Best New American Voices 2003

Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

A spontaneous swerve of engagement draws us to certain works of art. Often we know nothing of the artist and so our expectations are neutral, blank; but there's an instant rapport, a visceral connection that captures our attention. It's appropriate that this volume is titled Best New American Voices since it's "voice" that draws us into prose fiction. Among these wonderfully diverse and imaginative stories, there are openings so compelling one can't resist wanting to know more, immediately:

They are excavating the bodies at night, a few hundred yards away from our house. The bright halogen from the spotlights seeps through cracks in our closed windows and doors.
("Everything Must Go" by Barry Matthews)

In the end, my mother still knew a few things. She knew, for example, that telephones existed, that they had been a part of the world that she had been a part of.
("Good" by Cheryl Strayed)

Somehow the chickensnake had managed to climb up the twenty-foot steel pole and into one of the hollowed-out gourds the farmers had hung there as birdhouses for purple martins.
("Chickensnake" by Brad Vice)

Four days before the UN Security Council resolution will turn Desert Shield into Desert Storm, the team waits for the scouts on the south side of a dust-covered washout deep in the Iraqi desert. Their operation is illegal, but necessary.
("The Storekeeper" by Otis Haschemeyer)

Of course, compelling openings are simply the way in. Once we're inside the fictional world we look for other qualities as well as voice. In choosing the final selections for this volume, out of thirty-five finalists sent to me by series editors John Kulka and Natalie Danford (who'd chosen those thirty-five from 350 nominations), I was looking for works of fiction that involve the reader in dramatically realized, emotionally charged situations of significance. I was looking for originality of expression and characterization. I might have wished for more formal experimentation and writerly playfulness, while acknowledging that contemporary times, even before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, seem less amenable to subversive texts than such preceding, highly inventive decades as the 1960s and 1970s. Ours is an age of realism, in which memoir and memoirist fiction predominate.

Though there are several darkly surreal tales among these selections, the dominant mode is psychological realism. By "psychological realism" we mean, usually, the establishment of a central consciousness through whose perspective a story is narrated or unfolds; our involvement in the story depends largely upon the plausibility and worth of this central consciousness. Do we believe in him or her? Is the fictional world convincing? Unlike fantasy, realism derives much of its power from a skillful evocation of time and place. In this volume, settings and circumstances are deftly, often brilliantly, rendered and strike us as unquestionably authentic, whether the cancer wing of a hospital ("Good"), the Iraqi desert on the eve of Desert Storm ("The Storekeeper"), a residence for terminal AIDS patients ("The Year Draws in the Day"), Vietnam ("Peace"), an impoverished Alabama farm ("Chickensnake"), a backwater New Hampshire town that can't support a library ("Everything Must Go"), a farm residence for emotionally disturbed patients (''April''), or native New Guinea villages (''A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies"). There are love-story variants that range from the breezily comic ("Circuits") to the mordantly melancholy ("Transparency"), and there are tales of confrontations with mortality that remain purposefully irresolute, proffering no formulaic happy endings ("The Good Life," "Who Is Beatrice?", "Under the Influence"). Even those stories that shade into the fantastic ("The Woman Who Tasted of Rose Oil," ''At Celilo") are so convincingly rendered that the shift from realism to surrealism isn't intrusive. We read such fiction with little resistance to suspending our disbelief . We read with eagerness, pleasure, enlightenment.

I should note that in reading, and rereading, the thirty-five finalists passed on to me, I was struck by the high percentage of stories in which extreme or grotesque imagery figured. This leads me to conclude that, though this is an age of literary realism, it's also an age that perceives its possibilities without, one might say, an excess of youthful optimism. Perhaps what struck me most about the stories was, simply, their diversity. In even those stories not selected for the anthology there were often passages of startling, wayward originality; familiar situations were narrated in unfamiliar, odd tones; the seemingly predictable often turned out not predictable at all. Though it's frequently said by critics of writing workshops that there is a typical "workshop story," as there's a typical "workshop poem," the nominations to Best New American Voices suggest the reverse.

Writing is a visionary activity but it is also, perhaps more fundamentally, a craft. To be a writer isn't to compose words in the air, as in a dream; it's to commit oneself to the discipline of communicating with readers through a commonly shared language. The more involved one becomes in this craft, the more one is involved with a professional literary community of editors, publishers, book designers, printers. Writing may be initially an isolated activity, in fact like a dream, but it quickly becomes collaborative, if it is to have any existence beyond the immediate and ephemeral.

Of all collaborative creative efforts, the "workshop" is the most communal, as it's often the most democratic. Theatrical and musical works are commonly workshopped, and the tradition of young sculptors and painters apprenticing themselves to gifted elders surely originated in antiquity. Yet the question is often asked, naively and aggressively, "How can 'creative writing' be taught?" Though it's taken for granted that young people in music, art, and drama work with instructors, it seems somehow unnatural that young writers may want to work with more experienced writers in workshop situations. Obviously, there's a common misconception of what happens in writing workshops.

Creative writing isn't "taught" in any conventional sense of that term. No instructor can assign inspiration. We can't assign the basic principle of artistic creation, which is a mysterious and utterly idiosyncratic amalgam of ideas, energy, imagination, "talent." Most instructors assign exemplary texts for the workshop participants to read and discuss, but we don't assign formal papers on these subjects. (For my part, I usually assign two stories each week, a classic and a contemporary paired for aesthetic reasons.) Many workshops don't give standard academic letter grades (A, B, etc.); courses may be ungraded, or Pass/Fail. The experience of a writing workshop is unique to its time, place, participants, instructor. A workshop will take its shape and tone from the individuals who comprise it, and yet is more than the mere sum of its parts. Obviously, more advanced workshops require little formal guidance from the instructor; writers come to workshops highly motivated and knowing what they want to write. They know their intentions, but they don't know how an intense attentive readership of other writers will respond to their work. Younger writers tend to benefit from assignments that are precise yet general enough to allow for the expression of individual imagination. (Typical assignments I give in my first-level fiction workshop involve experimenting with genre: writing dramatic monologues, miniature narratives, self-portraits by way of metaphor, journal entries to be transposed into fiction.) The workshop instructor is probably most helpful when he or she guides the young writer toward powerful but unconscious material that can be shaped into coherent fictions. But it isn't possible, or desirable, to "teach" creative writing any more than one might teach another person to dream.

The most pragmatic instruction one can give in a workshop isn't abstract or ideological but editorial. In my workshops, we proceed with the assumption that we're a gathering of dedicated, highly professional editors on a magazine or literary quarterly. We aren't editors who have the luxury of rejecting: We "accept" all the material that's submitted to us, and our task, as editors, is to provide editorial advice to the writer that will allow for significant revision. I ask my fellow editors: Did you like this story? Would you want to read more work by this writer? If not, why not? Beyond such impressionistic responses, which are essential for the writer to gauge his effectiveness, we critique the manuscript in editorial terms: Is the story too long, too short, too slowly paced, too sketchy; is its tone appropriate to its subject; is the opening the most strategic opening; is the ending the very best ending, both a surprise and yet inevitable; is this the most effective sequence of scenes, or might the story be more dramatically rearranged; are there scenes in earlier drafts that have been dropped out; are the characters fully realized, and are their names carefully chosen; does the story achieve closure; does the story read smoothly; are there grammatical errors, awkward sentences, repetitions, confusing passages, metaphors that don't work, misspellings? Such a system of procedure is called line-editing, which is analogous to having one's work examined with a very fine toothed comb. It can be exhilarating, exhausting, invigorating, inspiring. The surprise of many workshops isn't that there are good writers in them, for we expect this, bur that there are natural-born, instinctive editors. These are the individuals whose comments are most eagerly sought. They may or may not be the most gifted writers, bur the ability to self-edit, like the ability to self-criticize, is inestimable for a writer. It's my intention to provide training for editors as well as writers in my workshops, and I would guess that other instructors of workshops have similar aims.

Since the inauguration of the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1939, writing workshops have proliferated in this country and, after decades of resistance, have become popular in England as well. Writers as diverse as Flannery O'Connor, John Gardner, Ray Carver, Jay McInerney, Mona Simpson, Joanna Scott, Madison Smartt Bell, and Pinckney Benedict are graduates of workshop programs, and writers of the stature of Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever, E. L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Russell Banks, Tobias Wolff, Edmund White, and Michael Cunningham, among numerous others, have taught such workshops. There are good reasons for this: Writing is a very lonely and obsessive activity, and one does write, after all, with the hope of being read. In the workshop, one is assured of an attentive and usually sympathetic audience; one sees one's readers, editors, reviewers, critics face-to-face, and the solitary, obsessive activity may become demystified to a degree. (In my workshops, criticism is exclusively constructive. No cruelty or backbiting in the guise of "honesty." Enough of that will await the writer in the world beyond the workshop.) A workshop can be a dramatic and intellectually stirring arena for the exchange of ideas otherwise lost. There is no atmosphere quite so intense as a writing workshop when discussion is free-flowing, imaginative, and responsible, and when the work being critiqued is meritorious.

Henry James famously spoke of the "madness of art" and of the writer possessed by his writing, as by a dream, bur we should remember that James was an exacting, professional writer with a keen awareness of the literary marketplace, even when he couldn't quite manage to satisfy its commercial demands; like his predecessor Edgar Allan Poe, who was a magazine editor and a reviewer as well as a writer, James saw himself as both an artist and a craftsman. Ultimately, it's probably true that a certain "madness" fuels art, and compels us to write in the face of possible, even probable, discouragement and hostility, and yet more immediately we can focus upon writing as a craft and a discipline; we can celebrate the amorphous literary world as a living culture comprised of individuals not very different from ourselves. The emerging writers of Best New American Voices 2003 are a testament to the ongoing vitality, imagination, and richness of that culture.

Contents

Preface
Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

Good by Cheryl Strayed
The Woman Who Tasted of Rose Oil by Esi Edugyan
At Celilo by Susan Austin
April by Katharine Noel
Chickensnake by Brad Vice
The Year Draws in the Day by Hal Horton
Under the Influence by Jenn McKee
Peace by Dylan Tai Nguyen
The Storekeeper by Otis Haschemeyer
Transparency by Frances Hwang
Circuits by Caimeen Garrett
Who is Beatrice? by Belle Boggs
A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies by John Murray
Everything Must Go by Barry Matthews
The Good Life by Laura Hawley

Contributors
Participants

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2002, p. 1169
• Publishers Weekly, September 30, 2002, p. 51
• Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 27, 2002, p. F5