I'd like to put in a good word for Carol Emshwiller's wonderful short stories. Her 1974 collection, Joy in Our Cause, published by Harper & Row, was one that influenced me a great deal. I guess the stories could be classified as experimental, but they are all playful as well as profound. John Alfred Avant in his review in The New Republic wrote: (forgive the weird font sizing from my cutting and pasting)
"Carol Emshwiller's stories are a world unto themselves, and it's very hard to write about what makes them so special—to do that successfully you need a freedom of language as total as Emshwiller's... she throws away plot and character development (and often throws away character entirely) and practically every customary fiction mechanism I can think of... these stories seem to be written by someone who has come to writing with no preconceptions and, playing with words, put them into all the right patterns. Her stories, if that is what they are, seem breathed onto the page; and our response is as though we were encountering her perfectly ordinary words for the first time.
Emshwiller has created new forms for herself but she is alone among the recent experimentalists in that her abandonment of plot and character doesn't seem the result of rebellion against other kinds of fiction, and she doesn't use her new forms as metaphors for meanness of spirit. It's difficult to describe her stories without making them sound banal, which is a serious problem since I want you to read them. They are about the wonder of being Carol Emshwiller, writer, wife, mother, dreamer and lover, whose life is bound up with others. Joy in Our Cause, which could also be called Song of Myself, is a celebration of life. Its language is extraordinarily fluid and carries you along with a childlike grace, making you share in the discovery of the book as it happens. A book like this becomes a part of your life. Carol Emshwiller mostly writes about herself, the frustrations of her daily life and of being a writer, her fantasies, sex, menstruation-the texture of her life. She often seems to be dropping sentences and paragraphs at random; and the stories that aren't autobiographical (“Destinations, Premonitions and the Nature of Anxiety” is about Bach's eldest son, who travels across America, stopping at Howard Johnson's restaurants) are usually as amorphous as the autobiographical ones. We may wonder what there is in Emshwiller's loose connections that is so clearly complete.
The connections, of course, only appear to be loose. Emshwiller is an elliptical writer, she may even seem tentative, but her emotional effects are very precise. She goes all the way with her highly developed intuitions, which are perhaps closer to a poet's than to a fiction writer's. Her stories rarely move logically; they rely as Northrop Frye said of Emily Dickinson's poems, not on the compelling argument but on the infinitely suggestive image, and on the perfect fitting of image to rhythm. They frequently include listings of things Emshwiller would like to do, people she'd like to meet or be, other writers she enjoys, and the listings help to create the mood she wants.
Emshwiller's intuitions may also be close to those of a moviemaker... Emshwiller uses her techniques to give us the most important thing she has to give: a simplicity of feeling that few writers ever reach. Like all serious fiction writers, she writes because she is driven to. We sense that she has long been thinking and feeling her life through, that she has gotten in touch with herself in ways that are supremely important to us as well as to her. Emshwiller works on a small scale, but she touches us deeply by writing about the most commonplace events of her life; and she has learned to use words so well that they are no barrier between what she is and putting what she is on the page. We can ask no more of any writer."
Emshwiller has become mostly known as a science fiction writer, but she still writes amazing stories. In 1989 Coffee House Press published her story collection, Verging on the Pertinent, which is fantasy/SF-based but contains jolting, sly stories unlike nearly everything else I've seen in genre writing.
Her 2002 story collection, Report to the Men's Club (Small Beer Press) is as delicious as the book published 28 years earlier. Writing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, James Sallis wrote:
"Report to the Men's Club contains nineteen Emshwiller stories published between 1977 and 2002, most of them toward the late end. The first, "Grandma," limns the final days of a superhero from the point of view of her granddaughter:
"She tried to fly as she used to. She did fly. For my sake. She skimmed along just barely above the sage and bitterbrush, her feet snagging at the taller ones. That was all the lift she could get."
The last story, "After All," follows a confused elderly woman in her flight from home. Just as she starts back, there are bright, bright lights, no cameras, and far too much action.
"Who would have thought it, the end of the world as if just for me. Right on time, too, before my slippers give out entirely."
"Mrs. Jones" tells the story of spinster sisters, one of whom finds a creature in the orchard, rescues and rehabilitates it even to the extent of hacking off its wings, and finally takes it on a honeymoon.
"Water Master" and "Desert Child" are, like many of Emshwiller's stories, novels in miniature, creating entire, teeming worlds while offering up but a single slice--never figuratively, from the outside, but always intimately, from within. As readers we're instantly inside the story looking out."
Carol Emshwiller has continued to produce amazing, unique stories in her seventies. She's a wonder.
Richard Grayson is the author of the short story, "Vampires of Northwest Arkansas," as well as a slew of story collections, a memoir, and much more that can be seen at his website.
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