Chicago native and WMU Professor Emeritus Stuart Dybek’s two new collections of stories won high praise from The New York Times Review of Books last month. By the way, his name is pronounced DIB-ek not DIE-bek, though Stuart says he'll accept either.
“Ecstatic Cahoots” and “Paper Lantern” both came out in June from publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dybek will read from the books at WMU’s Little Theatre on Friday at 8 p.m. as part of the Gwen Frostic Reading Series.
In them, Dybek says, he tried some new scenery—his previous work was often set in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. He also worked with some very compact formats, telling one story in just a couple of sentences. The Times’ August review suggested that the books speak to the “American present.” Dybek says that’s possible, but in any case it wasn’t his goal.
“When I sit and write, I don’t sit down and tack over my desk some big idea,” he says. “You just kind of have a story or an image, and you try and make it as vividly as you can on the page. And I have a kind of a faith in that process, that if you can make it vivid enough it will come with meaning.”
But Dybek says he had long eyed the very-short-story format, currently known as “flash fiction,” as one he would like to try. Its limitations require the writer to come up with “a lot of different strategies,” he says.
“And if you could collect 25, 30, 40, however many in one book, the reader could see that there was this desire on the part of the writer to tell a story in a very compressed way and that in order to do that the writer was trying all kinds of different methods,” he says.
“Inland Sea,” from Ecstatic Cahoots, is one such story.
Horizon, a clothesline strung between crabapples. The forgotten dress, that far away, bleached invisible by a succession of summer days until a thunderstorm drenches it blue again, as it is now, and despite the distance, the foam of raindrops at its hem sparkles just before the wind lifts it into a wave that breaks against the man framed in a farmhouse doorway.
Dybek says one question to ask of such a piece is: How could it have been told more conventionally? He gives an example:
John opened the door and looked out over the fields and there was a dress still hanging on the clothesline that Mary had left behind…
“It instead of telling the story this way, tries to capture what Edgar Allan Poe I think nicely called an ‘effect,” he says. “One of the things that was important about Poe as a writer is that his work argued that there was, instead of a story having to end with everything all neatly tied in a knot, the good guys winning and the bad guys punished, et cetera, a story could just end with an effect. A shudder, a shiver or what the French call a frisson.”
Dybek says he sees no need to put a “wall” or a “locked door” between forms.
“Writing is on a continuum, and writer can position a story in between a poem and a story and in fact that’s what the very word prose poem kind of implies,” he says.
Nor does the content always fall neatly into the categories of “real” or “imagined,” Dybek says.
“A writer can position a story between fiction and nonfiction, which is for me what a lot of memoirs are,” he says.
But he adds, “Readers don’t always agree with that and in fact if you do that with fiction and nonfiction, for instance, you can get in real trouble with a reader.”
