Our friend, Francis Coppola

He’s our friend, not because he knows us but because he loves good writing, especially short fiction. Today in serendipitous fashion, seeking a spot to submit my short shory I came across this site. Simple, artsy, and professional-looking, it would do just fine.

The two editors (there are just the two of them) suggested giving the magazine a read either online or buying a copy. I went through the table of contents for one issue and clicked on the Spring 2008 issue and began reading a story. Wow. He’s good. I’m in over my head. Another one! I can’t stop.

Proceding down the page for another read, I read an introduction to Love. Amazing. From there I perused the authors’ names, bylined by their story’s links. No way. Here are Ethan Coen (O, Brother Where Art Thou?), Wes Anderson, Margaret Atwood,  Tim Roth, and Woody Allen!

And the publisher? Francis Ford Coppola. No less.

This is big. I read Coppola’s mission statement. Inspiring. Various essays and reprints from well-known writers (Vonnegut, Dick) are there, too, along with impressive cover design. But it’s not another anthology of college text collections. Plenty of unknowns are published here, too.

Writers can enter the contest, submit a story, or join the virtual studio where “thousands” of writers critique each other. Or just read. The publication is Zoetrope: All Story.

I love stories, having been introduced to fairy tales and myth as a child. In the fourth grade I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream from an old yellowed copy, some relative’s school Signet Edition.  In third grade my teacher read us Bible stories, and I fell in love with Moses and David. (I never liked ghost stories, however; still don’t.)

After getting a master’s in English, I knew I was forever tied to the story, whatever its form. Talk to me, Do it well. Tell me a story. Use your imagination and we’ll be friends forever. You, me, Francis.

The short list

As genres go, my ranking is essay, poetry, novel, drama, and short story. Last and for me least the short story is a worthy little type of fiction though, fairly modern in origin in its current form. Its ancestors are the medieval romance and the tale, noteworthy examples being Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and Boccacio’s The Decameron, all framed stories with stereotypical characters and themes — in a good way.  Not until the 19th century when a demand for fiction published in magazines arose did the genre realize its full potential for character and plot development. And sales.

Hemingway, not known for verbosity, a cut-to-the-chase guy, once wrote this story: For sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn. He called it his best work.  Talk about potential.

The Best American Short Stories of 2007 is edited by Stephen King, who has much to say about the genre in his piece in the NYT Sunday Book Review “What Ails the Short Story.”  He writes “Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse . . .”

Generally the short story is from 3,000 to 15,000 words in length or as Poe said, short enough to be read in a single sitting. Beyond that the form becomes a novella or a novel. Excellent short fiction may be found in The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, for example. (An old writer’s joke says that in order to get published in The New Yorker you write a story and then tear off the last page. They read that way. Kind of like their cartoons, takes a certain type.)

My short list comes from stories that I first read in college and go back to on occasion, stories I found while planning for teaching, or stories that I own as part of a collection or series. (I buy those The Best Essays of 1986 anthologies and such.) I’m not sure that the list is revelatory in any way. Should posterity find it they won’t piece together anything about their dead great-great-grandmother other than eclectic tastes.

Me and Miss Mandible                                     Donald Barthelme       (imaginative, an grown man in an elementary classroom)
How Much Land Does a Man Need?              Leo Tolstoy                   (heavy on values, wealth, greed)
How I Write My Songs                                     Donald Barthelme        (satire, humor)
Story of an Hour                                               Kate Chopin                   (death of a husband)
Why I Live at the P.O.                                     Eudora Welty                (southern humor as only we can do it)
Good Country People                                       Flannery O’Connor       (humor, southern gothic, religious hypocrisy)
The Chidren’s Story                                        James Clavell                  (cold war anti-Soviet, pro-patriotism)
The Cask of Amontillado                                 Edgar Allan Poe              (unreliable narrator, horror, irony)