Magic, Not Rollercoasters

Stories Read (in no particular order)

• Cougar by Maria Anderson from The Iowa Review, 2017
• Readings in the Slantwise Sciences by Sofia Samara from Conjunctions, 2022
• Hill Country by Patricia Sammon from december, 2018
• This is a Story by Denise Napoli Long from Write or Die Magazine, 2024 (flash)
• Fairy Pools by Patricia Lockwood from The New Yorker, 2025
• The Potter of Bones by Eleanor Arnason from Asimov's Science Fiction, 2002 (novella)

I don't want to do something as arbitrary and reductive as rating them, but rather share a few thoughts. First, they are all from this century, though fairly spread out, from different magazines and genres. Also, didn't realize until I was listing them out above that they were all by women and all white women save one.

Only two sci-fi stories and, honestly, Readings in the Slantwise Sciences was more surrealist fantasy than sci-fi. It might have been my least favorite on its own, though the story around the story and some happy coincidences endeared it to me (more on that later, maybe). Fairy Pools will take the prize as the story I connected with least then, and it was the one story that I got to discuss with one of my writing groups. Usually discussion makes me see the value in a story, but all I learned was that this author has a ton of family drama swirling around her and she's passing it off as fiction? I don't know and it wasn't that interesting tbh. I thought there were interesting and arresting images, but no story, no meaning, too little from the interesting characters, and a messy, obscured plot.

My favorites, stories I would like to reread, were The Potter of Bones and Hill Country. The immediate difference between those stories and the others was main character. While Cougar was tragic and poignant and oh so real (I could see teaching it alongside Louise Erdrich or Lauren Groff and that's just on vibes), I spent most of the story trying to figure out if the main character was a sociopath.

But with the other two, I just cherished the women at the center of the tale and for very different reasons. The alien MC of The Potter of Bones, Haik, is from a primitive society, and through investigation and questioning and dream visions, is discovering The Theory of Evolution. It's an immersive story that throws the reader into another world and speaks directly to the audience as though we were modern members of that same alien race. The main character of Hill Country, on the other hand, is not at all brilliant or successful or well-travelled, but she does find her own ways to peer into her world's mysteries as she imagines the lives of the people who come into the Deep South gas station where she works and treats everyone with kindness. It's a story to teach empathy with and brought me near to tears at the end. It performed the magic trick of making me care and making me see the world in a new and beautiful light.

That magic is what I want to spend the summer investigating, the same way that Haik searches the cliffs near her coastal home for fossils. In her introduction to The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023, R.F. Kuang, lays out some characteristics of good fiction.

1. Introduce a world the reader connects with (and do it in a matter of pages)
2. Speculative fiction is a prism that asks questions about our own world
3. Respect the reader (an oldie but a goodie. In her words, let the reader "put the pieces together on their own")
4. The writer commits to the bit (and she prefers story with an absurd premise)
5. The writer does the above with confidence

It's this last one that seems so vital to me, and I felt Kuang made the point particularly well. She talks about the problem of writing that keeps apologizing for itself or justifying itself, whether by explaining a character's actions or motivations or descriptions or even the premise itself. "You never want to stay on a roller coaster," she says, "if the ride operator keeps nervously checking the seat belts." Instead, in a good story, "we can sense the author's confidence" and thus "are willing to trust them in return." I could definitely sense the confidence, the steady, un-rushed forward propulsion of the writing in Hill Country, Cougar, and The Potter of Bones. The last might be the best example, or most obvious, as the narrative voice takes moments to talk directly to a fictional audience, not the reader. It's a bold move that I can't imagine a writer making early in their career.

It reminds me of a story I meant to reread this week, perhaps my favorite short story of all time: The Green Hills of Earth, by Robert Heinlein. I didn't get a chance to, but it's okay. I know it almost by heart. With Green Hills in mind I did revise a short story of my own that had been languishing on my hard drive. It has a bold premise, I hope, and I tried to fully commit. In that story, I write to a fictional audience from the future of that fantasy world. Believe it or not, I did all that before reading The Potter of Bones (but not before reading R.F. Kuang's introduction) and truly those elements existed in the drafts I had made years ago, though barely and the focus of this revision was to sharpen those elements.

So there you have it, one week of summer down and goals met! Finished a story draft and read a bunch of short stories. More than that, I did lots of novel reading; I'm nearly done with The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and making progress in Bleak House. I rode my bike every day, played Lego with the kids, and gardened.

A happy, much needed start to summer!