Catching Up With My Best-Laid Plans

Back in December, when I was racing to get Stewardess done on time, I managed to carve out a few hours one afternoon to meet Janet Desaulniers and chat about What You've Been Missing, a collection of short stories--including "After Rosa Parks"--that was last year's winner of the John Simmons Award from the University of Iowa Press. And then, of course, I promptly mislaid the notes I'd taken--but I found them today! (As to why I couldn't just blog without the notes, chalk it up to my writerly neuroses.)

Looking over the page of scribbled sentence fragments, I'm reminded of the fascinating backstory behind the collection. She was "discovered" in the slush pile of the New Yorker in 1980, and the buzz surrounding the publication of "A Late Show" there led to talk of a book deal that, for various reasons, never quite worked out. She continued to teach writing, publishing a new story every now and then, until about two years ago, when she pulled the original manuscript she'd submitted to Knopf out of a drawer and decided to work on it again: taking the best stories from her original assortment, adding a few things from her more recent work, and sending the new "cleaner, clearer" connection to Iowa, as a result of which there we are chatting in an empty wine bar before she goes off to read one of her stories at a nearby bookstore...

Now, these stories blew me away; just read "After Rosa Parks" and you'll see what I mean, and you'll want to get the whole collection for yourself. And you'll also want the Iowa Short Fiction prizewinner, Merrill Feitell's Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, which includes "The Marrying Kind." And, of course, I just got back from Tom Bissell's reading, and I'm thinking that this just might have to be the year I really, and I mean really, get back into reading short stories. And you'll probably reap some of the rewards of that, I would imagine. Which is about as close to a 2005 mission statement as you're likely to get for Beatrice, but let's see how it plays out...