Guest Blog by Corie Adjmi
Some people don’t like short stories.
I don’t get it.
I love them.
Why?
Well, because they’re short.
And they pack a punch in a way that differs from a novel. If a novel is a slow burn, a short story is a spark.
I like that short stories end on an emotional note, often ambiguous, without a tidy resolution. Novels, on the other hand, require more closure because after spending 300 pages with a character, readers want to know more clearly what happens to a protagonist they’ve become invested in.
A number of brilliant authors inspired me as I wrote my first short story collection, Life and Other Shortcomings. Whether exploring first love, friendship or a difficult marriage, I used masterly crafted short stories as models when I first began writing and was developing my own style and voice.
Through striking dialogue, Dorothy Parker reveals much about the dynamics of a marriage in her short story, “Here We Are.” Readers experience failed communication between a honeymooning couple on a train as they discuss trivial topics. We feel tension build at what is not said. “Dinner Conversation,” the first story in my collection, shows three couples at dinner. The conversation seems mundane on the surface but underneath emotions brew. The main character is disillusioned and lonely in her marriage. Readers are privy to her thoughts, feelings and beliefs, which differ greatly from what she shares openly at the table. And in a separate story, “Shadows and Partially Lit Faces,” we see a husband and wife distant and disagreeing, both of them not getting their needs met.
“This Is What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” written by Nathan Englander was inspirational as well. Englander’s story portrays old friends, two married couples, getting together after years of not seeing each other. Englander explores serious content but his work is humorous as well. It was a template for me when writing “Dinner Conversation,” but also it influenced me as I considered writing about Jewish themes, religion and faith. Iris, in my short story “The Devil Makes Three” is a married, Orthodox, Jewish woman, who struggles with her own religious choices—what she wears, rituals she follows, unexpected boundaries she crosses.
The tone in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is eerie and worth paying attention to. Joyce Carol Oates does an amazing job of capturing a feeling, a mood, and I used what I could from her story to create the tone in my story, “Blind Man’s Bluff.” We both use house as a symbol for safety. In the Oates story, Connie, the young protagonist, ultimately feeling compelled, chooses to leave her home, to step outside, and that is where the danger lies. In my story, I explore domestic abuse and how ironically, and sadly, home — the very place a child should find safety — is actually perilous.
Lastly, I must mention Philip Roth’s short story, “The Conversion of the Jews.” This story makes me laugh out loud. Roth explores the struggle between individual freedom and a weighing authority something I write a lot about in my quest to expose patriarchy in its many forms. In this story, Roth’s adolescent protagonist pushes back against religious doctrine just as my character, Kelly, in “Drowning Girl,” resists old ways of patriarchal thinking as she fights to find her voice, build agency and step into her own power.
As a fiction writer of short stories and novels, I appreciate both forms. But for me, short stories sting in a way that a novel cannot. I once read that a short story is a love affair, a novel, a marriage. And, to me, that sounds just about right.
Corie Adjmi is the award-winning author of Life and Other Shortcomings published by She Writes Press. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, South Dakota Review, Red Rock Review, Licking River Review, Evansville Review, HuffPost, Man Repeller, Green Hills Literary Lantern, RiverSedge, Motherwell and others. Visit her at corieadjmi.com
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