The debate on the health of the short story continues in this post by Larry Dark on the blog Critical Mass. (Ha! I originally typed “Mess”.) Dark, who has judged important short story contests, maintains that the short story is doing fine, citing all the literary magazines that are out there and the fact that publishers still publish short story collections. And anyway:
Popularity isn’t a good measure of importance. What really keeps the story going is that writers keep writing them despite the potential returns. Great new talents emerge every year because the form is such a compelling and challenging one. The best practitioners aren’t limited by the diffidence of the market. They don’t write for a particular audience or in pursuit of wide acclaim. They do so with a higher aim: the artistic challenges and rewards of the form.
Equally interesting are some of the comments on the topic, like this one by writer Samuel Edmonson, who didn’t agree with Dark:
First of all, commercial magazines pay money and for working writers such as myself it’s a job, a career, we earn a living wage; the tiny literary magazines pay nothing or close to it. So to get your stories published in them, you actually have to PAY because even if you sell a story for $100 you’ll never recoup the cost of postage, copies, equipment, and so on. It is impossible to run a business on it. It is not a career. You need another job (in academe, of course).
Secondly, these journals are tiny, no one reads them except for academics who are trying to get published in them. You are so completely wrong about their impact and by the weakness of your argument I suspect you know it — these literary journals have no impact on the world at all. But as a writer, I want to be READ. I’m writing for the man on the street, not for the politically correct chair of some college’s English deparment.
Thirdly, the academic journals strongly, strongly favor teachers and MFA graduates. Read any of these academic journals and you’ll see that most of the poetry and prose is from the academics. The writing, the worldview, the ideas, the very words are all so insular — and if you operate outside of that world, they will ignore you. They have to support their buddies. Spend a few hours to put the names and their affiliations in a spreadsheet and you’ll see what I mean about connections. And if you’re not only MFA-less but also politically incorrect, you might as well save your stamps because they’ll never, ever touch what you’ve sent.
Who do I agree with? Both, actually. Like Dark, I don’t think the short story is doing all that badly. People write them and read them still, just not like they did in, say, the 1920s. Much of the issue with the short story is related to the larger problem in our culture that people don’t read enough and that publishers care more about money than they do about art. But beyond that, I think there has been shift in how we see the short story these days. It was always supposed to be something people read as a short respite, something to amuse themselves while waiting for the train or getting their hair done. Unlike poetry, it has less of a high-art tradition. It was meant for entertainment first, and no matter how serious it is, it always needs that element in there to keep it interesting.
But the short story has lost its universal appeal. People never read them on buses or subways anymore–they read novels or nonfiction or essays instead (or more likely, play video games or talk on their cellphones). Why? Like Edmonson said, the short story is both supported by and written by academics. As such, the form is caught in a destructive, insular cycle where the people who are writing them are also the same people who are reading them. Thus they have no hope of reaching a wider audience, so the pay is paltry, the circulation of the magazines are small, and they are very difficult to break into.
And so the short story struggles on. Where’s that revolution already?
~ Joy
