WKMS begins accepting your submissions for our Short Storytelling Contest on September 15th.
But while you get your pencils sharpened or fire up the word processor, it might be instructive and interesting to dig into exactly what a short story is. They're as varied as the people who write them, ranging from the novella-length "A Death in Venice" by Thomas Mann to the pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to the famous "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn," allegedly penned by Ernest Hemingway. They can be linked or not, encompassing literary fiction, mystery, horror, and even science fiction.
But, other than being, well, short, what makes these works "short stories?"
To find out, Todd Hatton sat down with Murray State University's Watkins Endowed Chair in Creative Writing, the award-winning author Allen Wier for a series of conversations about this versatile genre.
By way of introduction, Wier grew up in Texas and Mexico, where his father traveled the jungles around Vera Cruz and Tampico looking for rare plants to sell in the wholesale flower business. Wier says the stories his father brought back has fueled his own writing.
"Every time he came back, he had had adventures in our absence. So I grew up with a lot of those stories...actually used a lot of that in my third novel, Departing as Air, which is set in Mexico."
Upon his return to the United States, Wier says he bounced around Texas and Louisiana, and has taught in colleges and universities throughout the southeast and eastern U.S. Wier's last post was at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
"I retired from there a year ago," he says, "and then this opportunity (MSU's Watkins Endowed Chair of Creative Writing) came along, and I decided I wasn't quite through with the classroom, or it wasn't quite through with me."
In those years, Wier also managed to publish a book of stories, Things About to Disappear, as well as four novels, Blanco, Departing as Air, A Place for Outlaws, and Tehano. He has also received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
When considering the short story, Wier says it's generally something more complicated than an anecdote, but less complicated, and shorter, than a novella or novel.
"I think short stories grew out of the oral storytelling tradition as far back as the 17th century, but, before that, even in things like the Odyssey or the Iliad where people repeated stories out loud."
Wier says the short story reached a peak of sorts in the 19th and early 20th century, when periodicals like Collier's, Cosmopolitan, and Redbook carried short fiction.
After a fall-off in the publications of such magazines, Wier says it seems as though the way we consume fiction has changed, moving online.
Nevertheless, Wier says the storytelling, and story-listening, impulse is still with us, no matter what shape it takes.
