The Short Story Becomes Essay Becomes the Short Story Again, or I Use Labels a Lot Even Though I Hate Them

So the wheels are moving on The Orchard Is Full of Sound. The call has been sent out by WVU Press for readers, which means the final touches are near. I started working again on short stories the day I sent the last manuscript their way back in November. Wrote quite a few and am still working on one that has stretched to an infuriating 15 pages. But then something else happened.

I must have missed nonfiction because I started writing essays.

And I'm reading the crap out of essay collections and anthologies of great creative nonfiction. I bought a total of 14 books along those lines around Christmas. Turns out I have enough already for most of a collection. So that might be something that happens at some point. Depends on whether or not I can actually write in that form in the way I feel a writer should be able to write. The line is thin that must be walked and still be interesting. A few names as examples:

Eliot Weinberger
Paul Crenshaw
Lydia Davis
Eula Biss
Anne Carson
Joan Didion
David Foster Wallace
Hunter S. Thompson
John Jeremiah Sullivan

There's countless others, but a list of examples needs to end somewhere.

I have been guilty in the past of trying to push myself into a form simply because I want to move around in it, wear it around the store for a couple laps, etc. I'm likely guilty in this case. But I do enjoy the essay, the personal narrative, the lyrical essay, nonfiction. Like short stories, it does have too many names, though. But that's just part of my crusade against labels.

However, work does and will always continue with my true form, the short story. I'm putting together the final touches on the new collection, Sway, due out from Cowboy Jamboree Press this coming spring.

So it's back to the 15 page behemoth I can't seem to wind down.

Pray for me church.