The reality is that not everyone can be a doctor, not everyone can be a professional athlete, and not everyone can be a writer. You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can’t express your individuality in sterling prose, I don’t want to read about it.
–Ted Genoways, “The Death of Fiction?” in Mother Jones Jan/Feb 2010

Here Ted Genoways, editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, expresses his mission statement, so to speak,  a way of turning aside submissions he simply doesn’t want or have time to read.  We might ask ourselves if  this, in itself, is  “sterling prose,” and wonder why we should read it if it’s not.  Two matters make this less than “sterling,” in my view, and I’d like to point them out as a means to talk about what we  talk about when we talk about writing.

One problem is the speciousness of the analogies: a doctor becomes a doctor by going through considerable training and vetting; an athlete — which is something “anyone” can be — only becomes a professional athlete by getting paid, and continuing to get paid, to play a sport.  The “anyone” here, to be an athlete, is anyone who puts in the time to train, has talent, drive, and what is generically called  “athletic ability.”  Granted, some may wish they had it, but really don’t.  It’s assumed that everyone who is a professional athlete has some ability — though their detractors and anti-fans may deny it vehemently.

Is writing really like either of these things?  Not really, and here’s why.  Anyone, literally, can be a writer, so long as he or she is literate.  Children are encouraged to be athletic but they don’t fail school if they aren’t (I know whereof I speak on this one).  But they really aren’t supposed to graduate without being able to write.  Therefore, they are writers, potentially.

Genoways doesn’t say “professional writer” because he knows that wouldn’t help his argument.  The pay scale for poetry and much literary writing is so low that people who are professional writers — journalists, mostly, but also celebrities who write books, or who become celebrities by writing books — would hesitate to call them professionals.  And everyone who considers him or herself a literary writer knows this.   Many, possibly most, are not trying to become  “professional writers” in that sense.  Certainly,  most want to be published writers and most would like to be paid for their writing, and would like to sell their books, but many of the people submitting to literary journals are “amateurs” if we define “professional” as “getting paid to write.”   Many literary figures, some quite respected, make their livings by something other than writing.

Genoways is well aware of this and so the “professional athlete” analogy really doesn’t work, but he wants to differentiate between sheer ability or doing it for love of the game, and being an athlete paid to compete.  But pay isn’t really the issue when it comes to writing, even if VQR pays.  If it were they’d only accept submissions from agents, who are getting paid to make sure their authors make money.

The doctor analogy doesn’t work at all, not even really for academic writers, who also don’t get paid (much or always) for their writing, though they are expected to produce it.  Not everyone can become a Ph.D.,we might say, but, if you do become one, you now have a credential that gives you authority to conduct research and comment on research in that field.  You may or may not get paid for that; as with many writers, your real pay, what makes you professional, comes from teaching.  A doctor, generally, gets paid for practicing medicine, making him, maybe, a bit like the freelance writer, but one rarely hears of someone being a doctor “on the side.”

Getting paid for writing may be difficult, in part, because anyone can be a writer.  And though Genoways might like to think that being an editor for a respected journal is comparable to those who hand out degrees in medicine or those who hire athletes, it isn’t really.  An editor of such a journal is given the task of deciding, from all that it is submitted and solicited, what suits the journal, what fits with what.  Some of that may come from people with credentials, some of it not.   Some from students in MFA programs, some from their teachers, some from people who wouldn’t go near such a thing.  Or it may come only from whomever the editor knows and is in contact with.

If not published by VQR, the writing might still find a home somewhere, and if published somewhere, it may claim some at least minimal credit as published.  And that’s really the only point in Genoways’ prose that stands: his statement of his own tastes as an editor.  If  it’s not sterling prose, don’t send it, he’s not interested.  Someone else may be.  And so, while the person Genoways rejects is, in his scheme of things, not a writer, it may be that the person really is, and maybe even a professional one.

So what of Genoways’ prose?  Do you not find that bit about the “precious snowflake” cloying?  Does anyone really want to read writers who are considered or consider themselves precious snowflakes?  Genoways goes for the cheap laugh — oh, yes, Ted, we know that type, how rough it must be to read such poseurs.

But then he doesn’t say (which would make me be with him more): if you cannot write sterling prose, I don’t want to read you.  Fine.  But no, he says “if you cannot express your individuality in sterling prose,” which gives the game away: “express your individuality” is not sterling prose (at this point, I think “sterling prose” is rather less than sterling), but seems a concession to the language of that “precious snowflake.”   But why?  To say that the “sterling” expression of individuality will trump the “precious” expression of individuality?  If so, it leads us to believe that the expression of individuality is what Genoways is after, when the point he seems most passionate about is decrying the protracted navel-gazing of American fiction writers who don’t seem to know or care that there’s a war or a world or a world war going on.

If Genoways, as editor, were reading Genoways’ essay, well, let’s just say it might not make the cut.

Over the holiday, I read Michael Chabon’s new book, which has in it a very poignant essay about (among other things) oldies radio — how one day the songs you grew up with are now oldies, while meanwhile the the songs that used to be your oldies, like Elvis and doo-wop, are falling away from radio forever. In today’s radio culture, a song like Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” a baby-boomer favorite that had resonance for the generation of two after the boomers because of of the movie Stand by Me and, moreover, because it’s a great song, is now lumped together with all the way old crooner stuff, the Como and Sinatra, the Rosemary Clooney, which, while it has its own merits, is for the boomers and all the rest of us basically grandmom’s music. Even early Beatles don’t really make it onto FM radio much any more — if you remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, then you almost sixty or even older, which is to say a small percentage of the radio listening audience. And not a demographic advertisers care about (unless they are advertising prescription drugs).

What does this all mean for me? Only that today, driving back from New York City with my 3-year-old fast asleep in the back seat, I flipped through the radio until it landed on the sublime “Super Freak,” the 1981 hit by Rick James.

I grooved through the last minute or two of that song, it faded out, and then I was hit with “Ventura Highway,” the 1972 bit of lite Americana by the band America.

Now, I love both “Super Freak” and “Ventura Highway,” truly. They are both catchy and lyrically memorable, and they both have the power to evoke a certain time in one’s life. Now, the times they evoke in my life never really happened, but rather seem as if they must have happened — but it’s a special kind of song that has the power to do that, too. BUT, and this is the point, they are two songs with nothing in common artistically, thematically, or culturally. They have been yoked together by some radio programmer out in ClearChannelLand only because they figure some guy in his forties (or maybe in his mid-thirties, but with an affinity for both music of his own time and the lite fare of his father’s time) will remember and enjoy them both.

In other words, if one thinks that a radio station ought to have a character, then this is a purely cynical programming move, putting “Super Freak” and “Ventura Highway” together. Which is another way of saying that nobody really expects radio stations to have a character any more. DJs don’t get to make playlists, and radio stations don’t serve meaningful communities of listeners.

To that latter point: there used to be a New Haven DJ named Vinnie Penn, who worked the morning show on WKCI (“KC-101”), a Top 40 station broadcasting out of Hamden, one town to the north of New Haven. Vinnie — who also had the honor of working with Glenn Beck when Beck was a crappy New Haven–based morning jock — wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but he was beloved by others. He could be crude and juvenile, to say the least, and at times could be quite smart. Anyway, what I liked about him was that he was a New Havener. His show was peppered with references to real New Haven hangouts, to what New Haven was like in his 1980s childhood, to stereotypes of surrounding towns in Connecticut, etc. In other words, he was our neighbor: Our Neighbor Vinnie.

After he resigned/was fired/was forced out, he was replaced by this dude with the fake name Mike Maze. (To be fair, Vinnie Penn was a shortened, so fake, name too. If I ever stalk the airwaves, it will be as Mark Oppenheimer, as in “Oppenheimer,” the song by the Old 97s.) From what I can tell, Maze isn’t the biggest moron on the air, but he is no New Havener, nor do his ClearChannelBosses seem to have any expectation that he be. His show could come from anywhere, and it seems to go nowhere. It has no grounding, except in the pop-culture reality-TV ether. For some reason, the idea behind a lot of morning shows now is to re-hash the TV of the night before.

I miss the way radio used to be. I came along way after the heyday of free-form. I never knew a time when DJs had any real power over what they played. But at least they weren’t playing “Ventura Highway” after “Super Freak.”

You may have noticed in this morning’s New York Times the article in which it’s asserted that men in their twenties and thirties are actually more dapperly dressed than our boomer parents. As one bit of evidence the author selected Prof. Samuel Rascoff of NYU Law School. Quoth he:

“The fashion gene skipped a generation,” said Samuel Rascoff, 36, a law professor at New York University who specializes in national security law and who, being a fastidious dresser, has given serious thought to the trend, which he sees reflected in his students.

“There’s a sense that this return to style, or to a consciousness of how you look, is an attempt by young men to recover a set of values that were at one point very much present in American society and then lost,” he said. “It strikes me as being of a piece with the way young people buy their coffee or their food: paying attention to authenticity or quality, and to whether something is organic or local. They stand for a rejection of the idea that all consumer goods are ephemeral and inevitably made in China and bought at Wal-Mart.”

Here is Prof. Rascoff:

Now, it so happens that I knew Sam Rascoff when he was a wee law student (not that I was a law student—I was not), and he did have a way with clothes. But unless his style sense has taken a major leap forward, he is at best the fourth-best-dressed man I know. In ascending order, I nominate these men as better dressed still:

3. George Raine, my old college classmate, now an associate at Ropes & Gray, the Boston law firm. George puts the white shoe in “white shoe.” Consider:

2. Prof. Willard Spiegelman, the editor of Southwest Review and a teacher of English literature at Southern Methodist University. So well dressed that he appeared in a fashion spread in the New York Times Magazine. Consider:

1. D. Graham Burnett. This guy is a sartorial legend. He teaches the history of science at Princeton. I have only met him twice, but sweet Jesus does he have threads. In fact, he may violate the old principle (which I have heard attributed to Diana Vreeland, late of Vogue, and generally late) that if you dress elegantly they notice the person, not the clothes. (Or was it Coco Chanel?) He dresses so well I can’t for the life of me remember his face. These pictures don’t quite capture the texture of the fabric, the warp and woof, the weave, the whoo-whoo of his how-de-do. And one of the pictures is weirdly gay (Burnett is a married man). But they will have to suffice:

While I am at it, may I say how much that second Burnett photo, the rent-boy pose, reminds me of the author photo the late Yale historian John Boswell used?

Don Draper, eat your heart out.

Reading today’s cover story in The New York Times Magazine, by Elizabeth Weil about her couples therapy with husband Daniel Duane, was for me a bit like reading a second novel by an author whose first book I loved: I want to read it—indeed, there is no chance I am not going to read it—and I hope it turns out well, but the whole situation is fraught because I will be devastated if it turns out badly.

The things is, I really love Daniel Duane’s writing. Let me put it this way: I am from Springfield, Massachusettes, land-locked and cold, and yet he made me enjoy reading about surfing. In fact, it would be a uncomfortably accurate to say I have a man-crush—OK, let’s call it a crush—on Duane. He climbs mountains, he surfs, he cooks, he makes a living as a freelance writer, he re-built his own house, his house is in the Bay Area. What’s not to love?

But could my love survive his wife’s article?

The answer turns out to be yes, my love survives. But it is weakened, and will probably never return to full ardor. To judge from her article, he is a loving husband and father, but he is a serial obsessive of the kind I can’t abide in person for more than about ten minutes. He mastered climbing—then surfing—then carpentry—then cooking! (What am I missing?) To know his passions through his writings is endearing; to know them through his wife’s long-suffering observation is to make me realize how unlikely it is that he and I could be friends. Partly this is because of the inferiority complex all of us ineffectual, lazy non-starters have when in the presence of real doers; partly this is because of the moral valuation I find myself placing (perhaps unfairly) on anyone who would rather cook really well than order pizza and have more time to play with his kids. (Don’t believe me? Read the article.)

I am not sure how to sort this all out. The issue of Daniel Duane is way too close to my face for me to see it clearly. I love his writing, envy his career, sometimes envy his life, don’t envy his wife … you get the idea.

Does this all bore you? Well, at least his books won’t. Read them.

A number of threads in my life wove themselves together in recent days and it was all about shopping downtown.

The New Yorker ran an article by Patricia Marx that name-checked the old punk boutique Bonnie and Clyde—it was on Chapel Street, I think in the space where Wave Gallery is now. The article was talking about a boutique in Chicago that’s named after the store (which they said was in Stamford, but really I think they meant New Haven, unless there was a sister store in Stamford I’m not remembering) and I thought, “Man, Bonnie and Clyde. I’ve got stuff from there.” And I do—I have a dress I still wear, and a military-issue shoulder bag that I last used two weeks ago. Bonnie and Clyde was, I think the first place I bought Manic Panic at—hair dye—a habit I found very hard to break.

Then the other weekend I was at Fashionista. If you don’t know about Fashionista—well, maybe you don’t care, if you’re someone who isn’t interested in buying other people’s old clothes, shoes, jewelry, or cigarette cases—well, ok, but: Fashionista is just something to behold. It’s a vintage clothing store run by Nancy Shea and Todd Lyon and it’s a more spacious and better lit version of the Ritz, which was a vintage clothing store on Broadway once upon a time. Need an old tuxedo? They’re there for you. Ball gown? Not a problem. Kicky little sheath dress? Purple suede elbow-length gloves to go with the sheath dress (or the tuxedo, for that matter)?

You simply never know.

I bought a dress at Fashionista few years ago. I get compliments on it all the time. But it’s the damnedest article of clothing I own: it is made out of an old leopard print bathrobe. I love it. It’s frumpy and amazing at the same time. When it falls apart—which it will, one of these days; how long can a bathrobe really last?—I will be heartbroken.

So I was at Fashionista a few days ago talking with Nancy and Todd about Bonnie and Clyde, which they remembered, and suddenly Todd said, “Wait, I’ve gotta show you something.” She ran to a rack of men’s overcoats and pulled out a coat that had an interesting label on it. I wish I could remember now exactly what it said, but it said that it was made for the Edward Malley Company, a department store that used to be right across the street from where Fashionista is now located (on lower Church). The line of clothing was something like “The Churchstreeter.” I guess it was a particular line of men’s outerwear or something. Todd cradled the coat and said, “Look: it came home.”

For some years I’ve been acquiring clothes at second hand shops in part because I liked the clothes but also because I liked the labels, which told their own version of the history of retail in downtown New Haven. I have a dress (I wore it to a prom in 1985 I think) from Kramer’s—I bought it at a second hand shop State Street. If you ask nicely maybe I’ll show you a picture of me wearing it—high necked, but slit to here, head to toe paisley and head to toe sequins. It’s a nightmare. I’m never going to sell it. I’d like to be buried in it, if possible. It’s a great dress made all the more dear by the Kramer’s label.

I’ve got a shirt from the Arthur Rosenberg company; they used to give J. Press a run for their money. I’ve got an overcoat from Gentree’s, from before Gentree’s was a restaurant—it was a men’s clothing store. (Now, of course, it is nothing; Yale tore down the building and it’s, I don’t know, part of the new art building or something.) I have a hatbox from the Edward Malley company, as well as a very lovely cotton button down shirt from them.

Small shops no longer have products with their own labels in them. You don’t buy a dress from Hello Boutique that has a label sewn in saying “Hello Boutique - New Haven.” But it used to be clothes were marked that way. You can find very fine quality jackets with labels that seem improbable now: “Manufactured for … in Derby, Connecticut.” Derby, Connecticut?

I hope someone in Derby is collecting clothing labels, too.

When I heard Mark Strand read at Yale the end of spring semester from his New Selected Poems (NY: Knopf, 2009), I resolved to get a copy and read through it. The impression I’d had that Strand’s work inhabits a certain constant place is sustained by this reading, and it’s fitting that the New Selected should appear after Man and Camel (2006). There is a wryness in the latter volume that, I realize now, inhabits much of Strand’s verse from the earliest, but which wasn’t quite so forcefully apparent before, to me, at least. His reading was so affable, jocose even, that the sense of the poems as austere imaginative landscapes into which one peers with metaphysical intent collapsed somewhat, leaving a stronger sense of playfulness.

Strand’s poems have always been inflected by a sense of words as symbolic more than descriptive. He’s about as far from being a nature poet, who yet describes a natural world, as one could be. He’s also rather far removed from confessional verse, even though he does at times clearly write about himself, or as himself. Such poems are not meant to create a scene to contemplate, or to reveal the dramatic movement of events, but are aimed to make a statement. For Strand, to create a poem is to offer a kind of précis that renders the state of consciousness, that articulates a grasp of lyric presence, or rather articulates the lyric presence that we might spend our whole lives trying to grasp.

Sometimes, as with ‘Man and Camel,’ the sense of parabolic meaning is so deliberate its effect becomes quite funny. For Strand has a very dry sense of humor and he knows how to use it. He’s able to make us feel in on a joke that may very well be played on us nevertheless. The poems often seem quite solemn, and they are indeed ‘austere’ in the sense that they don’t seek out fun and music and sensuous detail, very little in the way of sound effects or vivid impressions.

‘I walk / into what light / there is.’ This, we can say, is so pared down as to be minimalist. To be so toneless is not easy, and the goal seems to be for the poem to be read as if the page itself speaks. There are a lot of imperative sentences, words that simply surface and command our hearing. And the actions are generally simple too: walking, looking, speaking, writing, sitting, thinking; sometimes there are dreams. Nothing very much happens, but everything is poised to happen because each poem is running a course, moving to an end that will clarify its intention, its statement. As with this poem, from Darker, way back in 1970, that in some ways defines Strand’s project:

The Remains

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

The nouns are so precise and yet so generic; we could almost say Strand seeks a poetry of the generic. If that were all he were doing, it might be interesting enough for a volume or two, but there is always more at stake because the generic can become the allegorical: ‘The words follow each other downwind’; and the metaphysical: ‘Time tells me what I am.’ But there are other typical registers here too: the familial thread is alive in each stanza, from ‘family album’ to ‘my wife’ to ‘my parents,’ so that affective relations, the human community, is always ready to burst into Strand’s meditation. And the gesture toward nature or to metaphor, ‘the milky rooms of clouds,’ can bring a clear, unforced lyricism to bear at any moment.

So what is the poem’s statement? Much depends on whether you view the final verse as illustrating futility (‘What good does it do?’) or whether it has managed to slyly change the terms while we were looking. ‘How can I sing? / Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.’ We are bordering on ‘I am that I am’; could God sing a song of praise? Or, what would God praise other than himself? The parents off their thrones and in their clouds is a joke image; the wife is sent away from this paradise of self-knowing, self-perpetuating Godhead. All the other names are vacated. Only the one remains. The poem is stuck constantly in the groove of its own making, like a needle stuck on a record. Empty/remain; empty/remain, ad infinitum.

And that is Strand’s characteristic jest, to start singing just when about to be cut-off, to point the way out as he leads us back to the start. In ‘The Monument,’ a long poem, written in prose as responses to quotations primarily from other poets, Strand says: ‘my voice is sufficient to make The Monument out of this moment.’ To make a monument of any moment, one need only write a poem, but it will be a poem which conceives of each moment, any moment, as monumental.

Reading through the 267 pages of poetry in this volume, covering forty-two years of publication, one is struck again and again by Strand’s fidelity to that task. His ability to bring it off is based upon that keen sense of emptying and grasping what remains, but it’s also based on what I take to be the jest of originary utterance. God, the Hebrew scriptures tell us, spoke first and created everything. After that, there can be no originary utterance. The poet, in enunciating his poem, speaks in an ancillary manner that purports to begin things again, to empty, or to praise, but there is always the remainder of that pre-existing world. Strand is far too canny to take that as a point of despair or of futility if only because the mind allows words to happen to it, and when they do, there is no telling what possibilities for speech might also remain.

I’ve had a hypothesis for awhile that short stories lend themselves better to film adaptations than novels do. Of course, as soon as I sat down to make the case in writing, I remembered dozens of novels made into good films. Still, looking at the different ways novels and short stories are treated seems to tell us a little bit about the nature of those literary forms.

I came by the original theory through no particularly powerful powers of observation except noticing that whenever a movie is made out of a beloved novel (Beloved, for example, or Lord of the Rings) their fans get very territorial. Meanwhile, when a film is made from a short story nobody notices. For one thing, readers get very anxious about how “faithful” the filmmaker will be to a novel. Will Hollywood will transmogrify the elegiac qualities of the literature into exploding skyscrapers?

Usually, though, readers just say to themselves, “I hope they don’t cut out my favorite part,” often necessary for the obvious reason that novels are long and have too much material to cover in 100 minutes. But apart from length, novels are a form that begs for the sorts of experimentation that other written literature tolerates less: digression; superfluous minor characters and subplots; essays; and, most importantly since Madame Bovary, the dramatization of an evolving internal consciousness.

War and Peace, for example, can’t be faithfully adapted not just because of its impossible length but because of the impossibly novelistic nature of it. (I’m ignoring for now that Tolstoy claimed that it wasn’t a novel at all but some other new form he was inventing.) With all the time in the world – or at least control over the Masterpiece Theatre schedule – a film of that book wouldn’t feel too long but too much like a jumble of four different narratives, a how-to video on fox hunting, an essay on the methods of cultural history, a historical documentary and the director’s commentary all at once.

Another way of thinking about the challenge of adaptation is to consider Randall Jarrell’s famous definition of a novel: “A prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” Novels by their nature seem to have imperfections that are appreciated as beauty marks. They would perhaps look more like carcinomas on celluloid, so they get trimmed away.

When novels are faithfully adapted, they are usually shorter novels. But more tellingly they are novels that don’t indulge in all the woolly possibilities of the form. Film noir adaptations of Raymond Chandler are good examples. Besides being short, the books have minimal exposition, all of it focused on present action rather than background, and are packed with dialogue.

The novels of Tom Perrotta, which have prompted faithful adaptations, are similar in scope, prompting some critics to snootily characterize the books as “cinematic” precisely because of how ready-made for film they seem to be. But to me that’s like dismissing Frank Baum’s children’s classic The Wizard of Oz because it’s too cinematic.

“Faithfully adapted” and “successfully adapted” aren’t the same things, of course. Little Children is faithfully adapted to a fault. (Perrotta co-wrote the screenplay, too.) In that case, nothing is left out, not even a narrator’s voice that works in the book. It is imposed in the form of a movie voiceover that spoils otherwise emotionally powerful scenes. The voiceover undercuts the natural advantages of working with moving images by telling us what we can see for ourselves.

Given how attractive written literature is as a starting point for film and the challenges of adapting novels, I wonder why Hollywood doesn’t use short stories more. Probably it’s an outgrowth of our behavior as readers. For one thing, directors who are genuinely inspired by the literature they read are probably, like everyone else, not reading many short stories to get inspired by. Two, the novels have more of the name recognition that Hollywood requires for marketing and promotion.

This is why film adaptations of short stories either go by unnoticed or succeed despite their origins. I’m an attentive fan of Alice Munro, but somehow the film Away From Her, based on her story “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” came and went without me ever hearing about it. Approaching from the other direction, I remember the delight many years ago of stumbling on Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash and recognizing one hilarious chapter as the original source of the movie A Christmas Story. I loved all the other chapters in the book, too, but I’m glad they didn’t try to jam them all into the movie.

I found an anthology of these kinds of forgotten stories called Adaptations: 35 Great Stories That Have Inspired Great Films. Apparently, the films Memento, All About Eve, Rear Window and The Wild One all started out as short stories. One not included is “Home For the Holidays,” which inspired the Holly Hunter movie by the same name, the viewing of which is a Thanksgiving tradition at our house. I can’t say if it’s a faithful adaptation or not, because it’s out of print and difficult to find. Every year, whenever the credits scroll by and I see “based on a story by Chris Adant,” I think to myself, “Man, I’d like to read that.”

The best-known recent example of a short story being adapted into film is Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.” After the success of the film, a curious little book was published that included the original story, the screenplay, and essays by Proulx and the screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. They touch on many of the same points I’m discussing here, but I especially like one telling metaphor of Ossana’s – that the story is an “excellent blueprint for a screenplay.”

In other words, short stories, with their economy of language balanced with a depth of emotional complexity, are not thickets that Hollywood has to hack through to salvage a movie from but something that a movie can be built up out of. Rather than existing as machines for churning out saleable product, short stories lend themselves to new creative exploration in film. That probably isn’t sexy enough to get much attention in a blockbuster economy, but once filmmakers give short stories a chance, they get the pleasure of engaging with an intensely felt work.

New Haven resident Robert McGuire is a freelance journalist, copywriter, college writing instructor, frequent traveler, and author of a new blog.