It's Dead, You Say? Oh.

You can usually count on running across an article or three or five like this one every year. Articles written by people who like to think they're driving the final nail into a coffin which holds the moldy remains of The Short Story. As if this will stop people from writing them. As if we will all jump up from the keyboard and start making candles or churning butter instead.

By "dead" they mean that nobody publishes short stories. But a cursory look at the "marketplace" (gawd, what a word) suggests otherwise. They also mean that you can't make money writing short stories. To which I say, "Duh." Lorrie Moore, veritable Goddess of the Genre, puts it more eloquently when she notes in her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2004, that not since the "golden blip between Henry James and television," has a writer been able to live off the penning of a short story. F. Scott Fitzgerald used to write them to fund his novels. How's that for funny?

The death knell articles often snicker about short stories just being a warm-up for writing novels. To which I say, "Um, no." Short stories are compact and lovely, perfect as-is. They are often our first introduction to the written word--what is Goodnight Moon, after all, but a short story? or Where the Wild Things Are?--and we can return to them again and again to frame and re-frame, filter and re-filter, our experiences. And all in the space of no more than, let's say, twenty-five minutes. Well worth the time investment, at least for this reader.

So maybe I do not take the rumours of demise as seriously as I should. There's a group of UK writers who picks up my slack, though. They've started a whole web site that beseeches one and all to "Save Our Short Story."

And all of this has served to remind me that I still need to write a review of Oscar Peñaranda's Seasons By the Bay. Much to do, much to do...