![]() This extract is from Means’ story The Grip from his wonderful 2000 collection Assorted Fire Events.īeneath him the metal gave and sang accompanied by the tedious clack of rail gaps it was the couplings whacking each other or something. His stories have the stripped down, unsentimental quality of Raymond Carver, but also as strong a sense of place as Flannery O’Connor (see below) – though if O’Connor’s milieu was the deep south, Means’ is distinctly the Hudson River basin and the Mid West. Means has written four short story collections and a novel ( Hystopia, 2016). Note the piercing accuracy of observation, the precision and ‘pinning’ of a particular place and time, so that the rest of the story takes place in a setting we already feel we know and understand. Place to write stories windows#There were stories of children who had been swept away, down towards the rapids and the locks and the Algoma Steel fires of the Soo which we could sometimes see from our bedroom windows on overcast nights, glowing dull red against the clouds. But we were forbidden to swim in the water, because of the strong current. There was a short beach, behind which the cottages, with their contrasting trim – green against white, maroon against robin’s egg blue, brown against yellow – were lined up like little shoeboxes, each with its matching outhouse at an unsanitary distance behind. This extract is taken from her story Betty which appeared in the 1982 Simon and Schuster edition of the collection. These writers are: Margaret Atwood David Means Flannery O’Connor and Nikolai Gogol.Ī sense of location is a striking feature of much of Margaret Atwood’s writing, particularly so in her short story collection Dancing Girls. This week, as we continue the elusive pursuit of the ‘magic recipe’ for short stories, we look at four short story writers whose sense of place transports the reader so firmly into the story’s setting that the setting becomes, in a sense, the story’s leading character. ![]() Four short story writers who put place at the heart of their stories ![]()
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