Tag Archives: Amy Hempel

Our Favorite Short Stories

We asked our team to name one of their favorite stories in the hope it will shed some light into what the Orcans are hoping to discover within the slush pile.

David Anderson, Reader:

“Quaestio De Centauris” by Primo Levi. One of my favorites. How Levi, with such apparent ease creates the world so efficiently blew me away. There are no excess words. In no place does it sag under its own weight. Since the world has been built so well and the characters developed, the reader participates in realization and the heartbreak. 

Tommy Anderson, Reader:

For my favorite short story, I decided to go back and read some of the work that I remembered from some of my early fiction classes in college. There were a lot of great ones, but one that has stuck with me that  I honestly haven’t heard much about in any other instance is “Sugarbaby” by William Gay. I think the voice is done so well. The aggressively passive ways in which the protagonist, known as Beasley, tries to cling to the world he understands, even after he blows it up (sort of literally) is as heartbreaking as it is captivating. I find myself chasing these characters in my own writing: broken people who try, but often fail, to find what comfort they can.

Renee Jackson, Editor:

“Understand” by Ted Chiang is a brilliant example of using form as a core element of storytelling. First person is critical here as it allows the narrator’s vocabulary and sentence structure to change as the story progresses. The story also does an interesting job of taking a Flowers for Algernon concept and pivoting it so that it’s still a fresh account.

Ai Jiang, Reader:

I thought about it for a while and I think I’d have to say Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” The narrator speaks about Omelas rather than themselves—a way of storytelling that we usually would find somewhat distancing. But I feel in this case, the descriptions presented and the way the narrator talks about Omelas embodies their personality. The narrator often interjects with their personal thoughts and comments on certain aspects of the society. It does a lot of scene setting, but it’s done purposefully because of the narrator’s reveal in the latter half of the story, which offers equally descriptive imagery but a shocking contrast.

Zachary Kellian, Publisher/Senior Editor:

I chose “The Man Who Went to Chicago,” a short story from Richard Wright’s posthumous 1961 collection Eight Men. Another literary great, James Baldwin, had this to say of Wright (one of my idols): “His landscape was not merely that of the Deep South, or of Chicago, but that of the world, of the human heart.” To map the human experience with words should be the goal of every short story. To that end, “The Man Who Went to Chicago” has stuck with me ever since I randomly picked it off a bookshelf in the Chicago Public Library many years ago. I was looking to read a story that I could relate to, and instead, read something that helped me relate to others. It was a gift that Wright’s words keep on giving.

Zoë Mikel-Stites, Reader:

“How to Talk to Girls at Parties” by Neil Gaiman. It’s awkward and weird, and when I read it, it struck me hard enough to be something I think about to this day, even though I hadn’t read it in years. It plays with tone, awareness, and vocabulary in a way that I always find fascinating. Now it’s something I look to when I think about when I consider the effect I want my own writing to have. It was also made into a feature film in 2017, which I now have to go watch.

Ronak Patel, Reader:

“A Temporary Matter,” by Jhumpa Lahiri. This is not the first story about a couple’s marriage falling apart due to the loss of a child. But the lens in which it is told, that of a South Asian immigrant couple, provides a unique look at an old subject. I think that’s what first drew me not only to this story but writing as an art. I feel represented reading Lahiri’s work.  I see how these stories can unfold with people that share common experiences, something I did not have growing up. The cultural lens aside, this story nails so many of the indicators of great writing that we look for at Orca: quality imagery and narration, realistic dialogue, deep subtext, and skillful insertion of backstory.

Marci Pliskin, Reader:

This was tough! I’m going with Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.” It is dark, funny and heartbreaking. Every word on the page has purpose and each image is crystal clear. Hempel makes me feel generous toward the narrator who fails to be supportive of her dying friend. Oh, and this is the first story she wrote. 

Joe Ponepinto, Publisher/Senior Editor:

I was tempted to go with James Joyce’s “The Dead,” but everybody already knows that’s the best short story ever written. And then I thought about Thomas Mann’s “Death In Venice,” (which is also one of my favorite movies) but at 70 pages long it is more of a novella than a short story. So I am going with an old favorite that I have read many times and never tire of reading, “Bullet in The Brain,” by Tobias Wolff. Wolff gives us a completely unlikable character and then transforms him, in the milliseconds between life and death, into a heartbreaking reminder that every person was once a child, innocently embracing the hope of life to come.

Lauren Voeltz, Reader:

“The Redwoods” by Joyce Carol Oates  (Issue 70 of American Short Fiction, 2020). The story is experimental in form—taking on the literal shape of the interior of a redwood tree, weaving in and out of the present and the past. Oates connects these sections seamlessly. Oates has an excellent style and voice. The story is understandable on a first read, but upon rereading, it reveals deeper meaning. This story challenges emotionally, and I keep coming back to it for these reasons.

Orca Blog for May: The Problem with “I”

Lately I’ve been rejecting a lot of fiction submissions written in the first-person point of view. So many that I’ve begun to ask why—what is it about these stories that’s turning me off?*

First-person has long been an excellent choice for conveying a character’s individual view of the world. Examples like James Joyce’s “Araby,” Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” are classics that quickly come to mind. More recently some of George Saunders’s stories as well.

When done well, first person offers a glimpse into a character’s inner psyche. But remember that it’s also often referred to as the unreliable narrator; that psyche is tempered by motivations and long-buried embarrassments, which are suppressed in the name of ego, the image a character presents to the rest of the world. That person’s past is usually revealed through the story’s subtext, the signs and symbols within action and dialogue that serve as illumination of the character’s soul, and place it in relation to the reality that surrounds it.

That conflict between characters’ inner and outer worlds—how they relate to other people and experience growth—seems to be missing in some of what comes in through our submission portal. The result, especially when presented in first-person, are stories that exhibit a deliberate ignorance of the world. They are self-indulgent, sometimes self-aggrandizing. And for sure, they lack subtext.

First-person is, on its surface, the easiest POV to write. Just adopt a persona and a situation, and off you go. Maybe that’s why we get so many. No need to worry about other characters too much, since the story is about this one person. I think that’s the problem, though. One of the attractions of stories written in third-person POV is their world building. The characters are part of a world, not isolated from it. They must react to its demands, relate to other characters—in short, participate. So many of the first-person stories we get seem to want to escape from that. They seem narrow, limited, not fully formed.

Some of this seems to be a function of our times. In a culture in which every person is encouraged to express his or her inherent “specialness,” it’s easy for writers, especially younger ones, to misinterpret that to mean to the exclusion of others.

One writer who I admire, Rachel Cusk, has shown how the opposite of self-indulgence can make first-person POV truly work. In her Outline trilogy (Outline, Transit, Kudos) she has created a first-person narrator who remains primarily in the background, letting other characters tell their stories, and barely even reacting to them. It’s incredibly refreshing to read these novels, in which Faye (the POV character) acknowledges the world and perhaps more importantly, her place in it.

It seems that such engagement with the world is what’s needed now, both in fiction and reality. You have to live in the world. So do your characters. Give them the opportunity to do that and maybe your first-person story will find its way into our pages.

– Joe Ponepinto

*Note: I am aware that writing a blog about the shortcomings of the first-person POV in first-person POV is something of a literary oxymoron. But it seems unavoidable, since the nature of a blog is opinion. So bear with me.