A surprise: my story “Nature Rules” that appeared in Shenandoah in fall, 2017 received an honorable mention for The Shenandoah Prize for Fiction. Many awards have lots of categories, winner, finalist, semi-finalist, honorable mention, and sometimes more categories, so I don’t usually find that receiving an honorable mention is worth mentioning. But the Shenandoah Prize includes one winner and one honorable mention in each category, so I am extremely honored, and thrilled.
I learned the news while reading R. T. Smith’s final “Editor’s Note,” published in April, 2018.
I am pleased to announce our annual prizes for the most distinguished works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction to appear in volume 67 of Shenandoah… and I send out my congratulations to the recipients, the honorable mentions… Lynn Sloan’s “Nature Rules” in fiction
So begins the brief essay about my experience with Ollie, the character in my story that was read at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. To read the essay, click:
Thrilled that my story “Ollie’s Back” from This Far Isn’t Far Enough had been chosen by Selected Shorts for its program “A Feast of Fiction,” at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, I waited outside the auditorium for the show to begin. Mine was the last story and it was to be read by the outstanding actor Nate Cordrry. On that stage Nate Cordrry became Ollie, and he brought down the house. In a few months this program will be broadcast on NPR’s Selected Shorts and available in podcast.
Lynn Sloan and I have known each other for more than twenty years, first as members of writing workshops, and lately in a small critique group. We have a rich, collaborative friendship, and we’ve also both been fortunate to have our books published by Fomite Press of Vermont, run by Marc Estrin and Donna Bister. Principles of Navigation, Lynn’s first novel, came out in 2015, and her story collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough, appeared recently. The fourteen stories included in this collection were written over a period of several years, and they are gems—each one unique, but universal in their truth. My admiration for her writing—the psychological complexity, the beautiful language, the compelling, diverse situations—continues to grow and deepen. Even though we’ve been reading each other’s manuscripts for years, many of the stories in Lynn’s collection are new to me. It was a pleasure to ask my old friend questions that I hadn’t asked before.
How do you go about starting a story when your creative spark has dimmed? Try rubbing two ideas together, like Lynn Sloan did.
By Lynn Sloan
As every fiction writer knows, there comes a moment when the ideas dry up. It’s not that you have no ideas, it’s that none of them are engaging. You try to think. You take a walk. You hang around coffee shops eavesdropping on conversations. Ideas emerge, but each seems clichéd or too thin to support more than a page or someone else already wrote that story. These are dark times in a writer’s life. Are you really a writer if you have nothing to write about? You’ve walked outside, you’ve hung around coffee shops, now you follow other standard advice. You turn to the notes you’ve jotted down on your phone or on scraps of paper or in the journal that you keep, or the journal you meant to keep but you’ve let lapse. Nothing. Or you begin to journal. Each day you write down your thoughts. This is a great strategy to trace your own mental processes, to dig into impressions and feelings that flow ever deeper, and to re-discover how truly generative writing is, but still you find no story spark.
I descended into this sorry state after I completed my first novel, Principles of Navigation. For several years, I’d given everything I had to this work. Draft after draft, figuring out what my story was really about, living with my fractious characters, honing the plot, revising chapters, then the whole manuscript, and in the last months, replacing flat words with more vivid ones, deleting what was unnecessary, moving around subordinate clauses to make sentences that sung, and finally fixing the commas. I, the writer, was exhausted. Even worse, the editor inside me had dominated my thinking for so long, she’d suffocated the creative writer.
This Far Isn’t Far Enough: An Interview with Lynn Sloan 03/09/18
We met at a faculty retreat, Lynn Sloan and I, quite a number of years ago. Lynn taught photography at Columbia College Chicago, where I teach creative writing, and I still remember her speaking about the potential for narrative in series of photographs. (I wonder if she really did talk about that, or if I have revised that memory in order to encapsulate both her evocative photographic images and her deeply engaging fiction?) Our paths cross often in Chicago, this remarkable literary city, and each time we meet, I am reminded of her kindness and curiosity, two traits a writer of any merit should have, I think. We had the chance to talk story a bit, on the eve of the release of Lynn’s new short story collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough from Fomite Press. These stories—full of “powerful yearning” (her phrase, not mine, although I wish I could claim it)—are so smart and so masterfully crafted, it was delight to hear her talk about how they came to be.
Patty McNair: Your stories are populated with characters we readers feel we might know. They could be our neighbors, our colleagues, a friend of our mother, a customer, a family member. These are people engaged in the daily business of their lives, but often at a moment when a choice must be made, an action taken. And therein blooms the drama. I wonder, Lynn, what comes first for you? Character or dramatic moment?
Lynn Sloan: I suppose that it’s dramatic moment, in this sense: what comes first for me is a question: Why?
Downsizing a personal collection of books is not an easy feat for a booklover. More accuractely, it is probably a task that most booklovers procrastinate at or avoid at all costs! Just the thought of removing books from my shelves to place into storage bins gives me anxiety… let alone contemplating CULLING any.
Thanks to Women & Children First Bookstore for hosting a spectacular evening for the book launch of my story collection, This Far Isn’t Far Enough. Thanks to the terrific booksellers who made everything flow smoothly, thanks to my friends, old and new, and those I didn’t know, to everyone who came to listen to me read. An SRO crowd and all books sold. Thank you to Sarah Hollenbeck and Lynn Mooney, the generous, savvy, and wise ones who are behind all the success of Women & Children First. Thank you.
