Counternarratives' British Life + Saroyan Prize Short List

This April, Fitzcarraldo Editions, a new, small and vibrant publisher, issued Counternarratives in the UK and British Commonwealth countries--in its enchanting Yves Klein International Blue dust jackets--and since then, the collection has found not only a new set of readers, but spurred a new set of reviews. Two micro reviews appeared in the British publications The Lady and Buzz Magazine, the latter of which named Counternarratives its Book-of-the-Month for April 2016. Thanks so much to both reviewers for their reviews!

The collection received a different kind of mention in The Telegraph when critic Anthony Cummins included it in a May 1, 2016 article entitled "Clear-eyed and cutting edge: has the short story come of age?" In this short essay he discusses contemporary short fiction on both sides of the Atlantic, arguing that short stories may be more commercially viable and aesthetically daring on US shores, but that some British writers are, like their American peers, showing what short stories might do.

Among the writers he essays are some well known for their play with short fictional form and content: Helen Oyeyemi, Greg Jackson, Philip Hensher, and Mark Haddon. Into this mostly British mix he adds a side of Counternarratives, calling it "postmodernism with blood in its veins," and goes on to say that "This is no average work of historical fiction...rather, it’s a set of complex and unpredictable tales about slavery and racism." It's quite gratifying to note the book's distinctive approach to the short story form, its evident post-modernism, and its against-the-grain approach to historical fiction conventions. Many thanks to Mr. Cummins, and to The Telegraph.

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One very pleasant surprise came earlier this week when I learned that Counternarratives had made the short list for the biennial 2016 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, administered by the Stanford University Libraries. The Saroyan Prize takes its name from the late, award-winning playwright and fiction writer, and the 14 other books on the short list include works by Amina Gautier and T. Geronimo Johnson, among other very talented writers, and prior recipients have included Kiese Laymon, Daniel Orozco, Rivka Galchen, George Hagen, Nicole Krauss, and Jonathan Safran Foer, so I'm not getting my hopes up, but it is nice to receive this level of recognition. The awards will not be announced until later in the year. 

English 394: The Switchover

Monday marked a major milestone in my academic calendar: it was the final meeting of the first half of English 394: Theory and Practice of Fiction, the semester-long, initial portion of the full-year sequence that all undergraduate creative writing majors and (non-cross-genre) minors must take. As I've noted in previous years, this course breaks the college's quarter system, running past one into the second, at which point the professors change, and the second half of the course runs until the academic year's end, in mid-June.  In the first half the students work in shorter forms (short stories for the fiction track; weekly poems for the poetry track; and assorted forms of the creative nonfiction track), but in the second half they complete a long-form project (a novella for the fiction track; a 125-line long poem for the poetry track; and a long personal or research essay or lyric prose text for the creative nonfiction track).

With the handoff, my teaching load drops to 2 courses (the intro fiction and LGBTQ literature classes) this quarter from 3 (only the creative writing faculty have this load), and my volume of reading and emending student prose will also fall, though only after they hand in their final revisions next week.  It's hard to express how intense, how rigorous, and how energizing the sequence class has been.  I was again able to guide and watch 15 smart and enthusiastic young writers harness their talents and develop their skills as they wrote three short stories and subsequently revised two of them (though some will eventually rework all three), using as their guides the established writers we read and discussed in depth, and several works exploring theories and technical fundamentals of fiction writing. This year I chose stories by Anton Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Jhumpa Lahiri, ZZ Packer, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders, and the students drew from all of them to varying degrees, creating narratives that often were unlike anything any of these writers might attempt but also unlike anything they, the student writers, have ever undertaken before.  Their stories ranged from very autobiographical realist narratives to highly speculative, dystopian fantasies. Our discussions and the essays each of the students wrote analyzing the assigned stories by each of these writers did allow for deep investigation into the technical means and thematic aspects of each established author.

Working closely with students for six months means that I have gotten to know not only their work but them as people, their personalities, their senses of humor, their voices, on and off the page, and so the switchover on Monday was not easy. As much work as the class required of me (15 students x 3 stories (at between 8-20 pages) x 2 versions of 2 of the stories, + 15 4-page essays, alongside other classes' work), I deeply enjoyed it, and I can say I already miss heading down the stairs of University Hall every Monday and Wednesday at midday and launching into our discussions. (I feel this way about all my classes, but the length and high-level intensity of the sequence always makes it distinct from all my other classes, and I can say that at no other institution have I ever taught a class quite like either its first or second halves.)

Below is the cake we savored as we concluded our final discussion, on the novella in general and on theirs, still in the prospective state, specifically. Congratulations to them, and as I told them, I am wishing them the best and cannot wait to read what they produce in the novella half of the course!

Let me also thank Ish Harris-Wolff, a SFF writer and MFA graduate student who under the auspices of the university's MA/MFA program, served in the experimental capacity of Teaching Assistant--she was and is the first, I believe, to do so!--and who also read the stories and provided the students with valuable advice and guidance. I think of her as my co-pilot for the journey! Thanks so much, Ish!