The wonderful Engine Books published Steven Schwartz's latest collection, Madagascar: New and Selected Stories bringing back to life some stories from earlier, harder to find collections. He's been kind enough to answer some questions for National Short Story Month.
EWN: Your short story collection, Madagascar: New and Selected Stories, was published in 2016. What story within the collection had the earliest publication history outside of being in the collection, and what was that history?
Steven: To Leningrad in Winter, the title story of my first collection. I wrote it in graduate school, and though it won two contests, none of them included publication. I sent it around to literary journals, but it always fell short of publication there too. I entered it in one more contest that included publication in an anthology and that did the trick.
EWN: How did the publication of this particular collection come about? Were you solicited by the publisher, win a contest, agent submission, etc.?
Steven: I was solicited by the publisher Engine Books. At first the idea was to reprint two of my previous collections that were now out of print. But Engine Books editor, Victoria Barrett, had the idea of doing a new and selected volume, for which I was grateful and more enthusiastic.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as an author? Primary form to work with, or something you write when an idea hits, or …?
Steven: I once thought, after publishing two collections of stories with university presses, and then two novels with large publishers, that I would become a novelist from thereon out. As I put it once in an essay, I was wearing big-boy pants now, publishing novels. But after the third and fourth novels didn’t sell, I returned to the short story and rediscovered my love for the form again. I’ve been writing them ever since and humbly so, without any condescending thoughts to the genre about big-boyness.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as a reader?
Steven: Over the course of thirty years teaching, as well as being fiction editor for Colorado Review, stories have been my main meal. I also subscribe to a rotating group of literary journals and buy volumes by many new writers of the still flourishing form.
EWN: How will you be celebrating National Short Story Month this May?
Steven: The same as always, writing more stories.
EWN: Thank you very much for your time!
Steven Schwartz is the author of the novels Therapy and A Good Doctor’s Son, and four collections of stories, including the just published Madagascar: New and Selected Stories. A two-time recipient of the Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction, he has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, two O. Henry Prize Story Awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and is Professor Emeritus of English at Colorado State University, where he is fiction editor for Colorado Review. StevenSchwartzbooks.com
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