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Only Collect: Something about the Short Story Collection
- Ohio University Press
- Chapter
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49 Only Collect Something about the Short Story Collection P E T E R H O D A V I E S I W A S C H A T T I N G T O A N O T H E R parent outside my son’s preschool, recently, while we waited for our kids to come out.I was alone,she had another child,a girl of about seven or eight,twisting and twirling at the end of her hand. The mother, it turned out, had read my novel in her book group and wanted to know what else I’d written. I muttered something about my couple of collections, experience having taught me that telling someone who knows you’re a novelist that you also have story collections is at best underwhelming and a worst strikes them as irrelevant, a little like asking LeBron James what other games he loves,and having him reply,Canasta. I was starting to talk, a bit more brightly, about my novel-in-progress, when the little girl piped up,“What do you collect?” She hadn’t been paying attention before, but she’d intuited awkwardness from the way I’d lowered my voice to talk about my collections and—like an animal scenting weakness —pricked up her ears. “What are your two collections?” 50 ◆ P E T E R H O D A V I E S she asked again, this time with a touch of challenge in her voice, and I was about to say, lamely,“Stories” (if only to clear myself of the even more mortifying possibility that I wrote poetry!), when her mother broke in and told her, “Oh dear, they’re not that kind of collection.” “I collect Beanies,” the girl told me, firmly, “and Hummels and erasers and ponies. I’ve got all kinds, from all over.” I wasn’t sure if she meant the Beanie Babies, or the ponies, but her pride,her foursquare satisfaction of possession,left me with little doubt that she considered noncollectors with a touch of pity, and would likely find the idea of a collection of stories I’d written myself not only dull, but akin to cheating. “It’s the age of collecting,” her mother advised me, as the kids emerged from the school.“Yours will be at it soon enough.” ◆ T H E Y ’ R E N O T T H AT kind of collection. I trade in such parental evasions all the time, and the mother was clearly just trying to shield me politely from her daughter’s badgering. And yet the phrase stuck in my craw, a little, along with my own inability to answer her daughter’s question. (No writer after all likes someone else to speak for him.) In truth, though, I largely agreed with the mother—my collections aren’t that kind of collection. But, of course, what really nagged me is the question, what kinds of collections are they, then? ◆ I H AV E B E E N talking to my students for a few years about different types of story collections, based on my own experiences with the form. My first book, The Ugliest House in the World, for instance, was assembled under the not very edifying organizing principle of “all the good stuff I happen to have right now.” I don’t mean to entirely dismiss this kind of collection. I believe that one of the strengths of collections (and one of the pleasures of writing stories generally) is that they can be very diverse. Story by story a writer can change subject, tone, style, point of view, you name it, with much more [3.237.232.196] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:06 GMT) Only Collect ◆ 51 freedom than, say, a novelist. In my own case, I should confess that this aesthetic arises from pragmatism. I’ve tended to consciously write very different stories as a means of escaping the hangover from earlier stories—the way the first draft of a new story always seems so dreadful compared to the final draft of a previous story. It’s an unfair comparison, of course, but an inevitable one, and my means of tricking myself past this particular writer’s block has been to make sure that the next story is as far as possible incommensurable with the last—if one was light, the next will be dark, if one was contemporary, the next will be historical, if one was...