Short Story v. Novel

If you were to tell someone about one moment of your life, and only one, that moment would be the short story. A short story is a glimpse into the life of a character. This glimpse is definitive. The events of a short story compel a character through the rest of his or her life. Everything that happens before a short story is a preamble. Everything after a short story is a consequence. After all, Alan Cheuse often quotes his good friend Bernard Malamud as saying "a short story predicates a life."

Novels on the other hand are allowed the space to create entire worlds for readers. Prolonged depictions of life and place set the goal of the novel as something different than that of the short story. Rather than suggest a life that happened outside the confines of a narrative, the novel aims to show the reader life.

John Gardner writes in On Becoming a Novelist about the experience of reading a novel.

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page... We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.

Here Gardner demonstrates how novels can be engrossing. Readers can become absorbed in a world different than their own. One can roam around the life of a character and experience a different life. The experience can be so exhaustive that upon closing a book a reader examines his or her own world in a different light, almost unsure of which reality is more compelling.

Is one better than the other? They seem to aspire to different goals. Sometimes you need the precision of a Kawabata story, and the suggestion that one moment can predicate an entire life. The brevity of a page can have a simplistic beauty to it. The novel on the other hand can be an exhaustive exploration of time and place. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude explores several generations of a family who inhabit a city from its rise to its fall. In this journey, we see not just the definitive moment of one character but those of a family and a place that are engrossing. Both narrative experiences are satisfying. One offers brevity and the other thoroughness.

My question to you is which do you prefer?

Fiction Dinner with Alan on May 23rd

Last fiction dinner for year!

When: May 23rd, 6PM
Where: Alan’s house in DC (we'll send out the address)

Here is our list. If you told me what you're bringing and I don't have it down here, just send me an email and I'll add it. Those of you still deciding, just let me know when you can so we have an idea of the menu.

You know the drill, we'll gather and eat. Then Alan will talk and probably ask us all what we've been reading and if we're revising. (Answers: Ulysses and Of course!)

Nicole Lee		gourmet cheese
Jeff Moscaritolo		pies
Jay Patel
Beckie McGill		wine / pasta salad
Lisa Hill-Corley Norah Vawter
Sarah Silberman		tomato and cucumber salad
Elizabeth Gutting
Corey Beasley
Paul Zaic		slow cooked meat
Ken Isreal		carrot side dish
Bree Spencer
Kirsten Clodfelter
Laura Vinti		dessert
Pat Devlin
Priyanka Champaneri		sparkling cider
Atossa Shafaie
Sara Flood
Jennifer Brown		fruit salad
David Tucholski
Mark Fabiano		fresh vegetables and dip, diet soda
Ben Brown

Amber Smith (maybe)

cherry dessert

Alan Cheuse Interview on KQED

This is a bit overdue, but better late than never. I came across an interview with Alan Cheuse on the radio a couple weeks ago and I thought I'd share it here:

Miscellania...

Various bits and pieces of writing news to ease you back into the world before the semester begins (unless, of course, you never left to begin with):

-Check out the recent SF Chronicle online, featuring a review of The Convalescent by alum Jessica Anthony (who will also be reading from her novel at this year's Fall for the Book Festival)as well as Alan's review of the new Thomas Pynchon book

-Boulevard had just opened for their short fiction contest, deadline 12/31 - this one offers a free subscription with the entry fee (ok, so not really free)

-Zoetrope: All Story is still accepting entries for their fiction contest, judged by Yiyun Li, who will be Visiting Fiction Writer this Fall at Mason


-And more contests from Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, and - yes - even Good Housekeeping

And don't forget - most lit mags are open to submissions either now or in just a few weeks - get those stories ready and sent out!

Submit Here, Too: SFWP

Submit to the 7th Annual SFWP Literary Awards Program: the deadline for this year’s program is July 15, with a $1,750 grand prize and two $1,000 runnner-up prizes. The top three winners will be considered for representation by the Irene Goodman Agency. Entries are 25 pages or less of prose fiction or nonfiction; see here for more guidelines.

SFWP, the Santa Fe Writers Project, is also looking for authors (fiction, nonfiction, and book reviews) to submit work to their literary journal: http://sfwp.org/. As a previous post noted, SFWP published Alan Cheuse’s novella The Fires, and its founder, Andrew Gifford, was featured in the Washington Post Magazine.

Alan Cheuse, Politics and Prose, and WAMU

Alan Cheuse reads from his collection of travel writings, A Trance After Breakfast, at Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse (5015 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC) at 6 pm on Saturday June 13. If you haven’t seen the notices about this by now, check your email! There’s more to the event. 

Also, Alan was on today’s Kojo Nnamdi show at WAMU 88.5 (guest hosted by Sam Litzinger and joined by Barbara Hoffert) to talk about summer reading as well as his own book. You can download the podcast here until tomorrow at 2:30 pm. Alan and Barbara’s summer reading lists are here.

Art Taylor Interview with Alan Cheuse

Art Taylor interviewed Alan Cheuse about Alan’s travel writing collection here.

Alan and the Vision Series

"A Glimpse Into the Writer's Workshop"
Monday April 20, 2009
7pm, Concert Hall

Ice Cream and Books and Alan

The last post's mention of the Washington Post Magazine reminded me of an article I read a while back that is worthy of sharing here. The story is about Andrew Gifford, a D.C. publisher who's family founded and ran Gifford's Ice Cream and Candy, a franchise of old-fashioned ice cream parlors that once thrived in the D.C. area. Gifford's went from being the hottest spot on a Saturday night in the 1950s to bankrupt in 1985.

Despite suffering from a long-time painful chronic illness, in 2002 Gifford began a small literary press, the Santa Fe Writer's Project. Writer Ray Robertson is quoted in an interview, "Publishers like Andrew Gifford at SFWP are [expletive] heroes." The press published The Fires, written by GMU's own Alan Cheuse. Cheuse is mentioned and quoted in the article. (Also, interviewed here by SFWP, on his novellas.)

Check it out here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/14/AR2008081401431.html

Alan gets pied...

In a good way! Check out this snippet about Alan's recent trip to The Virginia Festival of the Book.

Apparently the chain is a gift from the panel moderator. Just, you know, if you were wondering.

Alan Cheuse on C-Span

This weekend watch Alan present his novel To Catch the Lightning from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar on C-Span. Dates and times below...

Upcoming Schedule
Sunday, February 22, at 7:00 AM
Monday, February 23, at 5:00 AM
Saturday, March 14, at 4:20 PM

And you can watch the video here.

A Slice of Wheat with Capote on the Side!

Many of us are familiar with Bread Loaf, that famed 80+ years old writing conference that takes place yearly in Vermont. The sleepy town (I'm assuming it's sleepy, because that's the way most of these towns are...apparently) is the place to be to meet those glittering literati: agents, editors, and writers both experienced and greenhorned.

According to this recent article in the Post, getting into Bread Loaf could be as easy as getting a job at IHOP (not really). A select group of applicants have their tuition covered by working the kitchen and meal hours as...waiters.

What's more, our very own Alan Cheuse once served as part of the wait-staff at Bread Loaf, as did Amy Hempel and Julia Alvarez. And more than one waiter/ess has been said to slip a manuscript to some famous you-know-who along with his or her order of baked potato and chicken almondine. (It's all in the wrist).

Check it out! Perhaps, one day, a student or two from our very own MFA program may have the privilege of saying they left the program to serve...and got their big break.