Nalini Jones’s Short Story Mix Tape

Although most “Selling Shorts” guest writers zero in on a single story that has moved or inspired them over the years, sometimes it’s hard to narrow the field down to just one. Nalini Jones, the author of What You Call Winter, has her own dream anthology, and today she’s given us a peek into her selection process. I have a feeling that some short story writer about twenty or thirty years into the future might be adding some of Nalini’s stories from this debut collection to his or her own wish list…

In college, in a fit of archival spirit, I tried to gather my favorite songs on a single mix tape. One became two, two became three, and a week later I’d created a series of over a dozen, which I eventually gave to my uncle. I imagine they might still be in my grandmother’s house, the cases scratched and dusty, the tapes themselves relics of a particular moment in my history.

My mix of stories changes all the time—with a few anchors, of course. I cannot do without Eudora Welty’s “June Recital.” Loch’s plight, shut up in a room to nap while a whole glorious world awaits exploration, is so nuanced, so minutely imagined, that we are immediately rooted both in a southern town and in a small boy’s sensibility. By the time we look through his telescope, our eyes have adjusted to Morgana; every line is saturated with a sense of place. And I love Miss Eckhart, whose passion for music is so great that even trifles—the sashes for recital day—are swept up in its tide.

Chekhov’s section has grown to include “Gusev,” for the sense, as it ends, that nothing is quite final. The quiet matter of Gusev’s death, the way we slip with his sailcothed body into the water, the sudden encounters with pilot fish and the shark, and the final view of the ocean, indifferent and lovely, all take us beyond what seem to be the original parameters of the story—the life of Gusev. There is a sense of our opening into a new world even as his life closes. In the dark pitiless waters, we’re shown life swimming in and around his death, and then, as we leave Gusev and return to the surface, Chekhov gives us a glimpse of the beautiful light that transforms the ocean into something “tender” but nameless “in the language of men.” That gesture toward mercy, toward hope, never fails to move me. It strikes me as intensely generous.

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3 November 2007 | selling shorts |