DIGITAL TOOLKiT FOR STUDENTS!!!
LearntheNet:
From "getting started" Internet basics to the web, email, newsgroups,
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The
WWW Modern Fiction Discussion Board Where You Post Your Stuff
Introduction
to English 201--A Virtual Version
The
Calendar: What You Need to Read, Write, and Do Day by Day
Details
on the Analytical Papers Assigned in This Class
How
to Write Excellent Analytical Papers
Some
Sample Analytical Papers Written by English 201 Students
Frequently
Asked Questions
Discussions
of ESL Problems at Dave's ESL Cafe!!
Stories
and Their Origins
Weekly
Prompts for Writing Your Short Story
Some
On-Line Fiction Sites
Some
Sample Stories Written by 201 Students
Writers'
Gallery of Pretty Good Liknesses
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Gallery of Pretty Good Liknesses
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A Glossary of Literary Terms and A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices
Clyde Edgerton, author of seven novels and a bunch of short stories, including one entitled "Send Me to the Electric Chair," writes: "When I was five or six years old, my mother took me to Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina, to see the electric chair. The purpose of the trip was educational: if I was bad, I would die. I soon forgot about our trip, oddly enough, until about three years ago, when I was fifty and she was minety, when for some reason she mentioned it. I don't remember why she mentioned it--perhaps we were eating lunch and she said, 'Son, if you don't stop driving so fast they gon fry your ass.' In any case, the memory inspired the story, and after writing it I remembered a great blues song, "Send Me to the Electric Chair," and used that as the title.
The story seemed to imply a novel, which I went on to write--and it should soon be available in bookstores everywhere. It's called Where Trouble Sleeps."
June Spence's story collection, Nice Men and Good Girls, won the 1995 Willa Cather Award. Her short fiction has appeared widely. Her story "Missing Women," which appeared in Southern Review, "grew out of a strange summer spent in my college town after graduation. Three women had inexplicably disappeared from a house not far from my own. The town was baffled by this, is how I recalled it, and a town likewise becomes a sort of entity in my story's narrative, though a split one, in that it puzzles over the women's absence while at the same time carries the secret somewhere within it.
I was working evenings as an editorial assistant for the local newspaper at the time, and I spent my days walking around, foloowing the railroad tracks that ran through a series of old neighborhoods. I was walking home from the grocery story one day, and an old woman sitting in her car called out to me, 'Your'e not afraid?' meaning, You're not afraid to walk here alone after all this with the women? I told her not, but what I felt was more complicated. I'd been, like everyone else, unnerved, but was defiantly venturing out because it seemed wrong to have to live otherwise--and vesides, it was broad daylight. 'If you get gone,' the old woman reassured me, 'I'll tell them I saw you.'
Working at the paper, I was privy to all manner of possible facts and odd details and downright misinformation about the women. The way the local media presented every tidbit, aired every theory available, seemed sensationalistic at times, but it was just as much a way of keeping those lost women at the front of all our minds when there were so few actual clues to what happened. The media seemed to answer our collective need to ponder over it, to not forget. I have never told a story in this manner before or since, but years later it seemed the right way to tell this one. The mystery remains."
I don't remember the other callers because I couldn't stop thinking about the bird trick. Much later, I began to wonder what type of person would sell these birds to folks who would waste fourteen days of their lives following the bogus training instructions. What would it be like toput up with such a person in my family or to have him as a friend? To find out, I put together Lenny Fontenot and had him lose his job. A character needs something out of the ordinary to set him in motion. Otherwise there'd be no story. Lenny makes his long-suffering girlfriend pay for their dates, he sponges off his grandfather, and he takes money from naive children and old codgers for worthless birds. His girlfriend beats him up, his grandfather throws him out of the house, and even his saddest victim, the deceptively simply Mr. Lejeune, turns a ten-dollar pigeon into a valuable lesson for both his crippled nephew and Lenny's grandfather as well.
Lenny's big talent is taking advantage of people he meets and making life a little harder for them. He's the type who never seems to see that he makes life hardest for himself."
Read the stories of these authors and many more in The Best American Short Stories 1997 , ed. E. Annie Proulx and Katrina Kenison (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
DIGITAL TOOLKiT FOR STUDENTS!!!
LearntheNet:
From "getting started" Internet basics to the web, email, newsgroups,
searching, web publishing, and multimedia. Clear explanations and useful
links.
The
WWW Modern Fiction Discussion Board Where You Post Your Stuff
Introduction
to English 201--A Virtual Version
The
Calendar: What You Need to Read, Write, and Do Day by Day
Details
on the Analytical Papers Assigned in This Class
How
to Write Excellent Analytical Papers
Some
Sample Analytical Papers Written by English 201 Students
Frequently
Asked Questions
Discussions
of ESL Problems at Dave's ESL Cafe!!
Stories
and Their Origins
Weekly
Prompts for Writing Your Short Story
Some
On-Line Fiction Sites
Some
Sample Stories Written by 201 Students
Writers'
Gallery of Pretty Good Liknesses
Home
Page Resources
Writers'
Gallery of Pretty Good Liknesses
Home
Page Resources
A Glossary of Literary Terms and A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices