PASS IT, THEN GAS IT!

an exploration on publishing's problem with the short story collection (& our own)

Take a look at your recent reads pile, let’s go back a year. How many were short story collections?

I have this untested theory that people are either essay collection people or story collection people and they crossover once or twice a year but otherwise stick to their fold. I’m an essay collection gal. I’m going to buy your essay collection. I might not read it in full, I might not even read it in order, but I’m going to buy it and it will live on my shelf until I’m surrounded, and then I’ll put it in a pile of books I want to read by my bed (it’s actually a basket now because it got out of control) and it’ll live there for a year until I just admit who I am to myself and add it to the donate box.

Last year (2023) I read two story collections (one for work, if I’m being totally honest about the catalog), out of several dozen books. The one I read for work is Kate Doyle’s I Meant It Once which you should buy for every young woman in your life, and everyone else too. It’s a PERFECT grad gift, if you’re looking (the yearning! the yearning!).

I do listen to a lot of audiobooks but I pretty much stick to nonfiction for those. And I love a short story. Short stories raised me. When I returned to reading late into college (after quitting for the most part in middle school) & (because I started a book blog), it was short stories (and tbh Nicholas Sparks books) that brought me back from the dead. Lorrie Moore took me to the frog hospital, Raymond Carver to the cathedral, Amy Hempel to the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried, O’Connor to the good country people, Oates to the going and the been. I read who, at the time, I was told was foundational, and I let them bury me anew in their fields of grass and sticky leather car seats, and humor and wit and heartbreak. And then I read MIRANDA FREAKING JULY who I will always hold half a heart shaped friendship necklace for because her writing is ELITE. Miranda July could write a cereal box and I would eat Frosted July’s for the rest of time.

And when I was in the classroom my favorite stories to teach were “Zombie” by Chuck Palahniuk (whoops, I would be canned today! It was originally published in Playboy), “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, “Salvador, Late or Early” by Sandra Cisneros, and literally anything from Helen Oyeyemi’s story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, but mostly I waited all semester to teach Kiese Laymon’s “Da Art of Storytellin’: A Prequel” in Oxford American (and anthologized in The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward). If you really want to judge me, you should know I started every semester with David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water.”

But I think this is the first conundrum of the American short story: it’s a form, both fortunately and not, that is first brought to us through a high school textbook or educator. So, our first interactions with the form, and our whole experience of what it can do is not through an emotional bond, but an educational one—likely answering some question set or guide about the story that meets a state’s standards and reads like a multiple choice test (for me as a student, ninth grade English was The Monkey’s Paw, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Most Dangerous Game. Throw a little Hart Crane in there and you have officially ruined the story genre).

Some readers find their way back through study or discovery (or a viral story like Cat Person)—mostly English students and writers I would argue are partaking in short stories regularly (and we’re *kind of* a small crowd with VARIED interests and beliefs about words and values about reading), but often the stench of schooling remains. So, we’ve already limited the audience for short stories before the readership is even adults. (The same flattening happens to poetry).

Then, there’s the commercial and distribution prospect of short stories. You’re not, for example, going to find a short story collection in Target. Not because story collections don’t sell commercially (look at how successful Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez is), but because short stories are categorically (typically) science fiction & fantasy or literary. And Target isn’t hocking many literary books, they’re hawking your mysteries, thrillers, and beach reads. Are me and the gals following Belletrist reading stories on the beach, yes? Is the Target mom? No.

Same with bookstores. If you’re in The Strand or somewhere huge and citied, or a few independent bookstores across the country, then you’ll have a short story shelf, but most bookstores (that the majority of America frequents) do not have a separate short story section. So, stories are lumped in with novels. Which in theory could be good for stories because they’re aligned with “mainstream readership” but I would argue that they get lost not having a designated shopping area—quite literally a shelf—of their own. (It’s the same with memoir. If Barnes & Noble doesn’t eventually cave and move memoir out of “autobiography” I might seriously pop like a balloon).

Okay, so I’m funneling the readership down some more.

Then let’s get to the reading experience—short stories are for getting in and out. Lots of people will say on the TWEETER that they like short stories because they aren’t time consuming, you can read them on a train (maybe it’s just that city folk are funding the whole short story industry and my breakdown is null), or the expectation is that you don’t have to read the whole collection. Think about how you listen to an artist’s new album release, you might listen to the whole thing once, pick a few favorites and then repeat those on rotation. They have a sort of freedom that you don’t get with a novel. But … and here’s the a huge factor, they’re a mood read. Mostly, at the end of a long day with babies, I don’t want a grab-and-go or a drive-thru (I need you to know I asked my husband for words here and he said “a snag and drag” and “pass it, then gas it!”), instead I want to leave my one human body for thirty minutes to an hour and get immersed into a novel. I want to be in the deprivation tank of a novel.

Image from Galen Crout on Unsplash

In essence, I don’t want to be me, I want enough time to be INSIDE a novel (or another longform text) where I don’t have to think about a to do list or the baby’s cough, or the last time I vacuumed, or the meetings I have the next day.

You see, a novel is one of our last pieces of longform content. And I am someone desperate for that content. Tiktok is fun to scroll, sure, but I’m so, so tired of a day of instantaneous emailing, I just want to digest instead of inhale. Stories don’t give me that same revival. (They might for you! But I think we can all admit, they’re a mood read! We have to be in the mood for a story collection or even just a story a friend shares they they recently published published!) Short stories are mostly too long to read in the amount of time I might scroll Twitter between work and mostly too short to become one with the no-sensory water. (I’m not talking about you flash fiction, but I love you the most anyway. A piece of flash can light me right up. But if short fiction is one niche-down, flash is getting even nichier).

All of the arguments I’m making could also be counteracted as a benefit of the short story, but what I’m trying to say is that it’s a question of audience, form, mood, and demand, not a question of merit or talent. Short stories are perhaps more a writers’ reading experience (a craft—it’s in the read kind of book) and a writer’s tool, rather than facing outward toward an audience (or at least focused on audience) in the way of a novel.

So, the audience is thinning. But not only is the short story a known factor of the high school classroom, but short stories live in literary magazines. And let’s all take some accountablity here, we can’t fund every literary magazine on the planet with only each other. So, we’re funding the magazines that we believe are publishing the best writing or who have published us in the past. And most magazines are working with an all-volunteer staff or with the backing of university or organizational funding (though this is depleting), and we’re not funding the short story (arguably that and poetry are the bread and butter of literary magazines) on that level, so what would make publishing take a chance on a broader stage? (We are also not funding anthologies, unfortunately). Think about it, if everyone who has ever been published in The Rumpus, donated $10 to The Rumpus, they might be able to hire staff full-time. But we’re not. When it comes down to it, we’re not supporting ourselves. (Wow, I’m depressing).

And thus, when I see a tweet like Amy’s—a FANTASTIC story writer with a collection forthcoming from Still House Press that you should definitely preorder, I understand the frustration, but I also understand the industry hesitation to publish story collections without a novel.

We can say all day if they don’t buy them, they can’t be marketed to us, but when they are bought by an editorial team—are we buying them, or are we buying one or two? Because then that explains why they’re buying one or two. And also why they’re buying collections with some thematic thruline, because those, friends, can be marketed kind of like a novel, something they already know how to do.

And don’t get me started on the one prize dedicated to story collections. You’re telling me out of the THOUSANDS of books a year that The Story Prize got 113 entries (from 84 publishers) this year? Doesn’t that seem … small? If 113 people were standing outside of a store in a line, you would be able to see them all from the parking lot. (Thankful to The Story Prize for their transparency, which Pen, as far as I can tell, does not supply for the Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection).

The last thing I’ll say is look at the presses that have story prizes. It’s UGA Press, Dzanc Books, Iowa Short Fiction Award, Hub City, BOA Editions, Press 53—I’m not surprised at all that the presses doing the work in the field of short stories are indies and university presses. Maybe we could all work on supporting more of them since that’s where our stories (and great story writers) are finding homes, even if The Story Prize has (again, I would argue) only big publishers on their longlist. Norton is not small and neither is Tin House, do not come for me. The only place that I’ll accept as truly small press / independent is A Public Space. The rest are MONEY.

Anyway, I love you. I love your stories. I’m sorry Playboy is defunct and not paying dollars per word like some beacon of “good ol’ boy” light. And that all the glossy magazines that used to include a dynamic, illuminating, talk-of-the-town story-an-issue now just pump out content about the best gin martini’s, air bnbs, and self-tanners. But we have to support the media we want to see, we have to make viral the things we want to read, we have to collectively support the work that takes work, or else it’s all just “8 Easy Ways to Pamper Yourself This Month” and “Six Gorgeous Kitchen Colors to Inspire a Refresh.”

We have to save ourselves from the best of best of best of paid for paid for paid for content content content. We have to read stories first, talk about stories first, pass around stories first, and make the industry follow. (Because they’re following, they’re definitely not leading).

---

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s “My OCD Can’t Keep Me Safe From America’s Gun Violence—But It Tries” is in TIME & her essay, “The Beast in Your Head” is in The Sun Magazine, Sean Enfield is on Across the Margin and interviewed in The Museum of Americana about Holy American Burnout!, Jessica Jacobs is going on tour for unalone which was just reviewed by Jamie Wendt in Still Journal, a story from Kate Doyle’s I Meant It Once is up at A Public Space, Metabolics by Jessica E. Johnson is reviewed by Joely Fitch at Broadside Press, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.