July 18, 2018 in craft
I'm finally stealing the time to learn a dance that my mother used to love--"it's the most feminist dance, Alina, no man to worry about pleasing, no fellow that needs to feel like he's leading". My writer side can't resist the urge to string those steps into a story, a series of Spanish instructional words describing parts of the body as well as flameno steps. The list form feels natural in stories trace new discoveries of knowledge or half-developed skills.
Though the feel is contemporary, list stories actually borrow from a classical rhetorical device, enumeratio, whichdivides or segments a big idea into navigable, numbered parts. We are hella fortunate to have so many incredible models in this form--Deb Olin Unferth’s “Things That Went Wrong Thus Far” comes to mind. In this flash, Deb uses the numbered list to narrate a couple's vacation from the first person POV. Each number makes further use of letters to expand the details. The strategy reminds of Benjamin Fondane’s “cine-poems” in that the list is structured by discrete emotional events rather than punctuation.
Enumerations
Since I'm not a fundamentalist about text or rules, some of the "enumerations" aren't as clear or numbered but the feel was somehow "listed." Without further ado, a long list of enumerated stories of various veracities that I admire and love. Because what's so great about having a cool list if you're not going to share it?
Aaron Burch, "Overcast" (Memorius)
Amorak Huey, "Where the River Is Shaped Like Words and the Words Are Shaped Like Blades" (The Collagist)
Andres Neuman,"The Things We Didn't Do" (The Paris Review)
Annabelle Carvell, "Good Girls Don't Use the F-word" (matchbook)
Ashley Adams, "What the Water Told Us" (Heavy Feather Review)
Barry Graham, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Road Trip" (Everyday Genius)
Barry Graham, "The Same Story" (FRiGG)
Blake Butler, "The Copy Family" (Fifty-Two Stories)
Caitlin Horrocks, "70 Sentences That DuoLingo.com Believes I Will Need to Know In Spanish" (CHEAP POP)
Carmen Lau, "Brief Interviews with Fairy Women" (The Coil)
Carmen Maria Machado, "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU" (The American Reader)
Chris Ames, "Twenty-two voicemails" (Heavy Feather Review)
Christopher Merckner,"Cabins" (Lithub)
Claire Polders,"Office Women: Three Portraits and Thirteen Questions" (Necessary Fiction)
Claudia Cortese, "The Hunger Essay" (Gulf Coast)
Claudia Cortese, "The Red Essay"(Mid-American Review)
Claudia Cortese, "The Twine Essay" (Black Warrior Review)
Deb Olin Unferth, "Things That Went Wrong Thus Far" (Boston Review)
Debbie Urbanski, "An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried" (Motherboard)
Elaine Chiew,"Compendium of Chinese Ghosts, Part I & II" (Jellyfish Review)
Eshani Surya, "Between Colitis Flares, Expect the Following Symptoms" (New Delta Review)
Eugenio Volpe, "Quadrupled" (FRiGG)
Glenn Shaheen, "Water in Its Three Forms" (matchbook)
Gwen E. Kirby, "sh*t Cassandra Saw That She Didn’t Tell the Trojans Because at that Point f*ck Them Anyway"(Smokelong Quarterly)
James Yeh, "Girl With Cool, Damp Mouth, of Four Very Short Stories" (Everyday Genius)
Jamie Grefe, "Obscurities of the Doom Horizon: A Series of Forty Eight Interconnected Stories" (Gone Lawn)
Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" (The New Yorker)
Jennifer Genest, "Ways to Prepare White Perch" (New Delta Review)
Jeremy M. Davis, "The Terrible Riddles of Human Sexuality, Solved" (Evergreen Review)
Jeremy Packert Burke, "Russian Verbs of Motion" (Nashville Review)
Jim Ruland, "The Lever" (Fanzine)
John Meyers, "Seven Confessions" (Cease, Cows)
Joshua Cohen, "IndenticalCity" (Fanzine)
Kate Petersen, "Homework 3 (Spring 2016)" (The Collagist)
Katherine D. Stutzman, "First Lines from Frank O'Hara" (jmww)
Kathy Fish, "A Room With Many Small Beds" (Threadcount)
Kathryn Lipari, "Twelve Things I Can Tell You About Cutting" (Smokelong Quarterly)
Kathryn McMahon, "Twelve Things Only the Mosquitos Know" (Cease, Cows)
Kristen Iskandrian, "Remarks My Immigrant Mother Has Made About Babies" (PANK)
Lea Page, "Things I Did After Each of 32 Rejections"(Brevity)
Leigh Stein, "Writing Prompts for Girls and Women" (The Rumpus)
Leonard Michaels, "In the Fifties" (This Recording)
Lindsay Hunter, "Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula" (Fifty-Two Stories)
Louise Phillips, "21 Stories About Samantha" (Requited)
Mark Atkinson, "Five Fears" (Gone Lawn)
Mark Budman, "Super Couple" (New World Writing)
Marsha Pelletier, "How to End a Relationship" (Nailed)
Matt Bell's "An Index of How Our Family Was Killed" (Conjunctions)
Megan Giddings, "Three Boyfriends" (Passages North)
Meghan McClure, "The Grieving House" (Pithead Chapel)
Mercedes Lucero,"How to Heal a Family in Three Easy Steps" (Fiction Southeast)
Meriwether Clarke, "The Grimm Brothers: A list essay" (North By Northwestern)
Molia Dumbleton, "Twenty Four Hours" (Gone Lawn)
Nicholas Grinder, "Formers (By Alphabet)" (Caketrain)
Paul Crenshaw, "12 Bible Stories in Need of Revision" (Subtropics)
Peter Wild, "Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style" (Fifty-Two Stories)
Randal Eldon Greene, "Irony" (3 A.M. Magazine)
Rebecca Barnard, "How to Be Another Person in Five Days" (Smokelong Quarterly)
Rebecca Orton, "Every Age She'd Ever Been"(Gone Lawn)
Richard Siken, "Field of Rooms and Halls" (Gulf Coast)
Rob Roensch, "Peter" (Bull: Men's Fiction)
Robert Lopez, "Three Subway Stories" (Okey-Panky)
Stan Brown and Brad Adler, "40"(Evergreen Review)
Stephen Graham Jones, "Modern Love" (Everyday Genius)
Steven Millhauser, "Thirteen Wives" (The New Yorker)
Suzanne LaFetra, "Nine Days" (Brevity)
Tara Laskowski, "The Etiquette of Adultery" (Necessary Fiction)
Tuli Kupferberg, "101 Ways to Make Love"(Evergreen Review)
Victoria Redel, "The Way It Began" (The Literarian)
Wendy Oleson, "How I Liked the Avocados"(Smokelong Quarterly)
Will Slattery, "Impressions and Preliminary Maxims Gleaned from Teaching High School Creative Writing" (Essay Daily)
Tangentially, a flashback to one of my list attempts: "Seven Stories About Girl Scars" (Tinge)
(Lots of thanks to Wigleaf, where I first discovered so many of these stories.)
Bonus: a few list stories forms I haven't read and someone should maybe try.... lists that might be fun and somewhat summer-tasty... lists I'd love to see or read:
A field guide to the plants in your backyard
Colors of night
Nicknames you wanted to use but didn't
Hotels or motels where you've stayed and what happened
Ice cream flavors
Toenail polish colors
Ways to say asshole in various languages
Little Free Library books
