Alumni and Faculty Short Story Collections

While the manner of expression in short stories is similar to novels—its use of plot, character, and setting—its history reaches back farther than the novel, and is really closer to the long history of poetry. The story collections BGSU alumni and faculty represented here are at once inspired by this deep history, as well as a terrific range of innovative achievements. Pulitzer-Prize winning author, Anthony Doerr, lyrically and majestically immerses readers in stories inspired by natural history in his first story collection, The Shell Collector. Sharona Muir’s Invisible Beasts: Tales of the Animals that Go Unseen Among Us, are stories akin to Medieval beast fables; they create a fantastic world of creatures that live just beyond what we can see, reminding us of the urgency to preserve endangered species. Stories in Dustin M. Hoffman’s One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, recall the rise of gritty American psychological realism; his stories take readers into the gutsy world of working class heroes, another way to bring underrepresented voices to the fore. Stories in Alison Balaskovits’s Magic for Unlucky Girls, make ingenious use of the everyday as well as legend and fairy tale; according to Publisher’s Weekly, “The mundane and bizarre walk hand in hand—or sometimes run around, setting fire to everything in their path.”

For nearly fifty years, BGSU’s MFA and BFA programs in creative writing have been a place for these highly accomplished writers to grow into the time-honored craft—and vision—of storytelling. Few such programs in the United States have as deep and storied a history. It is my hope that the outstanding works of short fiction in BGSU’s Center for the Short Story can be used in classrooms, seminars, research, and more for generations to come. To further illustrate the depth and reach of the short story form, I’ve provided a brief account of the form, broken into historical periods and changes in purposes of short fiction. I hope this may also help to give an aesthetic and historical context for how the rich past of storytelling inspires writers in our time—and in generations to come—to “Tell a good story.”

Prior to the Eighteenth Century

Some of the earliest stories were based on myth, for instance, creation stories like “Genesis,” the pagan Lithuanian “Sun/Moon/Earth” story, and the Aztecs’ “Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl—Lord and Lady of Duality.” In general, these stories were used to explain the ways of God and/or nature to humankind. In Greco-Roman classical periods, fables arose, short prose tales used to convey a moral of some sort, for example, Aesop’s “Fox and the Raven” or the Bible’s “Prodigal Son.” Franz Kafka, a more contemporary writer, drew directly on the form to create modern parables fraught with paradox and ambiguity, for instance “The Tiger.” Another ingredient in this ancient soup of forms are Medieval romances, including accounts of battles, valor, chivalry, etc., meant to show virtue, tragic fate, split nature of men and women, dangers of love, etc. The fabliaux also arose, a comic tale involving characters of “low” social status, including animals featured in beast fables, such as Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.”

It is with writers like Chaucer, and the rise of trade among newly developing European nations, that more details are included in stories (a sense of the everyday), things to interest the rising middle class, common folks. This tended to parallel the rise of secular humanism and popular literacy with the invention of the printing press and first broadsides. The Renaissance’s tendency to yoke together secular and religious concerns created a new, literate middle-class audience for stories. Unusual ‘news’ stories and ballads (stories that are metrical and rhymed) were printed. These often covered about one page, usually two columns, and were illustrated. The purpose of these stories was to spread ‘news’ as much as to justify the ways of God or nature to humankind.

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Fairy tales of various cultures, say, those of the Grimm brothers of the 18th Century, exemplify a clear break with the moral aspect of the short prose tale. These tales sometimes created moral ambivalence. And certain effects in the stories became privileged, for instance, the fantastic or magical. It’s this sense of ambivalence that writers continue to explore in our time by reaching back to these kinds of stories. Witness “Little Red Cap” and compare it with contemporary writings, such as “The Werewolf” by Angela Carter. Also see Italo Calvino’s telling of “Shining” from his Italian Folktales and his contemporary story, “Winter,” from Marcovaldo. By the 19th Century, the dark romances of Hawthorne (“Young Goodman Brown”) and Poe (“The Cask of Amontillado”) arise. More than pushing a moral, the purpose of these stories is a singleness of effect, often horrific and ambivalent. Narrators of these stories are often enveloped in the realm of the romantic, allegorical, supernatural, or fantastic. Following this, the early rise of realism gives us “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Melville), “The Open Boat” (Crane’s naturalistic tale), and “The Jolly Corner” (James’s psychologically real ‘ghost’ story).

Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Modernism and high modernism inspire the innovations of Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, all intensely psychological. Now, the purpose of storytelling turns inward for truth, new consciousnesses. An explosion of technique and types arise from this (to wit, Ezra Pound’s Make It New, 1935): stream of consciousness; free indirect discourse; limited points of view; irony; epiphany; surrealism; and spatial forms (how text appears visually on the page) that arise from theories of relativity, the influences of modern science.

The postmodern story suggests a kind of exhaustion of forms: these sorts of stories explore the fictitious nature of existence itself. Writers become faithful annotators of archetypes that have come before. See “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (Borges). The purpose of storytelling is not necessarily to explain ways of God or nature to humankind; it is not to create new forms; it is to suggest that we are each the authors of our lives, which, by the way, are mere fictions themselves, subject to both the mendacity of our lives and magic of our imaginations. For instance, see short stories such as Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” which features a bedraggled creature that represents the miraculous eroded by the everyday world.