Tagged: short story month

Sunshine Over Helsinki

No one in Helsinki saw his weather reports. They didn’t need his two-minute segment, twice a day, nestled between the football scores and children’s cartoon based on the Finnish epic “Kalvala”; they could just look out their windows, stand on their stoops, and know to wear a coat today. The reports were for Finnish expatriates, nostalgic for Baltic winds and icy sidewalks, or for a handful of students learning the words “lumi” for “snow” and “pilvi” for “clouds.”

Sunshine Over Helsinki, published in Failbetter in 2004, is a more substantial story than After Ice Cream. It doesn’t have much for plot; it’s focused instead on character, primarily that of Tomas, a Finnish meteorologist who works for a college television station in Southern California.

Looking back on it, I’m still happy with the story; I don’t think that its lack of an overarching plot–there’s a simple story, a quiet little love story, that runs through it, but that’s mostly there to hang Tomas’ character on–is a problem. And since it made it into the storySouth Million Writers Notable Stories list of 2004, I suppose others felt the same.

Floating Bridge

Accident


She meant to go on and tell him what the doctor had said.

At the outset, “Floating Bridge” seems like it’s going to be a typical cancer battle story of the sort that seems almost required in a collection of contemporary stories. Jinny has just left an appointment with her oncologist, and has been collected by her husband who is setting up a sickroom–”temporarily, though nobody said so”–in their house. I thought I knew what to expect: the strained relationships, the avoidance of the unavoidable topic of death, the brave struggle. Better written than usual, because written by Alice Munro, but still a well-worn path.

How wrong I was! Though Jinny’s cancer is central to the story, it is hardly central to the plot. Instead, “Floating Bridge” is hijacked by the picaresque if minor misadventures of her husband Neal, the girl Helen who has been hired to help at home, and Helen’s foster brother Matt. What seemed to be the expected arc of the story is undone by random and mundane events, with Jinny quite literally along for the ride.

The cancer, and a glimmer of news from the oncologist, never leaves entirely, but it is elbowed roughly to the background. Whenever Jinny is on the verge of talking to her husband about her conversation with the doctor, something–the quest for Helen’s shoes, the barking dogs and overly-hospitable foster parents at Helen’s home, the arrival of Matt–interrupts. And in the end, alone in her reflections, Jinny embraces the interruptions with “a lighthearted sort of compassion.”

From the writer’s perspective, what is marvelous about “Floating Bridge” is how Munro tells two stories simultaneously: the misadventures on the trail of Helen’s good shoes, and what could have been a conventional medical story about Jinny. The first story, told with a winking good humor, contrasts sharply with the second, which is almost silent but ties the whole together. Plot and theme are pulled apart, and then gently woven back together, which gives a surprising lightness to what could otherwise have been a grim tale.

After Ice Cream

They had decided to jump with an air of sudden jocularity. All week they had commiserated over the hundred little tragedies that stained their lives: He complained that the Peterson account went to Bixby because Bixby had married a partner’s ugly daughter; she countered that the price of nylons at Schuneman’s had gone beyond the reach of her secretary salary; he told her that he suspected his wife was fooling around with the milkman; she had caught her fiance in bed with a streetcar conductor named Bud; he had wasted his youth, and looked forward with dread to the long gray hours of middle age; she detested her youth and wished she had been born old.

When I was an undergrad, I wanted to be a poet. Which is probably not that unusual, though my taste in poetry–Yeats, Eliot, Hopkins, Andrew Hudgins–tended toward the formal and unfashionable.

Then I took a seminar with Kyoko Mori at the Main Street “Eat” in West DePere, Wisconsin (I don’t know what this little cafe was actually called; it had a giant sign outside that said “Eat” and it served bottomless pots of black coffee). We were supposed to produce a piece of our own to share every couple weeks, and also find a published work for everyone to read, and I ended up in a short story rather than a poetry mode. I’m not sure why I made that switch, but looking back at some of the poems I wrote back then I think it was for the best.

Strangely, though, I didn’t keep up with it. I went to grad school for my MA in American Studies, falling into a more analytical and sociological way of deciphering the world; then entered the work world, landing accidentally in a technology career; and then a wife, a house, kids, dogs … the world is too much with us, whether one is trying to carve out space for writing poetry or stories.

But I eventually drifted back into writing stories, a decade and a half later, when I started bumping into some interesting on-line literary journals. In the early ’00s, there seemed to be a new journal going up every week, often slap-dash, funny, contentious, and wild, like the punk ‘zine culture of the ’80s and ’90s but a lot easier to find if you took a little time to root things out. After reading a few, I thought, “Hey, I can do this!” and gave it a try again.

After Ice Cream was published in Eyeshot in April 2004. It was inspired by the photograph above, taken at the top of the Foshay Tower. At the time, I didn’t know who the unhappy couple were (on a later visit to the Foshay, I learned a little more), but I imagined there had to be a story in that picture.

I don’t think this is a great story, but it was a fun and easy one to write, and getting it accepted at a favorite site just encouraged my bad behavior.

Don’t forget to comment to enter the Collection Giveaway Project!

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Deception

It had all begun with Sabitha saying, on the way to school, “We have to go by the Post Office. I have to send a letter to my dad.”

There are a lot of things to note about “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” the title story of Alice Munro’s tenth collection: her handing of perspective, the way she sketches just enough setting to bring post-war Saskatchewan to life, how she illuminates a character through their reflections on other characters. But what makes it most interesting from a writer’s perspective is how she builds the story around a deception that is never uncovered by any of the characters.

Deception is difficult in fiction: it depends on the characters being truly in the dark, while the author and, eventually, the reader are thoroughly in the know. But because the characters spring from the author’s mind, it’s far too easy to subtly tip the characters off to the subterfuge. And if it was an especially good deception, the temptation is to have a big reveal scene, where the deceived parties discover the truth and reflect back on how they were fooled all along.

Munro doesn’t reveal that there is a deception until the middle of the story. Until then, we are entirely within the perspective of Johanna, a spinster housekeeper and nanny who is preparing for a journey west. She’s revealed to be a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense woman whose practicality is only slightly derailed by a suggestion of romance. The scene in the dress shop, where she is selecting an outfit that she will wear to be married in–not “pure white froth or vanilla satin or ivory lace,” but “a brown wool dress … about as plain as you could get”–is wonderful, revealing much about her character and nothing about her history in her conversation with the shopkeeper.

The deception is introduced in a sudden change in perspective, when the consciousness of the story switches from Johanna to Edith, the clever friend of the girl, Sabitha, whom Johanna cares for. Johanna’s entire undertaking–the selection of the dress, the arrangements for transporting furniture, the journey to Saskatchewan–is thrown into question, and we stop admiring Johanna for her pluck and practicality and start to pity her for being played for a fool.

And if she had ever learned of the deception, Johanna would have remained pathetic; but because she continues straight ahead on her plans–her character never changes, just our perspective on it–she soon regains our esteem. The deception in this story is helped by distance–it’s a long way from Toronto to Gdynia–and by its tight conspiratorial circle of two. There is a hint that Johanna has put the pieces together in the end, but she is too unreflective to dwell on it: she lives very much in the present, with her focus on practical matters.

The successful deception is, in a way, anti-climactic: there’s no reveal, no great scene of recrimination and accusation. A childish prank launches a woman on a new life she would otherwise never have pursued; whether it’s actually a better life than the one she leaves behind is almost beside the point. Edith is both relieved and embarrassed by her part in the story, and also amused that she has played the part of Fate without intending it.

What makes the deception in “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” work is Munro’s management of the characters’ knowledge. The story is told mostly in a close third-person perspective, with the consciousness moving primarily between Johanna and Edith (with a brief slip into the mind of Mr. McCauley, Johanna’s employer, mostly for expository purposes); nothing that either one of them could not know–the letters, the state of the hotel in Gdynia, the history between McCauley and his son-in-law–makes its way into their respective sections. With an omniscient narrator, or with a first-person perspective, the story wouldn’t have worked as well: an omniscient narrator would risk revealing too much too quickly, and neither Edith nor Johanna knows enough to be able to tell the whole story. Sometimes voice dictates a story, as when a character suddenly speaks up and demands to be heard; but sometimes the story dictates the voice. Knowing which to let lead is part of the wisdom of a writer of Munro’s caliber.

Don’t forget to comment to enter the Short Story Month 2011 Collection Giveaway!

Collection Giveaway Project for Short Story Month

May is short story month, and it’s going to be a busy time here. For starters, the Fiction Writers Review has launched a Fiction Giveaway Project to help litbloggers promote the short story; I’m going to participate by giving away a copy of Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness, one of the best collections I’ve read recently (giveaway details below). I’ll also be posting daily about a story, alternating between one of my own and one from someplace else (a collection, a magazine or journal, an on-line publication, etc.).

The first stories that I’ll be covering are from another Alice Munro collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. I’ll be looking at these stories from the perspective of a short story writer, taking a different aspect of each to highlight part of the craft of the story. Munro writes in the tradition of Chekhov: spare and focused stories that suggest much greater depth than is apparent from a surface reading. Hers is a style that lends itself especially well to the short story form, with its compression and economy; writers in any tradition would be well-served to think a bit about how she accomplishes so much in so few pages.

To be entered in the drawing for the “Too Much Happiness” giveaway, all you have to do is comment on one of the posts in the Short Story Month 2011 category. Note, though, that they have to be useful comments that advance the discussion at least a little bit: me-tooisms won’t count, but arguments, hints, suggestions, and outright dissensions will. I’ll select the winner at random on May 31, and make arrangements for the delivery of the book.

May is also when my book, Dad’s Eye View, is due to hit shelves. Though it’s not a story collection, it will still be generating a lot of activity, mostly on its own blog and Facebook page. So keep any eye on things there as well!

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