2025 week 3 reading

Richard Price, Miriam Gershow, Ben Shattuck, Bud Smith + some more "show your work" novel drafting...

Had a really solid, productive, encouraging and rejuvenating week of reading & writing & teaching & life… but feeling exhausted and just kinda meh today (the news, the weather, the extra work of late (week 3!) add students, the weight of wanting and needing to and knowing I should query some more agents for LOCK-IN, but not really feeling the motivation to spend time and energy on that…), and so kinda feeling like a pretty great week won’t be fully, honestly represented here. So it goes?

I published a new story on Short Story, Long that is maybe my biggest recommendation of the week. I think it’s really magical.

“The Free Throw Shooter” by Peter Witte

I finished Richard Price’s Lazarus Man last weekend. Loved some moments but overall felt kinda disappointed in it. Some of that might be on me and my own tastes and that I picked it up and put it down a few times and just the kaleidoscopic way the story is written and told, which is interesting but also I felt like kept me from ever able to feel as fully or deeply sucked in as I really wanted. There’s also the problem of expectations. Lush Life and Clockers are two kinda all-timers for me.

Interesting that I was reading Price this week. I’ll get to this below in what I wrote this week, but I typed-up/rewrote a couple chapters I wrote back in 2017 that I did not remember at all, one of which focuses on a couple of detectives, two characters and a storyline I didn’t remember existed. Thinking about it, I would all but bet I read Lush Life and Clockers in 2017. (In fact, I just searched my own tweets and it looks like I read both in 2016!)

One of the things I love about reading logs, one of the reasons why I decided to try to finally follow through on keeping one this year, is reading log as journal/diary. As a note with his own reading log,

Matt Bell

says, “Since 2006, I've done my best to keep a list of the books I've finished each year. Why? Because I've always known that writers are made out of books—and that this list would probably become a truer biography than any I'd ever have printed on the jacket flaps of my books.” Writers are made out of books, and books are made out of other books. I like not just knowing that there is some Richard Price DNA in this current book I’m working on, but that I can even track the timeline as a kind of book genealogy.

So, I finished Lazarus Man this week, and watched Mulholland Drive and the second season premiere of Severance and some of the second season of Yellowjackets and a bunch of The Agency, and I read a short story every day…

the stories I read this week:

Sat. 1/18: “Carker” by Miriam Gershow

About a teacher with a “trouble”/“problem” (my words; I don’t think the story uses them?) student (the titular Carker) meeting with his parents during parent-teacher conferences. Another version of the story might have been focused on Carker himself, but this adds the layer of the parents that’s a really interesting choice.

There’s a moment where, in giving the story of what’s been happening in the class, after lessons and lessons of rebellious silence and refusal to answer a question or speak up in class, Carker is pulled to the front to teach a lesson that is what I still most remember, almost a week later. A really great scene in a strong story.

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Sun. 1/19: “The Silver Clip” by Ben Shattuck

I don’t have a ton to say about this story other than just general, kind of overwhelming praise. For it and every story I’ve thus far read in the collection…

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Mon. 1/20: “Graft” by Ben Shattuck

I like reading one story a week, give or take, by an author. Mixing it up, shuffling them around. But then when one really grabs me, I just want to spend time with it. That’s the case here.

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The Nothing by Lauren Davis

I also spent a lot of this day off reading the second half or so of this upcoming collection,. Here’s the blurb I wrote for it:

There are ghosts in these stories. Sometimes literal, other times only in metaphor or feeling, but ever present in every story in Lauren Davis’ The Nothing is something just off page, under the surface, aching and yearning and pulling and haunting every sharp, minimal, perfect sentence, not unlike the way these stories themselves will get their hooks in you and keep haunting long after you’ve put it down.

It’s a really great collection. Mid-reading, I also tweeted, “Feels a little like a mash-up of Amelia Gray & Carmen Maria Machado (extremely complimentary) tho also very much its own thing.” You should preorder it right now!

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Tues. 1/21: “Violets” by Bud Smith

A reread, preparing to teach the story on Wednesday. Which I think went well! Maybe my favorite story by Bud. You can read it on The Paris Review (if you have a subscription). (I’ll also send you a PDF if you ask me nicely.)

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Wed. 1/22: “The Story Hearer” by Grace Paley

I said, Shall we begin at the beginning?
Yes, he said, I've always loved beginnings.
Men do, I replied. No one knows if they will ever get over this.

I’ve got a bunch of older O. Henry and BASS anthologies in my office on campus and so grabbed this and read it during my long break between classes. I didn’t love this story, but an interesting read. Felt very “1984-y” (time period wise, not in the Orwellian sense).

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Thur. 1/23: “Tundra Duck” by Ben Shattuck

Some more Shattuck! And holy wow, this story is amazing. Not my favorite in the collection… I don’t think, but also wouldn’t be surprised if it sticks with me the most? The final paragraph or two just knocked me out.

I’ve now read 5 of the 12 stories in the collection and every single one would be worth picking up the book for it alone. I feel like they’re worth a lot more words than I’ve been writing here. Maybe I’ll go long on one next week…

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Fri. 1/24: “Congratulations, Baby” by Miriam Gershow

As noted above, I love jumping around with my story reading, but also love when a collection gets its hooks in me and reels me in and it was fun to spend most of the week with Shattuck and Gershow. Both collections are great and I kinda want to just read them and ignore everything else, but also I’m trying to go slow, wanting to savor but also knowing I’ll be said when I finish them.

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Here’s something I wrote/revised this week:

Rick looked in one direction, the other. At the chicken coop, at the pile of goats. Back to the coop. Putting the pieces together, recreating the scene. Hands on his hips, really thinking about it.

Morgan stood anger-still, staring at the house. Looking like he wanted to say something. Rick really hoped he wouldn’t.

“Serves him right,” Morgan finally said. Inflecting it like all he was doing was giving words to a shrug. Like he had to say it out loud, with how Rick wouldn’t look at him.

Rick waited a beat. Another.

Finally, “I don’t know…,” hoping noncommittal would kill the conversation better than saying nothing at all.

“What do you want me to say?” Another shrug with words.

“I know what I don’t want you to say.”

“That it serves him right?” Morgan said again.

“That’s it,” Rick said, not looking but he knew Morgan was smirking. Instead: chicken coop, goats, coop, goats. Trying to make it make sense.

“That he’s an asshole racist?” Morgan said again, pushing.

Rick took a big, deep breath. Let it out long and slow. Maybe noncommittal was wrong tactic after all. “That’s it, too.”

“Asshole racist,” Morgan said again.

I keep saying this, but this novel is one I started seven or eight years ago and am revisiting. At the time, I had four typed chapters, and another four written longhand that I never typed up. I’ve now retyped three of the four original chapters (the fourth no longer fits and has been cut) and typed up two of the four I had in notebooks. I’ve got two more from the 1.0 version and then am in all new territory!

The larger idea for the novel has been bouncing around in my brain during most of that interim, sometimes more centrally, other times pretty far in the background, but still there. I’ve always thought it had some juice, and in the second half of 2024, I started feeling ready to return to it. I had some new ideas, some stuff I was excited about.

This chapter — Rick and Morgan, two detectives investigating some mysterious slaughter of chicken and goats — was the first upon revisiting that I’d totally forgotten I’d ever had the idea for in the first place. Had forgotten this chapter, had forgotten the entire existence of these two characters and their storyline. Finding it felt exciting! It filled out my idea for the book, and the world, and really opened up possibilities and what the book could be. It isn’t just these brothers, Jack and Sawyer. It’s part detective story! In the next chapter, there’s a kid whose mom is missing!

My writing today felt a little blah, but here’s to treating that like a hiccup and trying to remember and focus on and hold onto my excitement over the characters of Rick and Morgan and the possibilities of the book to come, with next week’s chapter(s) and then beyond! Always important to remember, Omar’s words on the stand — for “how does a man rob drug dealers for eight or nine years and live to tell about it,” for how a novel gets written, for how any art gets created, for how a life gets lived — “Day at a time, I s’pose.”

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Thanks!

—Aaron

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