Quinn Dalton’s Dream Anthology of Short Stories

The last time Quinn Dalton appeared as a guest author here at Beatrice, she talked about the benefits of hiring an independent publicist. This time around, as her new short story collection, Stories from the Afterlife, was coming out, I thought I’d get her to talk about one of her favorite stories. Turns out she has enough to fill an entire book!

You can’t help what you love. So in advance I’d like to make no apologies for the stories I’ve picked for my dream anthology. I claim no exhaustive review or attempts at even-handedness in my choices, if such claims are even worth making. I didn’t consider who wrote these stories—in about half the cases I couldn’t remember who wrote them, or I couldn’t remember the title, or both.

But I did remember a moment, an image, an ache. I closed my eyes and these things came to me and then I wrote down, “That one I think it’s called bird about this crazy pilot” and “the girl whose father is in prison and one of his former cronies gets her out of town and there’s something about a fire.”

Even if I couldn’t remember the story’s title or author, I was pretty sure I could find it, because I’d probably first read it in an anthology like New Stories from the South or O. Henry Prize Stories or Best American Short Stories. In a few cases I’d found favorites in an author’s story collection. In all cases, tripping across a story I loved led me to seek out more of the author’s work.

While I drew from contemporary sources, only four out of the eleven stories I chose were published after 2000. The most recent was originally published in 2004, and the earliest one appeared first in 1989, the year I graduated from high school. I guess I needed at least a couple of years to realize that a story had stayed with me.

So here is my love letter to these eleven stories, which I listed in alphabetical order by the author’s last name (though it’s nice to see the list arbitrarily sandwiched by pieces first published more than a decade apart in The Greensboro Review, where I was an assistant editor for a year while working on my MFA). I won’t try to write with any authority about their literary quality or what I think the writer was trying to do or whatever. I’m just going to talk about what they did to me.

⇒”Crow Man” by Tom Bailey, The Greensboro Review, 1989, reprinted in New Stories from the South, 1990, and included in the collection Crow Man.

Remembering this story, the image that came to me first was of a man and a woman pushing a rickety plane to its limits. And I remembered the urgent voice of the story, each word pushing into the next. The unnamed narrator is a young black man in rural, poor Mississippi who works for Rarden, a crop duster for hire from the north who falls in love with Naomi, whom he calls Felicity Jane, but who is owned “like a slave and not like a slave” by De La Palma. Rarden teaches the narrator and Naomi to fly, and he blows their lives apart in a way that they can’t talk about even decades later. The fact that Rarden gets killed doesn’t surprise anyone—we’re told this early on—it’s how he dies that changes everything and, in the end, nothing. This about Rarden: “Fueling, and him up again, in love and flying, which is what he did, like some men walk or run, or go into business. He fell in love and flew. He just drank on the side.” Rarden is purely who he is, and because of this, he’s doomed.

Like I said, these stories are listed in alpha order by author. But I love the fact that this one just happened to come first. It is one of the earliest in my dream anthology, and so it has been with me the longest. I’ve never stopped thinking about it and I doubt I ever will.

The other thing I love about my used copy of New Stories where I first came across “Crow Man” is that it’s all marked up with notes in a girlish cursive with helpful explanations like, below the final line of the story, “mercy killing.”

No shit.

⇒”What You Left in the Ditch” by Aimee Bender, The Antioch Review, 1997 and included in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.

I bought Aimee Bender’s collection on the recommendation of a friend and loved it. And this story—what an opening line: “Steven returned from the war without lips.” During his absence, Steven’s wife Mary has been avoiding a certain grocery store because of a certain cute clerk. But he’s home now and disfigured, and she starts going back. The young clerk’s face now seems to be “overflowing with lip.” What a great line—so funny and horrible. It is an honest story; when Steven tells Mary how he thought of her while he was wounded down in the ditch, and how his vision of her kept him alive, she’s shoving cans in a cabinet and thinking maybe, “…if you’d concentrated better you’d still have lips.” The way Bender depicts Steven’s clacking speech because of the prosthetic that covers what’s left of his mouth makes you understand her despair—you hear it for yourself.

⇒”Charlotte” by Tony Earley, Harper’s, 1992, reprinted in New Stories from the South, 1993, and included in Here We Are in Paradise.

First off, this is both a love story and an elegy and it’s wonderfully, hysterically funny. The narrator loves Starla but she doesn’t love him, not really. But they both love professional wrestling. They love the wrestlers but they hate them for leaving Charlotte for the lure of Ted Turner’s money and bigger houses in Atlanta. Earley gives us the whole cast of characters, culminating in a climactic showdown between Lord Poetry and Bob Noxious for the affections of Darling Donnis. Here, the bad guy wins. You know it’s inevitable, and the narrator does too, but you can’t help but hold out hope.

Like the wrestlers, the narrator and everyone he knows left smaller and (as they see it) humbler beginnings for the Charlotte’s slick sheen. But he finds that “when we got to Charlotte the only people we found waiting for us were the ones we had left. Our parents go to tractor pulls and watch ‘Hee Haw.’ My father eats squirrel brains. We tell ourselves that we are different now, because we live in Charlotte, but we are only making do.”

I photocopied this story and sent it to half a dozen friends of mine who’d never lived in the South because I was trying to give them some idea. It’s got everything we southerners love (or hate, but righteously defend anyway): the memory of a once glorious past, no matter how fake or flawed, the hapless grabbing for new wealth, the promise and loss of perfect love. Welcome to the New South.

⇒”Some Other, Better Otto” by Deborah Eisenberg, The Yale Review, 2003, reprinted in Best American Short Stories, 2004, and included in her collection, Twilight of the Superheroes.

Otto’s partner William is handsome, committed and patient, and together they’ve built a comfortable life. But Otto is not disposed to happiness; he won’t allow himself to be satisfied. His love for his sister Sharon is the loose thread in his carefully woven persona, and this is where we connect with him. Sharon’s mathematical prowess appeared in childhood, first as a miracle and then as the harbinger of mental illness. Otto recalls that “…at a certain point as she wandered out among the galaxies, among the whirring particles and ineffable numbers, something leaked in her mind, smudging the text of the cosmos, and she was lost.”

The writing here knocks my socks off, but there is also the fact that Sharon is the one person in his family Otto ever felt connected to, and he can’t save her, can’t bring her back. After a Thanksgiving visit Sharon has another episode, and Otto comes to collect her in the hospital. He is devastated and furious that she has to be the one to live like this, so much so that he can’t accept any comfort, not even from William. “I profoundly regret every tiny crumb of myself,” he says sarcastically near the end of the story, but it’s also the truth. And I guess this is what broke my heart—the powerlessness he feels in the face of his sister’s affliction, and the hatred he aims at himself because of it.

⇒”He’s at the Office” by Allan Gurganus, The New Yorker, 1999, reprinted in Best American Short Stories, 2000.

Gurganus was already solidly on the literary map before he wrote this story, but of every wonderful thing I’ve read from him, I will always be most grateful for “He’s at the Office.” My grandmother forgot herself slowly over a period of fourteen years. My fun-loving uncle was hit with Alzheimer’s in his fifties and languished for years in a nursing home. It is a terrible, terrifying thing to witness someone you love disappearing. You go the funeral again and again.

What Gurganus did was face this reality dead on with grace and humor. The narrator’s father Dick has entered the first stages of dementia at the story’s opening; a workaholic office supplies salesman, he first shows up on the wrong floor at work, and soon after is forced to retire. This creates tension at home; since Betty (the narrator’s mother) has long since adjusted to a life of activity and freedom. Soon, a solution is arrived at: The narrator and Betty set up an office in what used to be a sewing room, and they are able to create a convincing enough reality to woo Dick back to his still-remembered days of phone calls and filing.

The moment Betty and the narrator held each other in the kitchen crying, I was there in the room, too, and I guess this just happens to be one of those examples of how our own lives are part of the connection we make with great stories.

⇒”How to Talk to a Hunter” by Pam Houston, Quarterly West, 1989, reprinted in Best American Short Stories, 1990, and the title story of her debut collection.

Here, for me, was the right story at the right time. Not long before reading it, I’d been in a similar relationship to the one Houston’s unnamed narrator finds herself in—and though mine wasn’t with a hunter, I often felt I’d been wrapped naked in a dead animal skin—sacrificial. The story I wrote in tribute to Houston’s was called “How to Clean your Apartment,” but it was really about yet another man who I’d hoped would take me out of myself. Instead, of course, the opposite happened. Any frustrated lover knows this. You are never more with yourself than when you want to escape. You can pretend. You can plead. You can pretend not to plead. But it does no good.

Again, my own experience connected me with Houston’s story, which is tightly written and pulls no punches. “This is what you learned in college,” the narrator tells you early on. “A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.”

Amen.

⇒”The Foundations of the Earth” by Randall Kenan, from Let The Dead Bury Their Dead.

What I learned from this story is the power of two worlds sent crashing together. Mrs. Maggie McGowan Williams is the product of the Christian, rural South. Her beloved grandson left for Boston years ago, and now he is dead, and his lover—a man, a white man from the north—has come to join the family for the funeral. At a Sunday meal, the Reverend Barden, who is sweet on her, is making a point of complaining about the fact that a man who rents land from Maggie is working the fields on the Lord’s Day. But of course what does the Lord’s Day matter when you have lost a child you loved so much he could have been your own, and when you must reconcile yourself to the life he led and kept secret from you? In the end, her grandson’s lover, whom she previously wished didn’t exist, is the only one who can offer comfort.

“How curious the world had become,” Maggie thinks at the end of this powerful story about what it means to “pass” in this world, “…that she would be asking a white man to exonerate her in the eyes of her own grandson; how strange that at seventy, when she had all the laws and rules down pat, she would have to begin again, to learn.”

⇒”Skin Deep” by T. M. McNally, The Yale Review, 1994, reprinted in O. Henry Awards Prize Stories, 1995.

I don’t really know how many times I’ve read this story about Lacey, a seventeen-year-old girl whose father is in prison because of a car-theft insurance scam gone wrong. Her mother is involved with a deadbeat and in various pyramid schemes and has delusions of Lacey making it big in show business. Lacey has one friend, Mitchell, who is gay but still in the closet. Also there is another friend, a former associate of her father’s, Mr. Y., who has decided to help Lacey get away from her family and into college because her father did a favor for him once.

Aside from Lacey’s uncomplaining but painfully honest voice, which pierced me, it was clear to me when I read this story that it was put together by someone who knew what he was doing. I took it apart, scene by scene, line by line. I found that often a detail or phrase from one section or scene would then touch off the next. The story was written in present tense, but at the end it jumps forward in time to Lacey’s “true” present—the woman who has gotten through college and begun her life. There is still the simplicity and specificity of Lacey’s voice. But it has shifted, matured, and there is a sadness in it that comes from knowing what you’ve had to give up. Gives me chills.

In this case, I had no experience like Lacey’s. She’s working on a paving crew in New Mexico’s murderous summer heat, and I’m from the wet, cooler climes of Ohio and the Carolinas. She describes her fractured family’s condition as the “downwardly mobile;” I am the daughter of an architect and artist with smarts, solid work ethics and a still-happy marriage. My middle class adolescence was safe and easy, if not frothed with that heady cocktail of hormones and angst. So what made me feel connected to Lacey? I guess that sense of being trapped—different details, same feeling. In any case, Lacey is as real to me as anyone I’ve ever known.

⇒”Passion” by Alice Munro, The New Yorke, 2003, reprinted in Best American Short Stories, 2004, and included in her collection Runaway.

A woman returns to a summer resort town where she once worked as a waitress and was, for a while, virtually adopted by the Travers family. Grace falls in love with Mrs. Travers—her personality and stories—and she dates Mrs. Travers’ younger son Maury. Maury is in love with her, and she wants to feel the same. Maury is decent, smart and wants to marry her—exactly what a girl from a poor family should desire. She tries to pack herself into this notion but can’t quite do it.

Then one afternoon Neil, Maury’s older brother and Mrs. Travers’ first child from a first marriage, shows up. He is married and a father, and he’s also a drinker, Grace can tell upon meeting him. He arrives at the Travers’ house just as Grace has badly cut her foot, and takes her to the hospital for a tetanus shot. Maury comes to collect her, but Neil tells the nurse to say they’ve already left. “You didn’t want to go home yet, did you?” he asks her. No, she tells him, “…as if the word had been written in front of her, on the wall. As if she was having her eyes tested.”

Munro is a master of the moment that changes everything. Grace makes a choice there, and what happens next devastates the Travers family and ends her relationship with Maury. But it also frees her.

I bought this collection after hearing good reports about it. When I read this story I decided to read everything the woman has written.

⇒”Ideas of Heaven” by Joan Silber, from the collection of linked stories of the same name.

A young New England woman, Lizzie, marries an earnest young missionary, Bennett, and they travel to Shanxi, an inland northern Chinese province in the late 1800’s to serve at a post for ten years. When they first sight land, Lizzie recalls, “I understood that facts are more solid than we can stand—every particle of strangeness was perfectly real.”

And Silber evokes this strangeness with what feels like pinpoint accuracy: the landscape, the streets, the dress and customs of a people living half a world away and more than a century ago. Lizzie and Ben and their family try to make a life in this grim, remote area, but it is slow going, and there is always the hint of political unrest and opposition to them simply because they’re foreigners. The rise of the Boxers signals violence to come, but Bennett is of course resolved to stay. In the end, trying to escape long after it too late, they lose everything.

I grieved for weeks after reading this story—I guess as a mother first. Realizing she can’t protect her children, Lizzie thinks near the end, “I should never have had children…Though my best love had been for them, we should not have brought them into our audacious project.”

The whole book, by the way, is beautifully written, beautifully put together. It is described as “A Ring of Stories” on the cover, because each one connects to the next in some way. In “Ashes of Love,” the story immediately before “Ideas of Heaven,” a character mentions that her great-great-grandmother was a missionary in China. Of course, the ancestor is Lizzie, and her whole life will unfold and end in front of us in the following pages.

⇒”Duke Power” by George Singleton, The Greensboro Review, 2000, and included in his collection, The Half Mammals of Dixie.

When I first read “Duke Power” in The Greensboro Review, I had to lie down and catch my breath, I was laughing so hard. I was on a trip with my husband, and I said, “You’ve gotta hear this,” and then I proceeded to laugh so hard every few lines or so that I kept having to stop. I think I cried at one point.

Our hero Chuck has been enlisted by his boss to entertain a company higher up, Mr. Capozzi; he’s supposed to take him bowling. He goes to scout a location and practice on a Friday morning and encounters Felmet, an unconventional bowler and ex-electric power worker:

“Felmet stands right on the line with his ball held down by his right knee. This time he takes no steps and uses a spin that weaves twice, I swear. Unfortunately he ends up with a weird 2-10 split, and I say, ‘Tough.’

“Felmet says, ‘Not in the Land of Felmet.’…Before I say anything he walks to the line, bowls the light ball toward the 2 and his ball toward the 10. They fall simultaneously. From somewhere between three and twenty lanes away I hear more than two people yelling ‘Felmet!’ as if cursing a dog.”

That night, of course, there is a blackout, and Chuck still has to pick up Mr. Capozzi at the airport. Capozzi wants to look at the stars; he can’t ever see them in New Jersey. They sit on the hood of Chuck’s car and watch the blackout, and all the while Chuck’s wondering if Capozzi’s going to kill him, and the final moment’s just too funny to quote.

A year or so after reading “Duke Power, ” I had the pleasure of seeing Singleton read in Greensboro. I bought Half Mammals of Dixie and everything else he’s written before or since. I am proud to share an alma mater with him.

***

So there you have it. These stories, each in their books, hold a special place on my bookshelf, so when I glance up at them they can give me a kind of blessing. For better or worse, they made me want to write. And they made me want to come back to them again and again, steal away, and read.

6 December 2007 | selling shorts |