SHORT STORY MONTH
Ann Harleman is the author of two short story collections, Happiness, which won an Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Thoreau's Laundry (SMU Press, 2007) from which the story "Sharks" appears. She's also published a novel with SMU Press, Bitter Lake. "Sharks" originally was published in The Boston Review.
There is a cover flap description of Harleman's writing: "Despite their often dire circumstances, Harleman's characters manage to find moments of light and grace." It is a fitting description for the story "Sharks."
The story is told from the point of view of a mother. She has lost custody of her daughter, assumedly due to the fact that she left her husband for another woman (while not stated, it is the only implied reason she would have lost the battle). The short period that the story occurs during involves the mother picking up her daughter for her weekend visit. While there is a bit of dialogue and interaction between the two, the bulk of the story plays out in the narrator's head.
That isn't to say that Harleman completely "violates" the whole show don't tell line so often heard in creative writing classes. She utilizes the bits and pieces of dialogue or interaction between the characters to spin towards the mother's internal thinking. It is this thinking that allows the reader into the depth of the story - the fact that she left John, her husband, for a woman named Susan; the fact that she only gets to see Anna, the daughter, on weekends; and just how much pain she's in over the fact that she's missing out on so much of her daughter's life.
The method that Harleman has chosen to utilize - going from bits of action to large sections of internilzation - works very well in this particular story.
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