Emma Straub’s First Kisses

In early 2011, Emma Straub released a collection of wonderful short stories through the book publishing arm of the online literary magazine Five Chapters. A lot of people fell in love with those stories over the following months—one of them was Megan Lynch, an editor at Riverhead Books. Lynch was so impressed after hearing Straub read at a bookstore event that she didn’t just buy a copy of the book, she bought the book… and now, almost a year to the date after its original publication, Other People We Married has an even greater opportunity to impress itself upon readers. (Riverhead will also be publishing Straub’s first novel later in 2012.) Sometimes it’s hard for a “Selling Shorts” to pick just one story to write about, and that’s how it was for Straub. She’s got a list of great stories that helped awaken her to the possibility of writing in this genre, and she’s still discovering amazing stories by new writers. And I won’t be surprised if, some day, another writer comes along who talks about stories like “Fly-Over State” or “Puttanesca” or “Marjorie and the Birds” the way she talks about her favorites.

I didn’t write a short story until I was twenty-six, and already in graduate school. Up until then, I’d fancied myself a novelist and a poet. My writing could either be plot-driven or language and image-centered, with character-driven human emotion itself falling somewhere in the chasm between them.

People may love to mock the proliferation of MFA programs, but I can say without hesitation that my MFA experience, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, introduced me to the subtlety, epiphanies, and to the millions of minute shifts in feeling. Of course, I wasn’t actually being introduced to these concepts, not having been born a robot, but I was given a much better language for understanding and describing them.

Some of the stories I read during those first six months or so will always stay with me, no matter how many stories I read and love. I suppose it’s something like remembering your first kiss, even though you’ve been kissed better a thousand times since. They include Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and Toni Cade Bambara’s “Raymond’s Run.” They include Michael Cunningham’s “White Angel,” and Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs.” They include Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” and Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too.” Sometimes your first kiss is an epic one. I went on to read famous stories and obscure ones, anthologized classics and stories by my friends. I was obsessed.

And some obsessions, like kissing, never go away. This last year I fell hard for stories by Stuart Nadler, and Dan Chaon, and Caitlin Horrocks, and Megan Mayhew Bergman, and Adam Wilson. Short stories make me feel, even more than poems or novels, that some things are still possible: that there are other languages out there for me to learn, other geographies to traverse. And when I get there, to the other side of some rocky shore, I will be able to tell you all about it.

8 February 2012 | selling shorts |