an actual event in the news. I knew very little about the event (the child predator) for which I was thankful because knowing less freed me more when it evolved into fiction. The story quickly became more about the mother and daughter, and the mother’s profession as an artist. If I was told I had to make one of them into a novel, “Abstract Faces” would be the one. But it would be more about the double lives people often lead.
Garnett Kilberg Cohen is the author of three short-story collections: Lost Women, Banished Souls; How We Move the Air and Swarm to Glory (September 2014). She received a Notable Essay citation from Best American Essays 2011, the Crazyhorse National Fiction Prize (2004) and four Illinois Arts Council awards, including a 2001 Artist Fellowship award for prose. Her essays and short stories have appeared in American Fiction, Ontario Review, TriQuarterly, the Antioch Review, Brevity, Alaska Quarterly Review, the Literary Review, Descant, StoryQuarterly, the Roanoke Review, the Prague Revue, the Nebraska Review, the Gettysburg Review and many others. A former fiction editor of the Pennsylvania Review and Hotel Amerika, Garnett has served as review editor for several journals and was most recently Guest Nonfiction Editor for Fifth Wednesday. Cohen directs the Creative Writing–Nonfiction BA Program at Columbia College Chicago. She is at work on a memoir.
Christine Maul Rice’s award-winning novel, Swarm Theory, was called “a gripping work of Midwest Gothic” by Michigan Public Radio and earned an Independent Publisher Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award (finalist), and was included in PANK’s Best Books of 2016 and Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup: The Best Books of 2016 So Far. In 2019, Christine was included in New City’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago’s Guild Complex. Most recently, her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Allium, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk*, Make Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder and editor of the literary nonprofit Hypertext Magazine & Studio and is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University.
