Astray

Short Stories. I have tried reading short stories but have never truly loved them. They always seemed to leave me hanging with no real ending, with too many unanswered questions and me feeling somehow slightly ripped off. This was not the case with Astray. 

Emma Donoghue’s collection of verbal snapshots depicting social outcasts. The stories of people who existed only in dust covered history books on back shelves of old libraries. Characters who were remarkable and mundane all at once. They lived in the margins of a society that did not accept them - they just didn't fit in. 

Characters like Mollie who worked as a prospector, cowboy, cook and saloonkeeper in 1860’s Arizona. The immigrating Irish couple whose attempt at reuniting in America was rife with disaster. The mother who goes crazy from guilt and the woman who disguised herself and became a prominent business ‘man’ in New York City in the late 19th century. 

These stories are fact-inspired, existing previously as a line or two in obscure newspapers or archives. Yet Donoghue makes the characters come alive with haunting detail and vivid imagery with plots that tell a full story - all in about nine to fifteen pages per story. It is remarkable. 

The Afterword** explains that many of these characters were in fact real people, while other characters were “invented to put a face on real incidents”. It is Historical Fiction at its finest - in fact Donoghue calls her work a “hybrid form”, existing somewhere between the real and the fabricated. 

The elusiveness of writing historical fiction is a concept I struggle with in my work. How free am I to manipulate the story, to deviate from the truth, to enhance it or eliminate parts of it altogether. Where does an author draw the line between fact and fiction? Or is it not a line at all, but a smudgy, blurry band where the two meet and meld together? 

Ferris wheel at Santa Monica Pier
in California. (taken January 2013)

As a writer, what are my obligations and as a reader what are my expectations? 

These are discords that I will begin to solve as I evolve as a writer. But for now I am content in my evolution as a reader - finally taking on the short story medium! My reading repertoire is ever expanding, perhaps it will include poetry next... ok, I don’t think I have evolved that much!

(In reality I have chiseled myself halfway through Wild by Cheryl Strayed)

**I broke my own rule of no prologues, no epilogues, no forewards and no afterwords. But I was on a flight with nothing else to read and desperation does crazy things to people. I am happy I read it.   It enhanced my understand of the stories. Maybe it is time to drop this rule?