"Of course, mystery is not vagueness. Mystery is controlled. It involves information meted out only as needed. Tim O’Brien used to say that stories are not explanations. Certainly if you teach writing you see that some students think they are. They feel they haven’t made their point clearly enough so near the end of the story there will come an extremely spelled-out emblematic section. I not only don’t want the explanation, I want the mystery. I wrote a very short story called 'Celia Is Back,' in which a man comes unglued in front of his two children while filling out sweepstakes applications. His unraveling assumes an initially benign form—he gets carried away answering the sweepstakes questionnaire, making less and less sense—until his children get frustrated and then alarmed, and then angry. Anger is stronger than fear, so you typically get angry at the thing that frightens you. ... What’s wrong with him? What will happen to him and his children? That is left open at the end; that doesn’t interest me. I wanted to show what a breakdown might look like to children, where the deviation is just off center, and by underplaying it, it became more menacing.
{...}
"An unexpected place. Barry Hannah has this great comment about how Bob Dylan can’t sing but he has the desperation of not being able to sing, which is better than Glenn Campbell, who can sing. That’s what it is. What affects you is hearing the attempt at a note, it’s more moving than someone hitting the note perfectly. So you feel in writing maybe you can create a certain effect by going for a certain kind of language and not making it."
-- Amy Hempel, speaking in her 2003 interview with The Paris Review
Amy Hempel's Collected Stories is one of the best books I own. Hempel is a short story writer and journalist who was born in Chicago, lived long in California, and now makes a home in New York City. Her evening writing class at Columbia University with famed editor Gordon Lish set off her career of epic fiction miniatures, first seen in her 1985 collection, Reasons to Live. In the ensuing years, she has won a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story, and received a number of other literary honors. Her writing has appeared in Elle, GQ, Harper's, the Quarterly, and Vanity Fair. She is a contributing editor to the Alaska Quarterly Review. Hempel teaches writing at Bennington College and Harvard University, where she is the is Briggs-Copeland Lecturer of English. She is a founding board member of a foundation that cares for and rehabilitates dogs.
Image Credit: Gordon Lish Edited This
Comments