Laura Furman: “The Most Wonderful Group of Stories I’ll Ever Find”

Laura Furman became the current editor of the annual O. Henry Prize Stories collection in 2002. When this year’s edition came out, I asked if she’d let Beatrice readers in on the selection process, and she graciously agreed. In addition to her experience as a founding editor for American Short Fiction, Prof. Furman is also an accomplished short story writer, novelist, and memoirist in her own right, so her insights into what makes for a good story are more than welcome here!

Every morning when I drive my son to school through downtown Austin, I pass the little yellow cottage where William Sydney Porter, best known as O.Henry, lived with his wife and daughter. It’s now a museum, pressed on one side by the convention center and the other by a towering hotel. Its fretwork is preserved; inside are artifacts of the writer’s life and work, as well as donated furnishings illustrating the period. The writer of “The Gift of the Magi” is commemorated in Austin and elsewhere, but his most important monument may not be his stories, which many readers still love, but the O.Henry Prize Stories, founded in 1918 by his friends to honor him and to “strengthen the art of the short story.” Rather than being relegated to literary history, O.Henry will always be associated with the current masters and promising talent in contemporary writing.

There are intimidating aspects of being series editor of the O.Henry, the job I began in 2002. The editorship carries with it a responsibility to the writers of the many short stories submitted each year, to the magazine editors, and to the readers of the annual collection who expect a variety of excellent, challenging, and moving stories. My principal mission is to believe in writers and the original ways the best of them find to face the ancient challenge of telling a story.

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4 April 2005 | guest authors |

Gilead and Pearl

Monday night I made another one of my periodic trips out to the 92nd Street Y, this time to see Marilynne Robinson read from Gilead. She was introduced by Meghan O’Rourke, who talked briefly about the experience of working on the NYT profile of Robinson she wrote last fall, after which there was prolonged applause as the author walked across the stage to the podium, to the point where I would not have been surprised if there had been a standing ovation.

Robinson certainly would have deserved one; the passages she read from Gilead, in which the narrator describes the process of falling in love with the woman who became his second wife, were incredibly captivating, and one felt a genuine humanness to the character’s voice, both in the authenticity of his emotions and in their expression.

It was a rich and vivid peek into another person’s life—and a markedly different experience, at least to my mind, than that offered by the second reader, Mary Gordon. The audience was told quite a few times, as Gordon introduced sections from Pearl, that “I wanted to talk about” what I’ll call Issue X and Theme Y (a typical example of which was “what happened to the political faith of my cohort”). It’s not that Pearl is a bad book—it’s just that writing a novel because one wants to “talk about” something creates a fundamentally different end product than doing so because one wants, say, to tell a story, and I found both the passages Gordon read from the novel and the beginning chunks I’d read earlier that day to possess a certain detachment, to treat the characters as objects of study rather than vibrant presentations, a feeling that was intensified by Gordon’s use of a first-person narrator of near-omniscience.

And I realized by the end of the evening that, as an individual reader, and at the broadest levels, I’m simply drawn more intently to novels in which—again speaking broadly, and from my own reaction of the portion of Pearl I’ve read so far, which is admittedly not the entire book, so I apologize for whatever disservice I may be doing both author and book—issues, if they exist at all, appear to emerge organically out of characters’ lives, rather than those in which characters’ lives illustrate issues.

16 March 2005 | uncategorized |