I recently taught a creative writing class called “Sudden Truth: Writing Short-Short Fiction & Nonfiction.” It may as well have been titled, “Sudden Truth: Reading and Learning from Lydia Davis,” for all the pieces of hers we read together. Similarly, I could call this week’s column: “A Writer Recommends Everything Written by Lydia Davis.” Break It Down. The End of the Story. Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. Can’t and Won’t. That’s just to name a few.
During my first two years of graduate school, I studied short fiction (continuing what I’d started while earning my bachelor’s) before transitioning into the lesser-known land (lesser known to me, that is) of poetry. There was comfort there. First the short story, then the poem. This genre, then that one. Here’s what the short story form looks like, and here’s what most poems look like. Since finishing my education over fourteen years ago now, my writing, from time to time and often to my initial dismay, has veered off course, crossed lines, stood in both camps — or more camps than that — at once. Is it a prose poem? An essay in the form of a list? An autobiographically inspired fictional poetic vignette?
I once brought my confusion and mild panic to a successful writer friend. “I don’t even know what to call what I’m writing,” I said.
What he said?: “Genre is a shelving issue.”
In other words: Don’t worry about it. Just write. As far as I can tell, and based on everything I’ve read about her, this is the exact path that Lydia Davis has followed for most of her writing career. In a 2013 interview in the Paris Review, she shares that her “so-called stories could fall into so many categories. I don’t want to have to stop and think, Today I wrote a philosophical meditation, or, Today I wrote an anecdote. Today I wrote a vignette . . . I don’t want that kind of worry.”
By eschewing the confines of definition in the creative act, she writes not “short stories” but, simply, “stories,” as she has found “the traditional form of the story very constrictive, very constraining. I wasn’t happy doing it.” She writes from her “own interest. If something interests me, whether it’s a piece of language or a family relationship or a cow, then I write about it. I never judge ahead of time. I never ask, Is this worth writing about?”
I’m very glad that Davis didn’t ask that before writing “Goodbye Louise, Or Who I Am,” which is not yet in written circulation, but exists only in audio-visual form. When I hear this “story,” which she refers to here as an ongoing “false biography or false autobiography,” I revel in its humor, the language play, the ways in which language, and errors in language, can both distance us from each other, distort our perceptions, and inspire more and better language. Most significantly, for this writer anyway, it expands and increases the possibilities of what a “story” is and can be.
Enjoy!
Click here to read the full interview with writer and translator Lydia Davis in the Paris Review online.
