By Brad Quinn

Literary critic Charles May will be coming to Cincinnati for UC's Short Story Festival.

In 1842, Edgar Allen Poe, the father of the detective story and the Baltimore Ravens NFL football franchise, presented his expectations for the short story genre in Graham's Magazine. The short story, stressed Poe, should be able to be read in a single session. All of its parts should be controlled to produce a single, unified effect. And it should be spooky and morbid enough to provide a career for Vincent Price well into his 70s.

Since Poe laid down the rules, the short story has had its ups and downs in popularity but, in general -- especially compared to the novel -- it's been a somewhat neglected genre.

The University of Cincinnati English Department, however, is doing its part to remedy that situation with an 11-day Short Story Festival, featuring readings from short fiction masters John Updike and Lorrie Moore, as well as newcomer ZZ Packer. The festival also includes presentations and discussions on the short story from UC English Department faculty and visiting literary critics such as William Pritchard, Donald Greiner and Charles May.

May, who festival organizer Jim Schiff describes as knowing as much as anyone about the form, takes issue with the idea that the short story is in decline. He readily admits that the novel is more popular --and always has been -- and acknowledges that the number of venues for the short story has declined since the days of Colliers magazine early in the 20th century. But overall, May feels, the short story is holding its own.

"The short story, probably since Raymond Carver in the 1980s, has done pretty well in America," says May, from his office at California State University, Long Beach. "I was looking, for example, at The New York Times list of notable books for 2000, and they had 120 titles on the fiction list, and 20 of those were short story collections. That's not too bad, really."

As May notes, publishers are rarely interested in putting out a collection of short stories unless a writer has first published a novel -- Melissa Banks' A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing being a recent notable exception. However, that doesn't mean there is a lack of good short fiction. May cites Alexander Hemon's The Question of Bruno, and Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World as two recent collections he has admired. May saves his highest praise for Canadian writer Alice Munro.

"There are not many writers -- I don't know what it takes -- the courage or energy or dedication to stick with the short story," says May. "I think the best, the very best writer who has done that is Alice Munro. She, I think, is absolutely brilliant. She gets my vote as the current best living short story writer."

Although many contemporary short story writers might be unfamiliar to readers, anyone who has taken college lit classes is bound to have read stories like Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?," Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" or Eudora Welty's "A Well Worn Path," stories that share a distorted sense of reality and ambiguous endings. The reason such stories are so widely anthologized -- and so popular with students -- is probably because, as May says, the short story doesn't do a very good job of presenting reality.

"You don't have a short story unless something happens that kind of gauges and breaks up what been going on," explains May. "The short story says, 'Something's got to change'; the short story says, 'Things can't go on like this'; the short story says, 'Now I got ya'. The short story from the beginning has been like that. You go back and you read Poe, for example, and Poe's not interested in everyday reality. He's interested in things getting real intense. Look at Raymond Carver. That's not realism. It's kind of what John Barth once called hyper-realism. These people don't seem like real people in the real world. These people have been cranked up to a high level of intensity.

"Same thing with Hemingway. People said, 'Oh, wow. This is realism' -- that's bullshit! That's not realism. It was highly stylized. Nobody talked that way. Nobody walked that way or acted that way. So my feeling is that the short story, because it focuses on such limited kind of moment in time or a limited expanse, by it's very nature, has always dealt with things cranked up to extremes."

If a short story writer must strive to achieve a level of intensity, the form, likewise asks a great deal from its readers. As a critic and teacher, May is well-acquainted with the difficulties readers often have with the short story.

"Short stories put more demands on the reader's attention," he says. "You've got to read every word, or you get lost. If it's a good short story, you can't afford to let your attention flag. I think most critics who have studied the form suggest that the short story is closer to poetry than it is the novel. It leans more toward the techniques of poetry than it does the novel: in terms of language choice, selectivity and intensity and that's one of the problems for readers."

E-mail Brad Quinn

Mind Reader (April 5, 2001)
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