Customer Reviews

The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work

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The Story Behind the Story is the first collection of short stories I greeted with a whoop of joy.

The more you enjoy reading a particular short story, the more you want to know about the writer. How different is the writer from me? you wonder. How did the writer actually write the story?

Answers are hard to come by. If you're lucky, you'll find a measly author min-bio buried in the small print. Anthologies are the worst: one good story after another raises your curiosity, but lack of additional information leaves you deflated.

Complain no more. The Story Behind the Story is exactly what the title promises: a collection of masterfully written contemporary short stories, each partnered with a fascinating essay revealing the creative process behind the story.

The stories are by 26 writers who have taught in Warren Wilson College's famous MFA Program for Writers. The simple format (so beautifully basic you're astonished it really hasn't been done before) was created by the book's two editors, Peter Turchi (long-time director of the Writers program) and Andrea Barrett, winner of the 1996 National Book Award for her story collection, Ship Fever.

Subject matter and style are as wide-ranging and dissimilar as work from that many talented writers could be. There's an unhappy boy who eats matches. A deranged fascist who roams Venice. A kidnapped woman who buys a hat. A man who runs over a cat. The images are unforgettable: a wedding cake in the street, a door floating in a river, a pile of bones found in the snow.

Most of the stories are set in present day, with many of them telling the concerns of parents, such as Mrs. Dimbleby, Wilton Barnhardt's sympathetic portrait of a mother who's not sure how much she loves her snotty little daughter. A few are historical, such as Jim Shephard's haunting tale of male lovers aboard the doomed Hindenburg airship, appropriately entitled Love and Hydrogen. Absurd comedy reigns in Stephen Dobyns' Part of the Story, in which a clueless older woman is visited by the five grown children she gave up for adoption.

The range of voices makes a thrilling melting pot, for although they've taught at Warren Wilson, the writers come from all over the country. There's the bold poetic cadence of Michael Martone's The Moon Over Wapakoneta, the mesmerizing lyricism of Andrea Barrett's tale of lost love, Out There, and the "Mexicanized English" Karen Brennan uses in Sacha's Dog.

In each "story behind the story," the writers relate the source of their inspiration, what writing goals they tried to accomplish, and how the story evolved from idea to published page. The result is that each story/essay unit becomes a vivid "window on creativity," as Richard Russo (2002 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls) comments in his inspiring introduction to the collection.

Readers always want to know how autobiographical a writer's stories are. About City Codes, his poignant story of a family's attempt to save a historic building, Tracy Daugherty writes, "It's all true except for the parts I made up."

An innovative resource and great fiction

Ah, the writing life. We envision the author working compulsively, never satisfied, anxious to capture his ideas on paper before they disappear, a bottle of liquid inspiration and glass at hand. In the public imagination, the writer exists in some remote setting, isolated in his rarified world of complicated thoughts and clever phrases, perhaps a tragic and difficult personality. While there is cachet in such perceptions, writing actually involves a great deal of hard work. A story must be nurtured, carefully pruned from inception into the finished pages. Yet the writers in this anthology are distinctly human and accessible, certainly generous, stimulating the reader's imagination with their experiences.

In this anthology, a series of writers, all teachers on the faculty of Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, have contributed twenty-six short stories, each followed by a section named "About the Story". Each About the Story details the author's creative process involved in his particular story, whether it be personal experience, an idea gleaned from research or a series of incidents that resulted in a tale to tell.

The pivotal question about writers: is this talent genetic or are these skills that can be learned? In his introduction, Richard Russo addresses the problem ambiguously: Writers are both the same and different than others, says Russo. Good writing cannot be readily taught, but those who want to write can learn to do it well. With authors as mentors, advising aspiring writers, they may master the needed skills. However, "artists seldom progress in a predictable, linear fashion". It is possible for a writer to be good before he is competent; clearly, craft and experience can turn a writer into an author.

Thanks to the generosity of these veteran authors, sharing their experience and guiding the apprentice through the necessary elements of the craft, this volume is especially valuable. The shared ideas and discussions on problem solving build an energy that inspires the novice writer to experiment with a variety of approaches and each new story provides an opportunity for discovery. Yet each author has his own method, his own path. Russo refers another phenomenon, "cross-fertilization": when the solution to the story pays off by suggesting yet another, or stimulating a thought process that leads to a completed story.

The contributing authors are some of the finest names in contemporary fiction, including Margaret Livesey, Charles Baxter, Judith Grossman, Stephen Dobyns, Pablo Medina and Andrea Barrett. The authors' generosity is extraordinary in this literary treasure. Setting the tone with the first story, Antonya Nelson's "Strike Anywhere", a student "gives" Nelson the story, which "hangs in her mind like a Christmas ornament", until it is born. And Nelson "gives" the story to the reader in this anthology.

A few lines from each "About the Story", or one specific author's thoughts may trigger that sudden recognition, a solution. Of inestimable value to readers, each author shares a piece of his art, a myriad of ideas, suggestions and inspiration. I have marked my favorites (so far) and keep The Story Behind the Story on my nightstand, a ready resource and a reminder of the personal nature of the process, lessons on the art of writing. Luan Gaines/ 2004.

It is an interesting idea: a collection of stories, each followed by an essay by the author on that story. And there are several places in this collection where it works brilliantly. But like the other Warren Wilson book, "Bringing the Devil to his Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life," this collection could benefit from some pruning.



I would of course begin my cutting at the introduction by Richard Russo. But that's just my personal beef.



Many of the stories in the collection lack urgency. They are good stories, written by good writers. But I suspect that they are also rejected stories, stories that, before this collection, never found their way into publication. When I started reading the book, I looked on the copyright page to see where the stories had previously appeared. There was no indication that any of the stories had ever been published. As I read, I was not surprised. The first three stories (Antonya Nelson, Margot Livesey, and David Shields) left me bewildered and just barely awake. The writer's essays on the creation of the stories held my interest--I was curious to read about their personal and professional struggles. But the stories themselves lulled along like a long French movie full of beautiful and sometimes dirty people involved with one another in ways I couldn't quite follow.



Then I hit Charles Baxter's "The Old Fascist in Retirement." I couldn't follow this story either, but it was fascinating, like an image poem or a fever dream. I had a feel for what was going on, and that was all I needed to stay tuned. And I could have been happy with the experience of it. But Baxter's essay on the story rescued the reading from forgettable experience, and lodged it in my literary memory. His essay gave that ephemeral story context. I had the historical reference along with phrases like stylistic halitosis and stale rotten breath of Modernism to rattle around. And the fact that Baxter admitted that "this is a one-time-only story" somehow comforted me and laid to rest some of my reservation, it opened me up farther still to the experience of the piece.



There are stories in the collection that read very much like the work of Richard Yates. And though I do not particularly care for them, I understand their appeal and take to heart people's observation that such stories, in their understated way, create a remarkable intimacy of character. In Joan Silber's essay on her short story, "My Shape," she makes a very Yates-ian character observation: "What haunted me in her account was the teacher's repeated question, `How much do you want it?' An ecstasy of sacrifice was asked of her, for the sake of a fairly frivolous goal she had no hope of attaining."



Wilton Barnhardt's "Mrs. Dimbleby" is another example of the Yates-ian story. In Bernhardt's essay on the story, he writes, "Increasingly, I've come to see that all the high drama in the world rests in our day-to-day chores, our routines with our loved ones, if we're conscious, if we're observant."



Most short stories dwell on the day-to-day, and that does not make them necessarily Yates like. And the idea of the observant man echoes Camus and Satre, and probibily others still. But there is a certain softness to the Yates story (and many of the stories in this collection), a sense of suburban haze and strip-mall predictability. The Yates story lacks the Carver menace, or the Mark Richard, Larry Brown, Kevin Canty grit and strangeness.



A few of the essays offer sound advice on craft. Ehud Havazelet writes: "a story's form needs to be organic, the shape it takes, all the elements of craft--point of view, theme, voice, plot--having to emerge from what the story slowly tells you it needs, not from an infatuation born in experience, or a neat idea, or a thematic that is way too cleaver by half."



Kevin McIvory's short story, "The People Who Own Pianos," and the essay that follows are great meditations on the importance of voice. In the work he goes so far as to exclude elements of theme and plot.



Other essays wrestle with the difficulties and dangers of autobiographical fiction. Not something I am too terribly concerned with, but it is a common theme in four or five essays.



And then there are some damn good stories. Pablo Medina's "Mortality" is magical. And the essay that follows is just as good as the story.



Peter Turchi's "Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning," is a damn good story. And though I found the mother's dramatic death (car crash) a bit heavy handed, his use of fluid time and memory and image, the way the structure of the story folds in upon itself, the way it spins reader expectations, the way it balances precariously on the edge of sentimentality is really very good.



But in the end, the book is too big. There are only a handful of stories and essays that are really worth reading. Out of more than four hundred and seventy pages, I'd recommend about a hundred.

The book's premise & organization is clear & straightforward. None of the writers blather on about themselves; the pacing of each essay is perfect & importantly, no writer in the book has a bloated sense of self-importance. There is a humility and a thoughtfulness in process found here. Perhaps most significantly, the stories are blisteringly good!

The first story in this collection, "Strike Anywhere" by Antonia Nelson, left me breathless at the thought of a little boy eating matches. Even when the scene moved into a bar where a pregnant woman was drinking and smoking, and I wanted to forcibly push her out of the bar, even then I could not stop thinking about the little boy sitting in the pickup out front eating matches while his father drank in the bar. The irony of the story is that the father is angrily indignant about the way the strange woman is treating her unborn child, while completely unconcerned about his own family, one of which is poisoning himself a few feet away.

In the 'behind the story' section, Nelson reveals that a student told her this story, that her brother had told her, and said Nelson could have it to do with as she pleased. The result of that priceless gift is "Strike Anywhere."

When I bought this book, I expected it to be like a writing class, but I think it is more like a workshop. Many of the stories impressed me as world-class, while others left me cold. All of the 'behind the story' sections were interesting, as I thought they would be, some were a lot more helpful than others.

Steven Dobyns' "Part of the Story" is a page turner in which a sixty-three year old woman must meet the five children she gave up for adoption at birth, now adults who have tracked down her and each other. She is reluctant to admit that they all have different fathers, none of which she was married to. Further complicating things, on the morning they are all coming to her trailer to meet her, her current boyfriend dies in her bed. Only some well-chosen lies can save the day. Not only is the story brilliant, but Dobyns' comments about creating it are fascinating and instructive.

C.J. Hribal's story "Morton and Lilly, Dredge and Fill" is good, but his behind the story is great, with in-depth discussion of point-of-view and how he used it.

Robert Boswell wraps up the book beautifully with "A Walk in Winter," in which a man must relive the disappearance of his mother when a body is discovered twenty-two years later. The story, both the then and the now, is riveting, and the behind the story section is as well.

With only a few exceptions, I found the stories here more than satisfying, and the background material intriguing.