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title : Walking On Water and Other Stories
author : Wier, Allen
publisher : University of Alabama Press
isbn10 | asin : 0817307850
print isbn13 : 9780817307851
ebook isbn13 : 9780585212968
language : English
subject Short stories, American--Alabama.
publication date : 1996
lcc : PS558.A5W35 1996eb
ddc : 813/.01089761
subject : Short stories, American--Alabama.
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Walking on Water and Other Stories
Edited and with an Introduction by
Allen Wier
Page iv
Copyright © 1996
The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Cover art, original watercolor, Walking on Water, by Donnie Wier. Reproduced by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walking on water, and other stories / edited and with an intro-
duction by Allen Wier.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8173-0785-0 (alk. paper)
1. Short stories, AmericanAlabama. I. Wier, Allen
PS558.A5W35 1996
813'.01089761dc20 095-12753
CIP
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Page v
For Don F. Hendrie Jr
19421995
At the time this book was going into production, fiction writer and teacher Don Hendrie Jr died of a heart attack in Exeter, New Hampshire. "Hendrie" was one of my closest friends. For ten of the fourteen years that I taught at the University of Alabama he was my colleague, and daily contact with him was one of the pleasures of my life in those days. He was an essential ingredient in the success of Alabama's Master of Fine Arts program. Most of the writers who have stories here were his students and friends. I count Hendrie's friendship among my blessings and dedicate Walking on Water to his memory.
Allen Wier
Page vii
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
Allen Wier
1
Fighting
Michael Alley
5
Duck Hunting
Yesim Atil
15
Epilogue
David Borofka
17
The Taming Power of the Small
Will Blythe
28
Héma, My Héma
Mathew Chacko
40
Foley's Escape Story
Tom Chiarella
49
Mississinewa
Cathy Day
57
Prance Williams Swims Again
Matt Devens
64
Charlotte
Tony Earley
71
Forced Landing
Jennifer Fremlin
83
Wau-Ban-See
Ashley L. Gibson
95
Crawford and Luster's Story
Richard Giles
109
Howard in the Roses
Dev Hathaway
121
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What Comes Next
Laura Hendrie
124
The Twin
J. R. Jones
138
Won't Nobody Ever Love You Like Your Daddy Does
Nanci Kincaid
150
Stairsteps
Celia Malone Kingsbury
164
Hardware Man
Tim Parrish
176
The Wunderkind
Johnny Payne
189
In the MacAdams' Swimming Pool
Nicola Schmidt
196
Sipsey's Woods
Ronald Sielinski
201
Walking on Water
Kim Trevathan
209
Carl's Outside
Brad Watson
218
Stoner's Room
Hubert Whitlow
227
Contributors
239
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Acknowledgments
The following are reprinted by permission of the authors or of the publishers of the works in which the stories first appeared:
"Fighting," by Michael Alley, first appeared in Quarterly West, no. 21, Winter 1985;
"Duck Hunting," by Yesim Atil, first appeared in Passages North, vol. 6, no. 1, 1985;
"Epilogue," by David Borofka, first appeared in The Missouri Review, Spring 1993;
"The Taming Power of the Small," by Will Blythe, first appeared in Epoch, vol. 35, no. 2, 198687 series, and was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1988 (Houghton Mifflin);
"Héma, my Héma," by Mathew Chacko, first appeared in The Missouri Review, vol. 15, no. 1, 1992, and was reprinted in Stories, Fall 1992;
"Foley's Escape Story," by Tom Chiarella, first appeared in Foley's Luck Copyright © 1992 by Tom Chiarella; reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.; reprinted in the United Kingdom by permission of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc.
"Prance Williams Swims Again," by Matt Devens, first appeared in Story, vol. 37, no. 1, Autumn 1989;
"Charlotte," by Tony Earley, first appeared in Harper's and was reprinted in Here We Are In Paradise. Copyright © 1994 by Tony Earley. By permission Little, Brown and Company;
"Crawford and Luster's Story," by Richard Giles, first appeared in Ploughshares, vol. 18, no. 4, Winter 199293;
"Howard in the Roses," by Dev Hathaway, first appeared in Black Warrior Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 1984, and was reprinted in The Widow's Boy (Lynx House Press, 1992);
"The Twin," by J. R. Jones, first appeared in The Kenyon Review, vol. 11, no. 4, Fall 1989;
"Won't Nobody Ever Love You Like Your Daddy Does," by Nanci Kincaid, first appeared in Southern Humanities Review, 1995;
"Hardware Man," by Tim Parrish, is reprinted from Shenandoah: The Wash-
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ington and Lee University Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 1994, with the permission of the Editor;
"The Wunderkind," by Johnny Payne, first appeared in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, October 6, 1991;
"In the MacAdams' Swimming Pool," by Nicola Schmidt, first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, vol. 9, nos. 3 and 4, Spring and Summer 1991;
"Carl's Outside," by Brad Watson, first appeared in The Greensboro Review, vol. 50, Summer 1991;
"Stoner's Room," by Hubert Whitlow, first appeared in the Beloit Fiction Journal, vol. 1, no. 2, 1986.
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Walking on Water
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Introduction
by Allen Wier
When Malcolm Macdonald asked if I would edit for the University of Alabama Press a collection of stories from Alabama's graduate program in creative writing, I had no idea how difficult it would be to select stories from the many submitted by former students, good writers and friends every one. I hesitate to call them students; each came to Alabama with demonstrated talent and determination. For every story here, there is another that deserves to be here, and I've no doubt that we will be reading them in magazines and books to come.
The Master of Fine Arts Program
in Creative Writing has completed twenty years. I wanted every fiction writer who'd been in the program to know about this anthology; I hope I tracked down each one. The first few classes were small, and few stories were submitted by writers who graduated before 1980. The two dozen stories I selected span a dozen years, almost as long as I've been teaching in the program.
Long before my time, writers had been spending their time in west-central Alabama. In an earlier generation, the biographer, historian, and travel writer Hudson Strode had drawn writers from all over to his creative writing classes at the university and gained for Alabama the reputation as one of the two or three best places in the United States to study creative writing. Strode had hundreds of successful students and helped foster the careers of such writers as Harriet Hassell, Borden Deal, Elise Sanguinetti, and Helen Norris. Strode retired in 1963, and during the next several years creative writing at the university lost momentum.
Tom Rabbitt, a poet from Boston, was brought to Alabama in 1972 to design the curricula for a Master of Fine Arts program (the MFA having become accepted as the terminal degree, equivalent to the Ph.D., for writers in academia), and Alabama graduated its first small class of MFAs in the spring of 1974. MFA students founded The Black Warrior Review that fall.
The university offered me a job in 1976 and, after circumstances made me decline, surprised me by maintaining friendly contact. When the offer came again four years later, I accepted and drove an old two-lane highway through red-clay and pine-thick Alabama hills to Tuscaloosa, remembering something Wright Morris, one of my literary heroes, had said: Where there is little to see, there one sees the most.
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A miserably hot August afternoon in 1980, Tom Rabbitt welcomed me to campus. The next year we hired the novelist Don Hendrie Jr, who left San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to join us in Tuscaloosa. Rabbitt and Hendrie are writers I admire and enjoy, and they are teachers of skill and integrity. I have come to count on them in ways large and small, and I take this opportunity to thank them for years of unusually good comradeship.
Over the years the ''permanent" faculty has included poets Data Wier, Chase Twichell, and Robin Behn, and fiction writers Barry Hannah, Sandy Huss, and Lex Williford. Poet Elizabeth Libbey and fiction writers Valerie Martin, Chuck Kinder, and Deirdre McNamer have filled in semesters for writers on sabbaticals and grants. The MFA program's Visiting Writers' Seriesbegun on a shoestring, then supported for years with university-matched grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and now in the process of being generously endowedbrought a dozen or more writers a year to Tuscaloosa for readings and short residencies. The university awarded the program a Coal Royalty Endowed Chair in Creative Writing, held first by Wright Morris, who set a precedent of literary stature and excellence. Here's a list of chairholders, writers who followed Morris and spent a semester at the university: Margaret Atwood, James Tate, Andre Dubus, Michael Harper, Desmond Hogan, Cornelius Eady, Russell Banks, Gerald Stern, Marilyn Robinson, Jack Gilbert, Mark Costello, Heather McHugh, John Keeble, Brendan Galvin, Ted Solotaroff, Greg Pape, and George Garrett. Following their residencies, two chairholdersGeorge Starbuck and the late Richard Yatesmoved permanently to Tuscaloosa.
Many of the writers who visited became my friends. But, of course, the students are the ones who make a writing program succeed. Students came, of all ages, from all over the country and from other countries, with amazingly different backgrounds, to spend two, three, four, or even five years at this university beside the Black Warrior River. They came with the same burning intentionto write well. As a writer who teaches, I couldn't have asked for better.
Writers need the support of a community that takes seriously the toil to make poems, stories, novels. There's a smokestack in a mining town in eastern Kentucky (Harlan, I think) which has painted down its long brick face EAT, DRINK, SLEEP, THINK COAL. I've asked members of my fiction writing workshop to imagine that, here, at Alabama, the slogan is EAT, DRINK, SLEEP, THINK FICTION AND POEMS. And I tell them not to lament where here is, either; and not to lament what's not here. The best writing programs tend to be in out-of-the-mainstream placesplaces where a writer isn't as likely to be caught up in culture or glitter or social good times; places where a computer screen may be the only late-night show in town. A writer who's never before been to Alabama, never been in a Deep-South, steam-press August, never eaten fried okra or red-hair eye gravy, never looked up at the nightmare shapes of kudzu gone berserk, should consider all this exotic. If you're a writer, anything alien should be pretty wonderfulat
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least until you've exhausted all its possibilities. A writer may never again have the luxury of such a placea place where so many people turn out to hear a fiction reading, then go drink and rehash the story till the wee hours of the morning, and then go home, tired and hung over, to work on other stories, novels, poems.
The MFA program's goal has been to maintain an atmosphere in which writers are able to write well and are helped to discover the values and develop the resources that will sustain them once they have left such a community and must rely on themselves alone, to write and to write again. We've kept literature classes close at hand. Nowadays, writing workshops are some of the few classes in which literature is still taught as literatureto remind us of the traditions out of which we write. We've tried to recognize the difference between wanting to be a writer and wanting to write. That you cannot teach creativity is well known; creativity, talent, is a given, but does not guarantee good writing. If you can't teach creative writing, you can teach someone to read as a writer readsnot as a literature professor, not as a literary criticand you can help that writer become his or her best reader, best critic.
We've tried not to pay too much attention to grants, prizes, and publication, any of which may be corruptedat worst by greed or politics, at best by someone's poor judgment. Recognition is not necessarily the measure of a work's quality.
Even down in Alabama, we hear about the latest literary fashions. But there may be less pressure in places such as Tuscaloosa, far from the center of publishing, to keep up with the trends. Prevailing trends, like prevailing winds, are subject to sudden shifts, they come and they go. I'm suspicious of any writer who seems more committed to aesthetic theories than to the demands of an individual story or novel. We've asked members of our workshops to keep their own counsel and be patientto try not to let what's merely fashionable influence their goals, their aesthetics, or their integrity. What's popular, even in as small a venue as workshop "publication," what's fashionable and apparently marketable, is as reassuring as good manners, but not nearly as lasting nor as important.
Ezra Pound says, "Gloom and solemnity have no place in the study of literature intended to make glad the hearts of men." We've tried to be serious without taking ourselves too seriously. We've allowed room for whimsy, but kept holy our undertakingnot the institution, not the program, not the classes, but the aspiration to write good fiction, good poems.