Tag: #ShortStoryCollection

  • First Day of Winter

    I couldn’t sleep last night, or I guess, more accurately, this morning. It was about 4:30am when I looked at my phone to see what time it was, and I wanted to try to get back to sleep. I tried. I rolled over to a different position, but it didn’t help. It was too hot in bed, I couldn’t get comfortable, and my beard was very itchy. By 5:30, I had to admit that I was awake and that I wouldn’t get back to sleep. I didn’t want to wake anyone, so I went to the office, and sat down with my journal.

    I could hear classical music coming from my daughter’s room, as she listens to that now, to help her fall asleep. The music plays all night, and there is something very innocent and endearing about it. That the kid is starting her own music education.

    I took out the journal and just started writing about the day; what I need to do, and hopefully, what I can accomplish. I also started writing about the next project that I want to work on, and how to use short stories, and story sketches together to tell a complete narrative of family dealing with mental issues.

    And I continue to write about writing. Writing about something that I would like to write about. How will I write about it? What style will I use? Will I try to craft 10 stories that each have an individual style to them? Is that possible?

    Then it dawns on me as the dawn is dawning; that this is the first day of Winter, and the shortest day with the longest night. It begins again, the growing of the day, the receding of the darkness. All things must pass, and the daylight is good at arriving at the right time, right?

    Sometimes things happen at the right time for the right reason.

  • Short Story Review: “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeleine Thien

    (The short story, “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeline Thien appeared in the December 20th, 2021 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Over the past year, I have been asking myself, why do I like short stories so much? I would rather read a short story collection than a novel. I think it is a very challenging form of storytelling that fails more than it succeeds. For a writer to make a reader care about a story in a thousand or so words is impressive. To make a reader identify with a character is the same space of words, well, that’s impressive.

    “Lu, Reshaping” by Madeline Thien is a story about a character going through a midlife crisis, and I am not being flippant with that description. As a white male entering the early stages of midlife, these stories have a certain appeal to me. (In fact, I would dare argue that there is a whole unidentified genre in literature of novels about white men going through a midlife crisis, which normally involve affairs, children and/or a spouse who no longer understands, and ends with a death.) I feel like Thien took all of those midlife crisis tropes, and with her character Lu, feed them in and created a different but also familiar result.

    I don’t want to give anything away with how the plot unfolds, because of the language that Thien uses to describe situations, and also Lu’s use of phrases from Cantonese that are translated into English. I loved the words that were crafted for this story, and how they transferred the feeling of loneliness, of life passing you by, and questioning the decisions one has made, and that search for happiness, however fleeting, but also being adult enough to know that momentary pleasure should be let go, and not thought about again.

    Lu is not like me. She is a woman, immigrant from Hong Kong, English is not her first language, she is a mother, working a corporate job in, what I think is, Vancouver, and in a marriage that is not fulfilling. But, I could understand where she was coming from, what she was feeling, and how she viewed life. I was especially taken by a sentence in the last paragraph:

    One day, you were an immigrant, loaded down with inexplicable shame; the next you were middle-aged, a mother, and all the risks you’d taken – to live freely, to not be subdued – also made you feel ashamed, as if you’d done nothing but kick tangerines around.

    I understood where Lu was in her life. How ramifications from past decisions can shape how we evolve to the next version of ourselves, even though some emotions never ever leave us, no matter how much we change. All of that is a few words.

  • Personal Writing History; The Abbey Writers

    At least my life has been colorful, and has gone is some different directions. I say that because, at one point in my life, I thought it best at 19 to drop out of college and try my hand working low paying jobs, and become a professional writer. I was lucky enough at the time to have several friends around me that all worked equally low paying jobs, and also had artistic ambitions.

    One of my good friends, let’s call him John, was also an aspiring writer as well. We had been best friends since 9th grade, and since then we had read each other’s stories. One late night, over cigarettes and coffee at a 24-hour IHOP, one of us came up with the idea that we should professionally write together, like a band. So, like any good band, we had to come up with a good name. We thought “The Abbey Writers” was a great choice. It was based off our favorite album, Abbey Road, and it also made us seem like a group of monks. Right, that’s cool?

    It was a fun time, and we were able to put together a collection of short stories called, “Double-Jointed Mythology.” I have a copy of it locked in my storage space, and I haven’t looked at it in maybe 20 years. What I can remember of it was that we were trying to take a snap shot of life in the suburb we grew up in, and the disconnection between the world we were promised as kids, and the disappointment we found as adults in that artificial town. (Say, that sounds a lot better than what I think we wrote.) We even did a photo shoot with a photographer friend for what we thought would be needed on the dust jacket.

    What can I say? The publishing world didn’t have a need for us. We tried but never could get any of the short stories published, and this was back in the day when submissions required a self addressed stamped envelope. I think we tried for two years, but after awhile, rejection begins to weigh on us. I don’t think we ever “broke up” as a writing collective, but just drifted to other things, and worked on other projects.

    But I still think it was a good idea.