Stories We Love: “Rock Springs,” by Richard Ford
by Drew Perry
Perhaps no story, though, plays back through my head more often than Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs.”
Perhaps no story, though, plays back through my head more often than Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs.”
Every time I read this story I get a thrill, the sensation of having to hold on tight for a wild, plummeting ride, a dizzying shift in perspective, a cascade of questions that I can’t answer.
Confrontation becomes a powerful vessel in this narrator’s journey, and subsequently, the reader as passenger.
So many stories I come across may bang around in my head—at best—for a few minutes after I’ve finished them. But I can sit here and recall “A Small Good Thing” in such detail—emotional detail—without even a glance at the text. That’s a well-told story, I’d say.
I love Megan Mayhew Bergman’s story “The Right Company” from her collection Birds of a Lesser Paradise.
Once upon a time in 1978, a dear friend gave me Colwin’s second novel, the Manhattan fairy tale Happy All the Time, to ease my then-broken heart.
On Lydia Davis’s “Letter” stories from her new collection, Can’t and Won’t
“The Point” does everything stories are supposed to, and many things they aren’t. It begins with a dream, for example, and ends with backstory, both big violations of craft and yet somehow perfect.
Happy Short Story Month 2014! Once again, we’ll be celebrating short stories all month here at Fiction Writers Review. This months we have interviews, reviews, and craft essays, as well as the return of our “Stories We Love” series: writers on the stories that inspire them—and why. So here’s to our sixth great May full of short fiction. We hope you’ll join us regularly throughout the next few weeks, and that you’ll help us spread the word. Thank you!
Some of the most complex and weighty signifiers are brand names, celebrity names, clichés, and propagandist phrases like “axis of evil.” These categories overlap: celebrity names are brand names, brand names are propaganda, propaganda is cliché, etc. “Axis of evil” is a place to start because of its obviousness. No educated person I have met can vocalize this phrase without quotation marks implicit in the vocal texture. What do these quotation marks mean? I think they mean we don’t wish anyone to think we are complicit with the ideology behind the phrase. We use quotation marks to indicate awareness of […]
Editor’s Note: The Hopwood Room Roundtable is a weekly event in which visiting writers of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing discuss their work and the writing life with the University of Michigan’s student body, faculty, and the local literary community. Despite the ongoing gloom of this Midwestern winter, Kathryn Davis filled the Hopwood room with writers eager to ask her questions. Davis told us that she loves answering reader questions. “You never know what somebody’s going to ask you.” It seems simple now to write this out, but I suppose you never know what you really think […]
A writer can never have too much (or too little) advice on how to handle rejection. Every rejection, no matter how discrete, invokes the sensation of being punched in the face, and it’s extremely difficult to be magnanimous while that’s going on. So here’s my advice: with a slight shift in perspective, it’s possible to find rejection thrilling. The first step is learning how to take a punch. (Having been raised in a boxing family, I acquired this knowledge early in life.) The second step is learning how to enjoy taking a punch. That’s the hard part. Once my debut […]
