Short Fiction Contest Introduction

Before the beginning of the pandemic that has upended all of us, I had a working theory about what makes good fiction. I presented it to my students at the start of each semester, expounding the words again and again in class, and then once again during office hours or as many times as it took for it to become meaningful for them in their practice of writing. I told them, really good fiction, the kind that we come back to repeatedly, shows us the world we embody and then nudges us toward what that world can grow into. This transcends genre; it is true whether you’re trucking in realism or speculative fiction. The nudge, I emphasized, does not necessarily require change to manifest on the page, either within a character or within the circumstances of the situation in which she finds herself. The world to grow into might include an act of kindness where a daughter stays up with her grieving mother who believes her dead son has come home; it might present itself as a granddaughter’s realization of a lesson, essential to her, missed when her identity is tied to more than one land; it might make the reader delight in details of a startling miracle being filmed in Technicolor, while being forced to reckon with the pernicious ways in which racist practices are allowed to flourish; mainly and often subtly, good fiction asks us to consider another way to exist in the world.

Still, in April when the finalists for the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest were sent to me for final judging, I was beginning to question everything in the wake of COVID-19. I know I have not been alone in this act of anguished soul searching. After all, all humankind was suddenly, indiscriminately fragile. It was one thing to imagine a different, better world to grow into on the page and quite another thing to find the same kind of courage, and even imagination, when faced with disastrous disruptions to one’s life. But there the stories were in my inbox, and I realized that I was apprehensive. The work sent to me had been written and submitted prepandemic. I’d spent the last month and a half consuming only work that either grappled with pandemics or was pandemic adjacent. I had an alert on my phone for essays and op-eds calling for the invention of new language in the wake of a “new normal” way of living that was emerging. I asked myself whether the ground on which I had nurtured my working theory about what makes a successful story was not too limited.

As I clicked on one submission, then another, then another, a warmth spread along my neck, as it always does when I read interesting, lyrically rendered, startling work that pulses with what George Eliot in her essay “Nearest Thing to Life” has called an extension of “our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” She writes, “Art is the nearest thing to life” in that it amplifies experience. And it was precisely this amplification of raw human experience I found myself moved by and immersed in within the stories submitted to the contest, now in its twelfth year. Reading for a third time through the small pool of finalists, I caught myself stopping at sections that nudged me to consider how these stories reached beyond their own world and into mine. While they touched upon loss, immigration, third culture, racism, these stories were written with great nuance. They also sounded a call for kindness, humor, self-awareness, unflinching honesty — acts that continue to be radically important in a world riven with inequality and prejudice. I was reminded, too, of Samuel R. Delaney’s essay “The Necessity of Tomorrows” where he talks about the necessity of Black science fiction and mentions reading essays from Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin and thinking “They were as wonderful as . . . well, science fiction.” His words, coupled with the excellent work I was judging, bolstered my renewed belief that while stories that chronicled with...