Stephen Corey, editor of the Georgia Review, wrote a piece for the May/June Poets & Writers. Here’s an excerpt in which he quantifies the shifts he’s seen with nonfiction, poetry, and short stories:
Well, more people are sending out and publishing what they now call (forgive us, Father Montaigne) “creative nonfiction.” In the mid-1980s we received perhaps two to three hundred essays annually, but now that count has increased at least four-fold . . . The number of poems circulating seems to have held fairly steady, while the number of short stories, on the increase for a long canadian drugs cheap generic time, has diminished in the past few years. I think the publishing industry has worked overtime of late to eradicate the short story form, and I think some of the writing programs may have been helping too. Story cycles, linked stories, novels-in-stories – all these au courant designations are attempted endarounds in the pro-novel, anti-short story game of book marketing. The pressures on our potential new Flannery O’Connors and Ernest Hemingways to “get past” their story writing and into novels as quickly as possible may be opening a sad and profound gap in our literature.
4 comments
What a depressing observation about the fate of the short story. But perhaps those who resist the anti-short story pressure will produce even stronger stories as a result. I have to hope!
There are more reasons to improve. At least, we don’t stop learning.
Let’s do our own luck. If you think your are more effective then never hesitate to share it with us.
I highly appreciate your articles. It has got such an exceptional view.