A look at an innovative project celebrating an under-appreciated form
Why aren’t short stories more popular? After all, they don’t take a lot of commitment to finish. They’re digestible on morning commutes. There are plenty of really good free ones available online.
But short-story collections don’t sell many copies, and literary magazines struggle to sell enough subscriptions to survive. Weird, right?
This is why projects like Story366 make me happy. Story 366, a blog and reading project designed and executed by Michael Czyzniejewski, highlights the short form that I love in a new and interesting way. The concept: Mike will read one story from a story collection every day of 2016. Each day will feature a new author. And for each story, he will write an essay — a mini review — of the story and take a picture of the collection it’s from.
Mike is no novice of the short-story form. He has penned three collections of his own: Elephants in Our Bedroom, Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions, and I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories. He was longtime editor of Mid-American Review and is now editor of Moon City Review.
The essays he writes at Story366 are entertaining and insightful. They serve as mini-reviews of the stories but also provide insight and context on the author, the collection the story came from, and Mike's own life. While learning about brilliant stories, experimental points of view, and the art of good dialogue, we also get observations on traveling and road trips, beard grooming, Polish food, and more.
I also admire the variety of story collections sampled here — ranging from the micro-fictions of Robert Olen Butler to the sprawling epic-feeling stories of Alice Munro. When Mike has finished, his blog will be like a virtual library of short-story awesomeness. It's kind of amazing.
We're halfway through the year now, and Mike has yet to miss a day on reading and posting a story. Has it been tough to maintain? "It's a pretty big stressor," he admits. "There were days that I was traveling and had to stop at a McDonald's off the highway to write the post, even read stories, delaying me a couple of hours."
I chatted with Mike some about the project and what he's learned so far:
Where did this idea come from?
I've always thought that I should do more critical work. I've also wanted to spend time reading every day. I've had so many of these books for years — a few of them for 20 years — and for this reason and that, I've never opened them. That's really dumb, so I wanted the project to cover a lot of different books.
What has all this reading taught you, if anything, about the short story as a form?
I appreciate longer stories now that I've read so many. I'm starting to favor those stories [to short shorts], appreciating what space and word count can do in the right hands. That said, I still really love a couple of books I've done recently, Knockout by John Jodzio and Pinkies by Shane Hinton, books that have shorter stories, some mid-sized ones. So maybe I've just become more eclectic.
How has it affected your own writing, positive or negative, over the last few months?
It's probably done both. It's been negative in that I don't write my own fiction as much, but it's positive in that I'm a smarter writer, better critic, and have picked up on some techniques, some voices, and some structures that I hadn't come across before.
Why short stories? What do you love about them?
In our short-attention-span world, it seems like shorter works would be more appealing, but that's not how it works. I talk about this with students, with other writers, but I think short stories just feel more like homework to readers who are non-writers, like something they're supposed to figure out instead of something they're just supposed to enjoy.
In a lot of ways, they're right. Those same weird techniques and voices and structures that inspire me make other people wonder what the hell is going on. My favorite story is probably "The Babysitter" by Robert Coover, and the very things I love about that make my students hate it (which makes my knees weak to hear, makes me squeeze my fists red). I'm like, "Look at the genius in this!" and they're like, "I was confused."
Stories can take risks that novels can't, risks that can't be sustained for three hundred pages. That's why I gravitate toward shorts. For two pages, I'm open to anything, wanting to see what a writer can do with form or voice or style.
Check out the archives of Story366 here, and follow the blog for more story awesomeness in the days to come.
Tara Laskowski's short-story collection, Bystanders, was hailed by Jennifer Egan as "a bold, riveting mash-up of Hitchcockian suspense and campfire-tale chills." She is also the author of Modern Manners For Your Inner Demons, tales of dark etiquette. Since 2010, she has been the editor of the online flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly.
