discussing the short story
Last year, I decided to start using the podcast feature of my newsletter. I didn’t have any grand ideas or ambitions, but since I tend to do yearly deep dives into a writer’s career, I decided a podcast may be a good format for sharing that experience. And so last year I did an episode on every book William Gibson has published.
It was not exactly my favorite experience. Gibson is a very specific writer and not one I particularly care for, as it turns out. But I began the project and pushed through even though I often felt like quitting.
But that was the past. When I thought of ways to continue the podcast, I considered picking a new author and doing something similar. Ultimately, I decided against this and have instead turned the project in a very specific direction.
Every other week, my good friend Kyle Muntz and I choose a short story and discuss it. As regular readers here may already be aware, I’m a big fan of doing close, intense, and focused examinations of single pieces of art. Here, I’ve discussed Michael Jackson’s voice, Kanye West’s Runaway, Bon Iver’s 715 - CR∑∑KS, blink 182’s ONE MORE TIME, Destiny’s Child’s Say My Name, Tom Waits’ Make it Rain, Iron & Wine’s The Trapeze Swinger, and various other films and movies and TV shows. But the ones linked here are the ones most similar to what I envisioned doing with the podcast.
A very tight look at the short story, discussing from, narrative, style. Going, at times, down to the syntax of a line, the sonic texture of it. But also peeling back and discussing a work in its context. And while we’ve only released three episodes like this, I think it’s been one of the most interesting projects I’ve been a part of.
I believe I can say with a relative amount of truth that I’m better read than most people, including most self-described readers and writers. And it’s not just that I’ve read many books, but that I have read widely across genres. I’m as comfortable discussing James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy as I am discussing JK Rowling and Gawain and the Green Knight. I’ve read everything from micropress experimental prosepoem to bestselling commercial fiction and almost everything in between. I read selfpublished authors, authors in translation, authors from a century or ten ago, and I try to hit just about everything in between.
And Kyle is one of the few people I’ve met who has a similar breadth of reading. The podcast is tremendously enriched by the fact that he’s been a professor of literature and writing for nearly a decade as well.
And so I think we’re uniquely poised to present something quite different than most podcasts. We have both found that most content on literature is quite shallow or with too narrow or broad a focus.
The short story provides a very interesting avenue for discussion. For one thing, the commitment from the potential listener is much lower. You may not have the time to read a 300 page novel but you can probably pick up a 10 page story and be part of the discussion we’re having.
More than that, though, is that by focusing on single stories, one at a time, we can reach far and wide while also diving deep into one work at a time.
Our choices are of course informed by our own interests, so while our backgrounds are quite literary, our current tastes lean more towards genre fiction, in its various guises.
Our first episode was on Susanna Clarke’s The Wood at Midwinter and I think it gives you a strong sense of the project. We dig in and really chew on this brief story.
For our second episode, we did something similar with Stephen Graham Jones’ Father, Son, Holy Rabbit, but we were fortunate enough to have Stephen on to discuss the story with us.
Our most recent episode, released yesterday, had Brian Evenson on to discuss his short story The Sequence. Again, we dug in and chewed it up and Brian was generous enough to share his own thoughts on his story and his writing more broadly.
If you’re an aspiring writer, I think these episodes are really invaluable, especially the ones with Stephen and Brian on. If you’re a reader just wanting to have the kind of focused discussion on a story that you probably haven’t had since high school or college, I think this may be the best place to find it.
I hope you listen as we continue onward. We plan on having many more writers on as guests to discuss their stories, but we’ll also have some without the author. I think there’s a lot of value in both approaches.
But what I really hope—what I always hope—is that this audience that has piled up around me can learn something. If nothing else, I hope it’s a way for you to train yourself to once again look at art and approach it as a serious topic, as something to debate and discuss rather than simply as content to consume.
The algorithms are here to guide our consumption but it is possible to step aside. Take your interests in hand and give them the focus you once did, before you had a smartphone in your pocket, before you had dozens of notifications buzzing at the periphery of your attention.
So come join us. And we’d love to get recommendations from you wonderful listeners as we continue forward.
Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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