Baton-Rouge Advocate
Short Story Writers Flex Their Literary Muscles
YOU WON’T REMEMBER THIS
By Kate Blackwell
Southern Methodist Press,
$22.50
THE WAY THINGS HAPPEN HERE
By Kevin C. Stewart
Vandalia Press, $16.50 softcover
CHASING THUNDERBIRDS
By Roger Emile Stouff, illustrated
by Gary Drinkwater
iUniverse, $15.95
BY GREG LANGLEY
Books editor
The short story form was once more popular than novels and just as well respected. Then television came along. The Internet too. Video games, MTV, cell phones, YouTube. How could writers ask anyone to actually sit down and spend
— gasp — an hour or two absorbing
a story? It’s not a passive
pursuit either. You have to
think about what you read. To
really appreciate a short story,
you have to analyze it, look for
plot complications, symbolism,
metaphor and simile. That requires
some mental effort, and
there are no beeping screens
and cool graphics to keep you
engaged. To heck with short
stories. But … each time it
seems that short stories are
destined to die off along with
the general interest magazines
that publish them, a new collection
of tales comes out. Three recent publications testify
to the resilience of the
short story’s appeal.
A late start
According to the SMU Press,
Blackwell is a former journalist
who now teaches creative
writing in Bethesda, Md. This
short story collection is the
North Carolinian’s first published
book. She is 65.
It may have been a long wait, but it was worth it. Blackwell’s stories are jewels, each polished and tweaked to perfection, characters vividly rendered and plots as tightly wound as watch springs. Most of the stories are set in or near Blackwell’s native North Carolina, just east of the Piedmont, and the characters are the members of a genteel set who are not rich but well off and not snobbish but well mannered. Yet behind the doors of their neat white houses with their carefully tended gardens lives a special kind of despair that has always fascinated writers like Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Anne Porter. Blackwell is a literary relative of those writers.
In “My First Wedding,” Blackwell tells the story of a woman, Augusta, who is getting married. The tale is told in the voice of her cousin, a 24- year-old woman who was a young child when she attended Augusta’s wedding. Augusta had been married as an older woman, a literary type everyone expects to write a book and who reads Proust and is, in the view of the narrator’s mother, one of those women who are “too smart for their own good.” So is the narrator. Early on she reveals that Augusta “had married and settled in Chappaqua, New York, and had three sons and a wispy little daughter, Augusta had written nothing, so far as anybody knew, but she read everything, sending an endless stream of books down to her aunts and cousins in North Carolina.”
At her wedding, Augusta has a crisis, a failure of her expectations, that the other women nurse her through. On the surface, it’s a simple plot, but Blackwell’s work is so filled with subtle allusions that the reader is immediately aware of other issues: Augusta sees marriage as a surrender, giving up her dreams for a life she’s not sure she wants, accepting a subservient role she can never feel comfortable with. And the narrator identifies with Augusta.
There are an even dozen stories in Blackwell’s book, each as least as good as the one before it. Many of her characters are not appealing. They are not people you want to meet. The trouble is, they are so like so many people you do meet that you recognize them right off. Like the love triangle in “What We Do For Love,” two young women who were best friends who met and fell in love with the same man at the same time and yet remained friends, all of them. One of the women became pregnant and married the young man. The other became a craftsperson who weaves on a loom. When another love triangle goes awry, the three friends attend the trial of the husband who shot his wife and her lover in the stables of their horse farm. It is through their discussion of the trial that the true nature of their relationship is revealed. It’s as good a short story as has been written in the last 10 years — at least.
In “Heartland,” a young woman is unable to come to grips with the premature death of her husband and the revelations that come afterwards. In “The Queen of May,” a well-todo woman in a tony subdivision tries to regain a foothold on reality by getting back to basics — gardening. In “Carpe Diem,” a couple traveling in Europe are disappointed both by a couple of young people they befriend and by a minaret in a city in Crete that they have been trying to find for days.
Blackwell is a wonderful writer, her prose at once controlled and polished yet full of innuendo and understanding of human nature.