Is the Short Story genre the most difficult to master? I think so. It demands a miniaturization of story line and characters. Short stories can be very long, short novels in fact. But usually a reader expects a shorter ride.
This means the opening and closing paragraphs of a short story more so than in a novel are key to the works success with readers. Off the top of my head I admire the short stories of Maupassant, Chekhov, Bunin, Babel, Isaac Denison, Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and more if I stop think.
I admire the genre, but am intimidated by its demands. I write loosely, at ease on a novel. I turn tight and self conscious in a short story.
My output is of more than 20 SS. They cover me from late teens to my 60s. Some are OK, some terrible. The seven I selected for this website might not be my best, I’m just more comfortable with them. My most edgy tale is of a young man who visits an adult theater in NY to buy dope and instead ends up with a blow job. It’s titled Twinkle Twinkle Little Star because the decrepit theater’s ceiling is meant to be the firmament.
It’s not included here. I felt it too peripheral, distracting from the other stories. For the same reason culled others. Sex in novels is readily balanced, framed. It takes over in a short story.
What I do include surprises me in retrospect. Although I don’t always declare so, six of the seven are laid in part or entirely in Kansas. My home State is problematical in that among the US States it is among the lesser known. Few visit, almost no visitors stay, they drive quickly 450 miles across it on I-70.
Kansas is disadvantaged by images from the Wizard of Oz, and by its sad tilt into alt-right radicalism. The apposite to what I knew and experienced growing up there. The great majority don’t eve place it correctly in cultural terms, geologically, in terms of flora and fauna. It absolutely not a Midwestern state such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa. It is High Plains like Texas and the Dakotas, Eastern Wyoming and Colorado.
This makes it fertile ground for my short fiction because immediately it’s an odd setting. The same is true for Alabama which features in three stories and where my Bell family originated—my father graduated HS in Red Level, Al. Like Kansas Alabama carries a lot of negative associations. Again this makes for rich settings.
Dogs figure a lot too, particularly greyhounds. That will be explained.
Religion also is important. I’m an atheist but having been raised by Christians, specifically by a Methodist pastor and the daughter of one, it’s in my essence, inescapable as my Kansas, Alabama heritage.
The one short story I selected that might bother some readers is Sin In Peace. Yes, Gizmo is me. The ‘sin’ against him was against me. It’s heavily fictionalized but the core of it is quite accurate.
I’m sure that writing through time has been therapeutic to many writers, more so than readers should know. By choice or accident my story line converged in Sin In Peace with that of the work. It oughtn’t intrude. I should not have let it out.