Introduction

I admit it: I've written some introductions. Except for not being able to worm out of it with
Best American Short Stories 1987, though, I've confined my remarks to books of photography. You know: The photographs are right there, easily viewed as fast as your fingertips can turn a page, so I've tended to write about various subtleties I've noticed and found interesting, or to call attention to elements more successfully presented in visual form than with words. I sometimes play a game in which I try to figure out the literary equivalent of a Joel Meyerowitz photograph (maybe Eva Figes?) or of a Diane Arbus photograph (Angela Carter?). I only play this game when I am looking at the photograph itself (or at the reproduction, more often). Yet I'm not very tempted to do the reverse: to think about how stories could also be expressed as visual images.

For one thing -- though you may be surprised that I say this -- the photographs usually linger in my mind longer than stories do. At least in the moment in which I experience them, they seem so real that I suspend disbelief. I know that ultimately they rely on façade as much as stories do, yet the photographs that fascinate me appear to already imply narratives (or, with some of my favorites, to reinforce my belief that words can be absolutely extraneous), whereas, for me, the written word tends only to be involving when it has done all the work something pictorial can do, and more.

I am drawn to stories that are at once on the page and off it, escaping boundaries just as a good photograph does. I look for a double accomplishment, both a bow to the so-called real world

(I am tedious with writing students, begging them to include a telephone ringing at an inopportune moment, or a bird flying by the window), as well as a defamiliarization of that world, all achieved by including the detail or details that reverberate, on which the writer has focused his or her lens, in close-up. In short, I expect the world of stories, and I expect them, in some way, to acknowledge the world. I'm a sucker for the ostensible immediacy of photographs. I want to believe I'm seeing something in the present tense, whereas with stories, I'm skeptical about an all-pervasive present; I have to be convinced the story would still stand up if put in the past tense. Why, I can't really tell you, but I'm here admitting to a particular -- and no doubt self-limiting-proclivity. And I do not at all mean to disparage stories by confessing that I come to them much more slowly and skeptically than I do to a photograph. Like every writer, bits and pieces of stories come back to me at the most unexpected
times, though I find that photographs tend to recur in their totality (or at least I think I'm remembering them distinctly).

Some individual sentences just kill me. I am constantly astonished by Joy Williams's ability to be a sort of Zen master of risible misery. To think that Mary Robison had such powerful, perfect spacebreaks in her tour de force "Yours," a story of about two printed pages, I consider a miracle. And the first five words of John Updike's "Separating" -- I mean, they are so brilliant, we know they could not portend anything good. Perfect timing, perfect words, perfect spacing (I agree with Joan Didion about the importance of white space), can be incredibly powerful. There have been times when I've been almost hypnotized by the perfection of an author's words. Consider the beginning of Don DeLillo's
Libra. The first time I read the beginning sentence, I closed the book and did not look at it again until I'd finished the novel I was working on. I sometimes feel like a lost puppy, finding safety in following someone who speaks gently and who seems not to lack compassion. And who also, amazingly, stands upright.

Well, in a sense, I do follow after those I admire, sometimes. Writers have a way of echoing each other, of using each other as springboards, so that critics perceive groups and movements, where there is only the puppy trail, I think.

But I digress. When I spoke of images so powerful they remind me of certain writers' stories -- certain writers' worlds -- what I wanted to say was that I'm drawn to things that seem vivid, and concrete, but that are also intangible. That texts exist as words, though when you are reading, you have the impression that what you see and hear and touch and smell and feel is the thing itself. This is by way of admitting to what is undoubtedly a particular sensibility -- and one that has its limitations: When I write, and also when I read, I assume that when something
looks right, in my mind's eye, I can place people in that right-looking world. Many writers seem to know how people behave and talk once they have a visual context for the room in which they stand, or when they envision the field in which their people have stretched out, but if the context doesn't reverberate, if the writer hasn't zeroed in on the real bull's-eye, concentric circles won't radiate.

When you read Eudora Welty's astounding "No Place for You, My Love," you're swept away because the physical world she describes is so familiarly unfamiliar that it almost becomes phantasmagoric. When Raymond Carver's character thinks, at the end of "Are These Actual Miles?" about the past, a time in which all miles hadn't yet been traveled (but if they had, he would have driven them in a car he remembers at story's end almost as a quintessential love object), you're spellbound because he's telling you what you couldn't possible have known -- or at least known in those exact, stunning
visual terms. As in Eudora Welty's story, Carver gives you the sense that if you identify with his character, you're everywhere and nowhere; that you are car, driver, used-car salesman, wife, lover, cheat, as well as the system that cheats us all. Both stories draw heavily on the outside world, which exists in both close and distant proximity to the increasingly claustrophobic, nearly hermetically sealed interiors where the action transpires. Both stories are seductions, in which the seduction of the reader parallels the seduction of the characters. And I'm a sucker for that. I'll take that ride any day. When you read the stories I've included here, look for the mile markers; look for the way ordinary scenes and routines are glimpsed, and then glimpsed again, slightly off-kilter, and the way the writer suggests the world's consequent reinvention.

I know I could point out some nice images, some clever turns of phrase, some things amusing and powerful in the stories in this issue. No different than an evocative photograph, they're right here, but they're not exactly quickly turned to and taken in -- and I'm not saying a photograph should be approached that way, either, except that, as with all visual art, when you look at a photograph you do get a strong sense of the whole -- what unity is there can, at best, register with instant impact -- because you have the advantage of seeing it all simultaneously. Then you have to start looking deeper.

With a story or a photograph, I usually wonder the same things: Have I ever been here? Are these people familiar, or unfamiliar? (I always hope the answer is "Both.") Why was it composed this way, as opposed to some other? And -- why not be honest? -- I wonder: Am I better off, or worse off, than these people? (Landscape photography is a different story. In spite of all those graduate school years studying the Romantic poets, I do not identify with birds, gardens, or with stick configurations.) In the back of my mind, not forgotten as I read and write, is always the day's news, which I get by chance, if somebody calls and actually refers to any world event (not terribly likely), or from
The New York Times, which is, paradoxically, both unbelievably riveting and narcotizing. The context of what I read on any given day is, of course, something created for me by the writer, but it's also partly determined by events large and small, as reported in the newspaper, or announced by a friend, or narrated -- usually glumly and briefly -- as my husband, Lincoln, paraphrases what he's just learned on "All Things Considered," whose introductory theme is sometimes his marching music from his upstairs painting studio to the cluttered world of the kitchen.

Like most writers, that is where I'm usually found when not at my desk. I stand around on the pseudo-marble tile and wonder about things, probably somewhat the way a religious person goes to sit in a church pew. I tend to stand, though, in confusion. The kitchen reflects this confusion, of course. Necessary to throw out flowers when petals have fallen? But how interesting the anemone stems are, like old men's crooked canes, once the distracting petals have fallen . . . Photos on refrigerator -- good idea to take down, when babies depicted have started college? Food -- any food that could pass for dinner, given husband's liberal ideas about what constitutes a meal? What are other writers doing? Eating excellent restaurant meals? Starving? Starving, I hear. Sometimes, the letters from editors that come with the daily galleys suggest, subtly, that the author is hungry, and someone such as myself -- do they correctly imagine the amount of time I spend around the kitchen? -- might be so kind as to throw a bone. I don't
know about blurbs. Couldn't I as well break a wishbone? Blurb writing is a difficult mode: So many seem like epitaphs that simultaneously flatter the blurb writer. I always slightly distrust them, the way I'm wary of most introductions. They don't seem guides so much as sighs heaved after the fact. They're the open me first appended to the gift you're about to receive. Oh, all right-but isn't excited ignorance to be trusted? You can always rely, then, on intuition and on trying to make your own order out of chaos.

A kitchenesque digression. By way of showing you that pronouncing on things, as one generally does in an introduction, doesn't come easily to me. I've been in situations when I've had to provide synopses to editors of what I intend to write. When cornered, what I do is write the piece. Then I proceed to write the synopsis. The physical laying on of hands seems necessary. It's true that I don't begin anything, story or novel, or even a letter to my parents, knowing what the plot will be. Like fingers hovering over the Ouija board, I find that I linger longer over some characters than I'd have thought, because of a kind of electrical charge theypossess; I find, time and time again, that what seemed a digression I decided to follow after (or, really, a moment that expanded as it exercised a kind of magnetic pull) resolves itself by becoming an important element of the plot I could never have anticipated (or, at least, could not have consciously articulated). I often feel that my fingers get me out of
trouble, rather than my brain.

Introductions often inadvertently try to tame or quantify that which follows. In her wonderful book
The Writing Life, Annie Dillard has written one of the most alarmingly true things I've read about the position the writer finds herself or himself in, vis-à-vis the text: "A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting 'Simba!' " When I think about it, that passage entirely captures the push-pull dynamic that I think lies at the heart of writing: You've brought something so monstrous into being (wonderfully monstrous, one hopes; shaggy; unable to be contained; no high-strung purebred, your unique creature) that it takes on a life
of its own, and the more captivated you are by it, and the more the work reflects that, the more the monster has succeeded in capturing you. We know this from
Frankenstein. There is always the danger that in speaking briefly about this monster, in introducing it, we predispose the audience to think this beast more tame than it really is.

Another problem I have with introductions is the same I have with movie previews: They give away what you're going to see. Also, the soundtrack blares; it's too noisy. They begin to take on a sameness, become a genre unto themselves. Introductions are where the editor lead-foots it out to a square dance and extends her hand, first left, then right, touching everyone to let the reader know that all the writers partaking in the festivities have been quickly, and formally, acknowledged.

Well, please assume that in being selected for this edition of
Ploughshares, these formalities and festivities have been observed. In reading manuscripts, I discovered more powerful stories by writers I wasn't familiar with than I had expected -- stories that made all the reading worthwhile, and that made me optimistic about the original, strong-of-voice, serious writers out there writing.

When they aren't standing around their kitchens.

Or whatever else they are doing when not creating -- or avoiding -- the beast.