So, today we have the privilege of beginning work on a new story (“Feelings”) by the wonderful Ruth Ozeki. Ruth is a Booker Prize Finalist, who Dave Eggers has called, “One of our era’s most compassionate and original minds.”

A novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, Ruth is also a distinctive and soulful short story writer, as evidenced in her new (and first) collection, The Typing Lady and Other Fictions, just published earlier this week by Viking in June 2026.

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Hello, beloved Story Club,

I had an interesting experience this week.

I’d requested, from Substack, a way of putting all of my posts here, going back to the very first one (on my birthday, Dec 2, back in 2021 (!)), into a single word processing file. They kindly sent me a link and I spent a good solid day doing the conversion, which resulted in a single (mammoth) Word file of some 1288 single-spaced pages, containing every post I’ve ever made here.

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Some of them, as I read back through, I literally had no memory of writing. Others I remember with such fondness and a remembered sense of collective discovery - when we all turned a corner together on a story or an aspect of writing.

Here’s a list of all the stories we’ve covered, to the best of my knowledge:

1. Cat in the Rain – Ernest Hemingway (US)

2. An Incident - Lu Hsun (China)

3. The Stone Boy – Gina Berriault (US)

4. My First Goose – Isaac Babel (Russia)

5. I Stand Here Ironing – Tillie Olsen (US)

6. The Doll’s House – Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand)

7. The Gilded Six Bits – Zora Neale Hurston (US)

8. In the Basement – Isaac Babel (Russia)

9. Anyone Can Do It – Manuel Munoz (US)

10. Flowering Judas – Katherine Anne Porter (US)

11. The Lady with the Dog – Anton Chekhov (Russia)

12. CommComm – George Saunders (US)

13. Twenty Minutes – James Salter (US)

14. Her Father’s House – Maria Messian (Italy)

15. An Honest Thief – Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russia)

16. The Overcoat – Nikolai Gogol (Russia)

17. August – Bruno Schulz (Poland)

18. The Devil – Leo Tolstoy (Russia)

19. The Jilting of Granny Wetherall – Katherine Anne Porter (US)

20. Boule de Suif – Guy de Mauppasant (France)

21. The Child – Bobbie Louise Hawkins (US)

22. The Rockpile – James Baldwin (US)

23. Guy de Mauppasant – Isaac Babel (Russia)

24. Enemies – Anton Chekhov (Russia)

25. A Conversation with My Father – Grace Paley (US)

26. Light Breathing – Ivan Bunin (Russia)

27. Clay – James Joyce (Ireland)

28. Miss Furr and Miss Skeene – Gertrude Stein (US)

29. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (England)

30. After the Ball – Leo Tolstoy (Russia)

31. Death of Ivan Illych – Leo Tolstoy (Russia)

32. The Whistle – Eudora Welty (US)

33. The Dwarf Pine – Varlam Shalamov (Russia)

34. Paper Pills – Sherwood Anderson (US)

35. Young Goodman Brown – Nathaniel Hawthorne (US)

36. A Fabulous Animal – Samanta Schweblin (Argentina)

37. The Coffin Maker – Alexander Pushkin (Russia)

38. The First Full Thought of Her Life – Deb Olin Unferth (US)

39. Indian Camp – Ernest Hemingway (US)

    (If I’ve missed any, please let me know.)

The 1288-page document also contains every one of our “Office Hours” sessions (where I respond to your questions) and numerous entries in another, sort of miscellaneous, category called “Essays on Craft and Writing,” where we’ve talked about, among many other things, revision, the art of the short-short story, Orwell, my stories “The Falls” and “Sparrow, “ AI, some epic reader-recommendation lists, prompt-building….and much, much more.

I mention this partly because I was astonished to see how many pages had accrued, just through writing a few pages a couple of times a week, quickly, with some, but not much, revision.

Also, just to remind you all that this resource exists. If a person is a Paid subscriber, he or she can go back into these discussions at any time, review them, print them out, etc.

As I read through my file, I felt something was missing, and that was: your Comments. I suspect that if I included these, the page count would have been driven up into the tens of thousands. (But your Comments are preserved in the archive.)

Reading through my posts only made me realize just how essential the Comment aspect is to this whole Story Club enterprise. I mean, my essays are good, perfectly fine…but the Comment portion radically widens our explorations and takes us off in interesting directions that may or may not have much to do with the story in question.

It’s a living, breathing, evolving community, characterized by (as I heard again and again on my latest book tour, from journalists and other observers) its convivial and tolerant nature - a place that is rigorous and firm, where people stand their ground, and vigorously debate…but always (well, mostly always) in a civil and respectful way.

This, in my mind, is the real vocation of Story Club: to give us all a chance to practice, every day, that lost art of having a free, opinionated mind and putting that mind into play with other free, opinionated mind, in a way that says not, “I thought this and I am right,” but “I thought this; am I right?”

Believing that this can be done, and practicing it on other, living people is, I’m coming to believe, the great challenge of our time - to continue to be human and prefer being human and honor that which only humans can do, and, therefore, strive to get better at believing that other people are every bit as real as we are.

I particularly love (and often brag about) the fact that, if I ask, say, “Any Russian speakers out there, who can re-translate this passage?” or “Any neuroscientists, who might fact-check me on this?” I will always get a rich response from what I sometimes think of as The Story Club Braintrust.

What a resource!

Being part of this has also produced, for me, a much richer portrait of that mysterious entity called “My Readership.” I find that I start a new story now with a much more generous idea of who I’m writing to and for, made more confident by our interactions here that risk and difficulty will be tolerated and met and rewarded, as long as I remember to respect my audience - and getting to know you here has made that very easy to do.

So….thank you.

This resource will, I hope, continue to exist and be accessible for many years to come (and we will keep growing it for many years, too, I hope).

If nothing else, it will exist for future historians as a way of understanding that even in a harsh, violent time, characterized by aggressive public discourse, there was something else going on under the surface, that was thoughtful and kind, rigorous and curious.

And that thing was what was actually keeping the boat afloat.

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On Sunday, behind the paywall, a new story by a contemporary writer, who has a new book about to be released and has been kind enough to let us run one of her stories here, so we can all discuss it.

I won’t name her yet but…Sunday, you’ll know. And the story is a beauty.

P.S. Wanted to let you know that (speaking of the history of Story Club) a story by one of our most beloved members, Mary G. has just taken first place in a competition at Writer’s House Magazine…and here it is. Congrats, Mary, way to go!

Writers' Hour Magazine

[Fiction] Poof!

Poof! By Mary Guterson…

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9 days ago · 8 likes

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Courtesy of SC member LB - thank you!

Three Shots

113KB ∙ PDF file

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Today we wrap up “Indian Camp” - apologies for the long post. Lots to say about this one…

So, congratulations and thanks to all of you for making this journey through “Indian Camp” so epic and insightful.

Today, I’d like to share a few of my thoughts on this last section and the ending.

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Reminder: We’re discussing “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, in four parts. Catch up with our discussion: Part 1 and Part 2. Today we’re discussing Part 3. Sunday, we’ll talk about Part 4.

So, right: escalation galore in Part 3.

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In case you missed it, we’re reading “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, in four parts. Today we start Part 2. If you haven’t read part 1 you can go back here for the discussion. It’s a good one. Next week we’ll read Parts 3 (starting today) and 4 (on Wednesday).

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Over beyond the paywall, we’re in the middle of an epic discussion of Hemingway’s “Indian Camp.” Join us for some great talk about an escalatory masterpiece. Close-reading a story like this is a great way of calibrating one’s sense of pace and coming to a new understanding of what actually happens in a short story (how much, how quickly). We’re on an unusual and intense Wednesday/Sunday schedule, so no Office Hours question today…

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Also wanted to let you know about this podcast, hosted by John Spong, called One by Willie, on which I had the honor of appearing - the episode dropped yesterday. Each episode, John talks with one Willie Nelson fan about one Willie song. We talk about my early (very early) exposure to Willie’s music and then we hone in on one song associated with Willie, namely the great “Pancho and Lefty”, written by Townes Van Zandt.

The podcast - an evolving national treasure/archive - lives more generally here. It starts with Willie and his work and goes…everywhere.

John has featured folks from the music world (Bonnie Raitt, Lyle Lovett), but also Lawrence Wright, Brené Brown, and Ethan Hawke.

In other news, we made the trip across the country safely and are now in our new place. Guin is doing pretty well, with some ups and downs, and I am just getting my writing area set up, with lots of ambition (my reliable old pal) welling up. Always interesting to travel, see the world, come home and go, “Wait, what? I’m supposed to say something about all of that? But it’s so vast!”

But I will try.

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The story, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, was written when Hemingway was in his early 20s, describing the time of his childhood – so, say, around 1910. His family had a summer camp in Michigan. During that time, the word “Indian” would not have been considered pejorative (at least by the white culture). I’m going to use it in what follows, just in keeping with its usage in the story.

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So, I’d like to try an experiment here, a version of the “page at a time” exercise I offered in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. The story is “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, a story that was very important to me as a young writer, just in terms of the sheer escalation within it.

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Thanks to TIME Magazine for including two of my books on their list of “25 Books That Capture This American Moment,” and especially for letting me praise Dispatches, by my friend and hero (may he rest in peace), the great Michael Herr.

Special thanks to Amanda Gorman for selecting Lincoln in the Bardo and to R.J. Palacio for selecting Vigil.

There’s a nice video here.

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Over beyond the (really quite low!) paywall, we’ve been discussing style.

One of the questions that’s come up is about the difference between voice and style. And I have to admit that I use these two absolutely interchangeably: to me, voice is style and vice versa.

This maybe demonstrates one difference between a theorist and a practitioner. I strongly consider myself the latter. I don’t know the difference and it doesn’t bother me not to know; it’s not a productive distinction for me.

Although there might be one way that I understand these terms as having slightly different meanings.

In stories like Elliot Spencer” or Fox 8,” I spent a lot of time working with the way the prose looked on the page. In the former, I used inter-sentence spacing to communicate the narrator’s struggle to speak and think after his brain had been wiped clean, and in the latter….well, the narrator is a fox who can’t spell very well.

Neither of those choices would be noticed if those stories were read aloud.

So, maybe, in my esthetic world, the way the language sounds when read aloud is “voice” and the way it reads on the page is “style?”

But honestly: to me, they’re the same. 😊

When editing, I think a lot about a quality I’d describe as looksound. How does the prose strike me as I silently (but not really silently) read it in my head, in terms of the way its sonic aspects intersect with its visual aspects?

Is it unusual? Is it cool? Does it have some “me” in it? Does it challenge the reader to rise up out of the plane of normal thinking and have a new look at life, on my terms?

My goal is to make the language seem like normal language, mostly, but supercharged. I suppose the underlying idea is that normal, everyday speech isn’t quite sufficient to represent what’s happening down here on Earth, not really, and so I have an urge to stylize it – organize it, speed it up, compress it, make it denser – rarefy it, essentially – not to be fancy or show off, but to make an experience for the reader that mimics or evokes the experience of being alive. (I’ve sometimes described this as “freakifying” the language.)

We have a language in which we do business (“The hospital? It’s at the corner of Main and 3^rd”) but that language only scratches the surface of what it means and feels like to exist in this world.

Maybe a swath of literary prose has the same relation to normal speech as a swath of music has to ambient sound. It’s a rarefication of the natural.

Now, why would a person want to do that? Why can’t we be satisfied describing things in “regular,” everyday, language? (Why can’t we be satisfied to just step outside and listen to street sounds?) Where’s the value in this “super-charging?”

The answer, I think, is: a non-normative style is somehow more ultimately truthful; more faithful to the reality of an actual lived moment.

In its departure from normal speech, it at least acknowledges the limitations of language and the fact that language is always a tool, that produces a mere approximation of truth.

Imagine a man walking into a Home Depot. On the banal, everyday level, we might just write: “Scott walked into the Home Depot, looking for nails.” That’s a perfectly good sentence, and a good example of the way much literary fiction is written these days, on the assumption that the meaning of the story comes from event, recounted simply, in plain, everyday language.

But is that it? Is that a true statement of that moment? Is that what that moment – that moment when one walks into a Home Depot – feels like from inside?

Anyway, I think that’s where style begins: in an attempt to do justice to a moment.

Now, many great stories operate within the “normal voice” convention. I mean, most do. That’s one way mystery is created – by omission. And we all know that dazzling stories (like Chekhov’s, say) can be built out of very simple language.

What I found out, years ago, is that I, personally, can’t make very good stories out of simple, or first-order-realistic, language. What I need to do is get the surface of the story jangly and energetic, and then everything else comes out of that. And to make a jangly, energetic surface, I have…well, I have to make myself believe in the character’s reality – I have to believe he or she is as real as me.

Just as we are always trying to do in real life.

And, just as in life, this begins in specificity.

If our story continues, “Having recently been laid off from his job at the steel mill, Scott wondered if Home Depot was hiring,” I recognize this as a thought someone (me, even) might have, while, at the same time, feeling somehow let down by the banality of that expression of the though – the way it only distantly approximates the way having a thought feels as one has it (which would be full of character, really: in the form of specifics, things specific to Scott’s way of thinking and speaking and so on, things that would render Scott more particular and vulnerable).

Whereas, if we consent to heighten the language, making it more specific and dense and atypical, we might get something like…

“Moving through the just-sprung-up Halloween section (the upblowing plastic ghosts, the baying werewolves in price-tagged tophats), Scott didn’t feel the old autumn-is-here joy, as he could still hear the attempted kindness in Miss Smelting’s voice as she said they were “letting him go to pursue bigger things,” and here, now, as he moved down the unending aisle of cleaning products (madly expensive-seeming now that he had no (zero) income), he imagined himself working here, orange-vested, competence-exuding, although, in truth, he knew nothing at all about tools and once, in fact, had nailgunned his left hand to a piece of drywall.”

Well, that’s not quite it. Although there’s something intriguing and promising (for me) about the sudden reveal of his incompetence there at the end.

But, if nothing else, we’ve got more of Scott now and I am starting to feel a little sympathy toward him.

Anyway, that’s an approximation of how I work – although the next step would be to do, like, a hundred rewrites of the above until it started to be good – that is, until it started to really sound like “me.”

And the trick is to keep my standards up (truly up) until that happens.

There are, of course, other ways of freakifying prose. Cutting is good: omitting everything we can that might be even slightly implied and thereby redundant. A story compressed in this way starts to feel strange and surprising, like life – it has that slightly malformed quality that tells us something is working besides the author’s intention.

One of the deepest truths I’ve come to realize over my nine million years of living is this: other people are just as real as I am. They really are, even though it doesn’t always feel that way.

Literature helps me feel this truth more viscerally, somehow. Seeking a less normative style is a form of enforced moving beyond my received understanding of the world, into something fresher.

Language always fails us. But literature can be a chance for it to fail with more embedded sympathy.

Thoughts, Story Club?

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Thank you for your robust response to my questions about style and Henry Green.

When some people hear “style,” they may think, “high style” - that is, they think of prose that operates in the upper/unnatural register, in order to be more expressive (prose that may be, purposely or otherwise, difficult to parse). So: Henry Green, Henry James, James Joyce, the Faulkner of “Absalom, Absalom,” and so on.

Of course, any piece of writing has style. Sometimes the style is simply a style that tries to vanish, so there’s just world there, no words - we might think of Hemingway at his best.

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I feel inclined today to talk a little about the British writer Henry Green (1905-1973). I think it’s because, being between projects, I’m reconsidering…. well, everything. But mostly prose style. And he was a master, with such a distinctive, highly considered style - nothing was accidental or unconsidered in his sentences.

Check out this, for example, from Loving, his 1949 novel:

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We’ve been having a great time talking about Deb Olin Unferth’s story “The First Full Thought of Her Life,” over beyond the paywall. On Sunday, Deb answered our questions about the story. I asked if she had any images of the real-life model for the story and she, showing her characteristic generosity, sent me these:

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Happy to share Deb’s responses to your excellent questions below. And, as always, I want to sing your praises, for the precision, generosity, rigor, and civility of your Comments in response to “The First Full Thought of Her Life.” I thought it was a wonderful conversation.

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In my Thursday post, I mentioned the great interviewer and critic Michael Silverblatt, who passed away earlier this year. As I was researching Michael, I found this quote attributed to him:

“Great novels are about the fate of goodness in the world. The novel wants to test goodness as a principle, and most of the time goodness gets defeated. Many people take it as a given that there is no goodness to be tested any more. How would you test goodness in the world if most people are corrupt or without principle or have learned principle-less-ness? I think that one of the things we face in our time is that after we’ve reversed things enough, who knows what goodness is any more? Who knows where we stand?”

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In February, we lost a great one - Michael Silverblatt, who, for many years, hosted the podcast “Bookworm.” I’ve been meaning to write something about this loss but I’ve found it hard - he was, simply put, the best and deepest interviewer I’ve ever encountered.

I always felt like we had a special relationship, although I suspect anyone he ever interviewed felt that way. He told me once that, before he interviewed someone, he would read or re-read their entire output. I could certainly feel that level of care on the other side of the desk. He was always generous and courteous - if he had a problem with something you’d written, he would approach this as if it had been a deliberate choice on your end, and it was up to him to try to reconcile it with his esthetic belief system. He was also a holder of strong opinions, developed over thousands of hours of deep reading. He had the confidence of someone who has done the work, for an entire, beautifully spent, life.

We always had great, jovial talks but then - every time I was there, save one - afterwards, in the hall, he’d say something that was on a slightly deeper, less public level, something that would, in some way, large or small, inflect the next book, something that, on two occasions, brought tears to my eyes. These weren’t tears of hurt, but the kind that can come when a person feels he’s been recognized, his work truly seen. He just was…making an observation, about the work, or about its relation to the person I seemed, to him, to be - but I could feel all of his intense reading of my work behind the observation.

So, thank you, Michael. You were huge in my writing life. As I wrote, I was always thinking, somewhere in my mind, of how much fun it would be to talk with you about the book, and how much I would benefit from it. And, weirdly, I find that I still feel that way.

You can find all of the conversations I had with Michael here. And - this is a treasure trove - ALL of Michael’s interviews here, on the KCRW website. And the guy interviewed some giants…Toni Morrison, Tobias Wolff, Zadie Smith, and Kazuo Ishiguro…and the list goes on and on.

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Now for our question of the week.

But actually, there are two questions, and I’ll offer a combined answer regarding something the two have in common.

So, Question One is:

Sorry to bombard you with some (and quite extensive) writing questions, but truth-be-told, it’s hard to find good advice about these sorts of things without (1) knowing a good author friend or (2) having a circle of author-friends, and Story Club is, for me, just like it is for a lot of good folks here, the closest thing to a good circle of author-friends I have.

I also apologize in advance for just the sheer amount of questions that turn into more questions here.

Just for some context, I’m a younger writer, so I know that a lot of people (rightly so) will say—and they have said—I don’t have the experience to publish. But, as I write and keep improving, I want to start improving in the way that only occurs once you share work and people tear it to shreds (just like a writing course I took one time), all the while making somewhat of a name for myself. So, to the absolute harm of my ego, I’ve begun to submit my work to short story lit mags; however, with each decline, I realize this is not leading me anywhere either. I’m stuck, I’ve realized.

So, here are my questions: I definitely have put in the work so far of writing and reading every day, but how can I find an editor to force me into the next phase of my writing, so it can be good enough? And then, when the time comes, how can I find an agent to help me publish in the scary lit mag world? Is there anything I need to do in the meanwhile to better myself and my chances, like apply for a short story contest or something or that nature?

Thank you very much. I know you are very busy! Sorry for all the questions; I wish very badly to share my work with people one day (I know you understand the feeling).

And Question 2 is:

I’ve lately been working on a novel and have been editing the first 50 pages before moving on to the rest. A few friends have read them and have noted something that I think I’ve always struggled with in the back of my mind as a writer: trusting the reader. In this case, it’s manifesting as a number of asides and parentheticals that explain a character’s motivations a little more or their thoughts or even the world around them. Part of the reason I think I’m inclined to do this is because I’m building this world from a slightly fantastical premise (not unlike your own works) and want to sell it more. It’s not that I don’t trust the reader’s intelligence, but I believe it’s that I’m not fully trusting my writing to guide the reader to where I want them to go. So I guess my question is: how do you toe the line between (over)explaining story, motivations, world, etc. and trusting the reader to fill in the blanks?

Thank you for your questions, you two dear SC members.

I felt the urge to combine these because both involve the question of taking ownership of one’s work.

There’s a natural tendency - in the context of Story Club, in the context of the larger how-to-write complex - to adapt the idea that if we just “do it right,” all will be well.

But isn’t it true that what we really want from the writers we read is some sense that the person, inspired by their buffeting trip through life, has grabbed the reins? And is doing it their own damn way? That they are working out of what thrills them, rather than what they think might pass for good, evaluated by some outside jury?

Sometimes, doing it the wrong way - understanding but then denying “authority” can convey a sense of originality.

Over the revising life of one of my stories, there’s always a moment when, having been a good literary citizen (knowing the meaning I’m trying to convey, being sure of how the story is doing its work) I get discontent with the part of me that only wants to placate and please some imaginary (and not very friendly) panel of experts, and another part of me appears, sort of defiantly, that doesn’t care what they think (and also secretly knows that this not-caring is ultimately going to produce a work that will win those grouches over).

So, Questioner One, you ask: “How can I find an editor to force me into the next phase of my writing, so it can be good enough?”

The simple answer is: you have to become that editor.

I think we all know the feeling, when locked into The Story That Won’t Be Finished, of wanting to turn to some outside authority who can sanely, methodically, tell us how to get out of it.

When I’m there, these days, I start seeking another (familiar) feeling: the “Oh, God, no one is coming to save me from this story” feeling. Terrifying! But true.

The only antidote, in that moment, in my experience, is a stronger belief in one’s own esthetic. A more defiant seeking of one’s own opinion. What pleases you? Delights you? What gives you a slightly naughty, defying-the-rules feeling that, secretly, however you know, is right?

And when I say “a stronger belief in one’s own esthetic,” this means: feeling free to look deeper for what pleases and delights you. To look past what you’ve been told to what you can really feel. Let that internal list you have (of what should please, should delight) fall away and listen for the quiet voice of your own true taste.

It’s there, but it’s shy.

Questioner Two: same answer, really. You asked: How do you toe the line between (over)explaining story, motivations, world, etc. and trusting the reader to fill in the blanks?

When I was on tour just now, I noticed something: so many good writing questions (questions that, like yours, come out of the questioner’s genuine perplexity, borne out of many hours of writing) can be answered like this: “Yes, good question.”

And then…silence.

That is: the question is the one that you, the questioner, have chosen to ask, of all the questions you might have asked, and that means it’s likely the question, for you, at this moment. (The key to whatever’s obstructing your progress)

The asking itself is of some benefit.

If I wasn’t on tour, in public, but in a class or office hours, I’d respond: “That is a great question, that can only be answered by you, and not theoretically, from above, but only line-by-line, by the decisions you make at specific places in your story.

But the fact that that was the question you chose to ask, tells me that it’s a live question for you and central to your progress.

There’s always, of course, trial advice to give, locally. “Don’t worry about an agent or contests just yet, Questioner One. Come to a place where you really feel you are owning your own work first,” for example.

Or, “Questioner Two: do two radical edits of the same story; in one put in all the asides and, in the other, cut anything even vaguely resembling as aside out - that is, don’t trust the reader at all in the first version and trust her completely in the second. Then read both back-to-back and let something wash over you. (Something will.)

But I think it’s good, now and then, to remind ourselves that art isn’t a job we do well - it’s a job we do uniquely, as only we could do it.

It’s a yelp, it’s discretionary, the world can (maybe) live without it but it doesn’t want to. It’s your offering and your job (your vocation) is to get as much YOU in it as you can…and someone else’s advice, no matter how well-intended, can only take you so far.

Thoughts, Story Club?

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So, this week I am very fortunate to be able to introduce a story by Deb Olin Unferth. Deb was in my very first cohort of young writers at Syracuse and has since gone on to a dazzling career, and is much beloved among other writers, for her highwire use of voice and pace, among many other gifts.

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Hi Everyone,

Today, I’d like to give you the first behind-the-scenes, quasi-technical look at the process of writing my recent novel, Vigil.

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Sorry this post is late! Just in from traveling and got overrun with things that needed to be done.

Last week, I proposed an exercise that might help us refine our view of the narrator of “The House with the Mezzanine,” by Chekhov.

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Finalizing this post in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where I just had the honor of participating in the University of North Dakota Writers Conference - which was founded in 1970 and has been happening continuously ever since.

Someone gave me a record of the writers who’ve attended over the years, and the entry for 1975 caught my eye: John Barth, Wendell Berry, William Gass, Ken Kesey, N. Scott Momaday, Ismael Reed, and Alice Walker (!). And 1978 wasn’t bad either: John Ashberry, Amiri Baraka, William Burroughs, Ring Lardner, Jr., and Story Club favorites Tillie Olsen, and Eudora Welty.

A great privilege to attend, meet so many nice people, and be interviewed by the wonderful Amber Sparks, author of (among other books) Happy People Don’t Live Here.

I will now sleep for three hours, and get (I hope) on the 5 am flight back home.

But first, our question of the week!

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Q.

My question is thus: are we finally allowed to drop the quotation marks? (which remind me of prison bars). After reading Vigil and Prophet Song by Paul Lynch I can’t help but notice that the bars have been taken off. In the case of Prophet Song even the “He said, She said,” is gone. In Vigil you are necessarily stuck with Mel G and Mel R and a cast of thousands so perhaps there’s no way around it. Dialog can create nice space on the page (except in P Song where the intended effect is claustrophobic). But I always hate having to load “he said, she saids” into the flow of my dialog or having to come up with some clever workaround like - “You are completely to blame for my confusion,” he vocalized while reading his mental etch-a-sketch. “You are a pain in the…”, Susan slammed the door.

It seems you were dealing with these questions while writing and at the readings. What do you think? Are the rules loosening? Are we finding our way to a bright new dawn? Will the editors let us go there?

A.

I think we are allowed to do whatever we want, no exceptions.

Of course, we have to deal with the fallout from that. And we might want to have some rationale for any sort of departure from convention – not a logical, articulated rationale, but even just a hunch – a hunch that this will be better than that.

Part of the fun, with art, is to do something a little verboten or naughty and then make it work – the reader feels that, I think, and likes the panache of it, especially if that departure isn’t just random.

In my case, I make the “quotation marks or not” decision on a case-by-case basis, truly. It’s just a decision I make as I get to the first bit of talking. My “rationale” is just that it feels right, whichever way that decision goes. Vigil has none; a recent story, “Thursday,” does use quotation marks. There’s probably some deep rationale but I don’t know what it is.

But let’s talk “fallout.”

I don’t think editors generally object to the no-quote-mark convention, which has been around since at least the stories in Dubliners by James Joyce, and probably long before that.

The advantage of not using quote marks has something to do with the non-interruptive nature of that convention. Because the spoken words aren’t announcing themselves as such, they are just one more component of the visual, on-page, presentation…or of the associated verbalism that occurs there in our head, as we read, which sometimes feels right.

I personally don’t mind the “he said/she saids” (and don’t love it when I can’t figure out who is saying a line) but am not crazy about adding things to them….you know: “Get thee behind me,” he exclaimed/ejaculated/burst out.

I feel that the tone of a statement should be implied by the words themselves. I don’t mind the repetition of the identifiers and, in fact, I think these can be part of the larger poetry of a dialogue section – we just have to take them into account, treating them as of equal sonic value as the spoken bit. (Hemingway is a master of this, by the way.)

In other words, we try to make the whole dialogue swath, identifiers included, read with good rhythm and sound, including the identifiers.

With Vigil, I could make the case that most, nearly all, of the “talking” isn’t talking at all but a sort of psychic mental exchange between different dead characters and sometimes KJ Boone. But that argument doesn’t hold up, since the speech of the living characters isn’t indicated with quotation marks either. (I think I tried that, at one point, but it felt intrusive and off.)

With any departure from the norm, we want to think, as courteously as possible, about its effect on the reader.

I’ve read a good number of student stories in which the writer has decided to eschew quote marks. My job there, as I edit, is to identify places where the convention is making it unnecessarily hard on the reader, usually by not making it clear where the talking starts and ends. (Sometimes this might be the intention but I think usually not).

So, say we have:

I never want to see you again, Rick said. You’re always borrowing money and not paying it back. A dog across the street turned around in three quick circles. And it’s not like I’m made of money. The dog barked, sat, began to whine. That’s it.

Well, to my ear, the writer is making it hard for no payoff. If he’d just said:

I never want to see you again, Rick said. You’re always borrowing money and not paying it back.

A dog across the street turned around in three quick circles.

And it’s not like I’m made of money.

The dog barked, sat, began to whine.

That’s it.

…is that better? A little. But for clarity, I’d do it with the speech identifiers (the “he said/she said” part).

I never want to see you again, Rick said. You’re always borrowing money and not paying it back.

A dog across the street turned around in three quick circles.

And it’s not like I’m made of money, Rick said.

The dog barked, sat, began to whine.

That’s it, Rick said.

But, truly: it’s up to us.

The larger principle is this: we are allowed to do anything. Will there sometimes be a cost (to clarity, to readerly engagement, to our publication prospects). There will! Should we take these into account? I think we should, especially if clarity, readerly engagement, and/or our publication prospects matter to us.

I remember once seeing Frank Conroy teach a class. He drew this big arc on the board with a “W” on one end (for WRITER) and an “R” on the other (for READER) and he said that any work is going to fall somewhere on the arc - either trying to please the writer (maybe a difficult, self-referring work like, say, Finnegan’s Wake) or the reader (an easy, popular, very accessible airport read). Conroy then said, “You might be thinking you should split the difference, and put your book right in the middle of the arc.” But no: he wasn’t suggesting that but, rather, saying that, you could put your book wherever you liked, only you had to accept the consequences. If you put it way over on the W side - don’t complain when no one else but you can make sense of it and it doesn’t sell. If you opt to put it way over on the R side - don’t complain if you fail to get high-end literary cred.

But you, the writer, get to choose. Period.

Often, when I’ve done something odd in a story, I just say, “OK, oddness – you’re in for now. But I’m going to have to ask you to justify your existence.” That is, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing that “just because” or to distinguish myself as an edgy, rebel-of-a-writer who doesn’t care about what anyone thinks of him. No: I am someone who is working hard to use the entire pallet of effects available to me, in order to make my story more special and original.

I can give a quick example. When I first started Vigil, I had the book in the same format as Lincoln in the Bardo and there were two ghosts in attendance at the bedside of: a dead guy from the 19^th Century (who could have stepped right out of Lincoln in the Bardo) and a younger, working-class woman who’d died in the 1970s.

After working on this model for a few weeks, it finally dawned on me that the book didn’t require that structure (it hadn’t “asked for it” in the way that LitB had). And it felt very slow in that format.

So I decided to choose one narrator and stick with that person.

I chose the woman – Jill “Doll” Blaine. But then I found I was having trouble cutting certain bits of the male dialogue – I liked the sound of it and it did a perfect job of setting certain things up.

So (and here’s the accommodation of the non-normal mode): I just dropped the bits I liked from the male speaker into the female speaker. And made a note: That’s weird and will eventually have to go, unless it earns its keep.

I left it like that for quite awhile, always softly asking myself, “Why is she talking so weird?”

In time – spoiler alert – it became clear that she herself contained two consciousnesses – one from her actual (now ended) life, one from her current state (angelic/ghostly/”elevated.”)

That development in the book was suggested by the anomaly in the prose, in other words.

So: excess that occurs to us by way of feeling….and then some textual reason for that excess to be there (which makes it not an excess).

So, I don’t know about that “bright new dawn” but I think that, if we believe in the choice we’ve made, and accept all of its consequences, editors will, yes, happily go there with us.

Thoughts about this, Story Club?

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A few quick announcements - first, of this interesting event happening in D.C. on Saturday, April 25, 2026 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM:

More details here.

I won’t be there except in spirit but have lots of affection and admiration for the organizers - and love anything that honors Oak Hill (where Lincoln in the Bardo was set) and Mt. Zion.

Some of you may have noticed that the short film The Singers, based on the Turgenev story featured in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, won an Oscar last week. It’s a lovely film and congrats to everyone involved.