short stories

It's been a while since I've worked on a story. Lately I've felt like I don't even know how to begin. Watching movies like Blue Valentine, Hard Grit, and The Fighter has been hugely inspiration. I get this excited feeling in my gut like I want to forget everything else and just focus on telling a good story.

This past summer I read a lot of short stories I read the collected work of Grace Paley and felt a similar excitement in her strong characterization, the women who speak so honestly. I read the stories of Alice Munro, Alistair MacLeod, Bharati Mukherjee, Mavis Gallant--some of the best storytellers of our time. And again and again it was the strong characters and plot that made me excited to write. I want to get back to the basics that made me fall in love with words in the first place.. characters I could relate to.. stories that moved me.

Lately I've been focusing so much on poetry, which is a good thing because it's changed the way I think about language. But I haven't been reading too much fiction. Tonight, I bought Alexander Macleod's Light Lifting. I've read all but two stories and I feel that excitement in the pit of my stomach... I'm marvelling at some of his decisions on form and point of view. But above all, it's the details that stand out, and that make the stories so strong. I've been reading a few stories by a young and amazing short fiction writer, Eliza Robertson who was nominated for the Journey Prize this past year. In her story, "Ship's Log," her use of details is so incredible. Reading her stories has made me want to create these worlds again, these three dimensional spaces Munro speaks of as rooms in a house. Places one can spend a little time walking around within.

I do see writing stories different from writing poems. I'm not exactly sure yet in what ways. But I do feel like I'm building something when I write a story. Fleshing it out almost as though I'm sculpting, refining. It does feel three dimensional. Poems are more like painting. Not that they're flat or impressionistic but that their language can communicate immediately and directly. Sharply like colours. Not slowly, like a sculpture one can explore. I will have to think about this more!