Fiction On A Small Canvas
New volume
celebrates
the best in
Christian
short stories
Bret Lott reads stacks of short stories.
That’s part of his job as editor-in-chief of The Southern Review, a
literary journal published at Louisiana
State University, where he teaches English
literature. He has also authored several
volumes, including the bestselling novel Jewel(chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection),
and the short-story collection The Difference
Between Women and Men. So he was eminently
qualified to serve as editor of The Best
Christian Short Stories, published earlier this
year by WestBow Press.
The book’s first story has Seattle Pacific
University roots. Penned by Mary Kenagy —
managing editor of Image journal, and an SPU
adjunct professor who teaches fiction writing
to undergraduates — “Loud Lake” follows a
young Christian at summer camp.
Lott says that he didn’t make his final
selections for The Best Christian Short Stories because they delivered an explicit Christian
message: “I chose them because they were stories
that told the truth of human experience
through the prism of a Christian believer
blessed with the gift of writing.”
Short stories, says Kenagy, provide a
unique and rewarding way to think things
through. “I tend to think more in terms of
people and events than ideas — which is why
I’m not an essayist or a theologian,” she
explains. “As a reader, I love good short stories.
You can read a short story while your dinner
is cooking, or while you’re at the Laundromat,
and then you can hold the whole thing in your
head at once and keep thinking about it while
you’re eating or driving home.”
According to Kenagy, “Christian stories”
often suffer from the problem of pain — or
the lack of it. “The central Christian story…doesn’t shy away from pain,” she notes. “But
since Christians are often nice people, gentle
people, we get this mistaken idea that they
should be reading some special kind of kinder,
gentler fiction than everyone else, an idea that
is doing nobody any favors.”
What makes a short story excellent? Lott
lists a few essentials: “A short story has a much
smaller canvas than a novel does. The challenge,
therefore, is keeping it to the point. Stay
in scene, stay on character, stay on detail …
stay on target.”
Lott visited Seattle Pacific’s Master of Fine
Arts in Creative Writing program last summer.
“I think [SPU’s] program is important,”
he says, “because it allows believers a place to
work on the gift they have been given, to refine
it, to rehearse it, and thereby learn the depth of
the word and all it means and can mean. …
Certainly every other M.F.A. program in the
country teaches the same thing. But students
in this program know what is at stake. We
know whom we serve.”
— By Jeffrey Overstreet (jeffreyo@spu.edu)
— Photo by aaron hogan
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