Dear Short Story,
I won’t write you love letters because you don’t need love letters. I know, you can’t seem to shake your negative rep: “no one likes you, you’re only good for workshop, no one wants to buy you.” It’s hard living in a world where you are forever second best. (I know how that feels!) You had your heyday in the 14th century with One Thousand and One Nights and The Canterbury Tales. It’s in the 17th and 18th centuries where the novel is the most popular girl in the world. But you come back for your crown in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the damn big, curvaceous novel always seems to best you. She sure knows how to seduce!
You may have spent a lot of time going to self-help seminars, shouting from the sidelines, having people speak on your behalf, trying to figure out how to make your detractors love you. But, oh, short story, you can’t make people love you. As I once wrote, “what must be cajoled will never stay.” You can’t convince people of your worth.
So, it’s not for you to change how the world sees you; it’s not for you to carry a chip on your shoulder, a megaphone at your lips, always trying to show how you are good enough. You have no control over that.
It’s for you to step out of the novel’s shadow. You don’t need to stand next to anybody who takes all your shine. You have your own spotlight to bloom under that is not predicated on comparison but is predicated on your sole existence. People like to create drama: #TeamShortStory or #TeamNovel. But you don’t need each other to exist, and you don’t to be pitted against each other. Like Paul D said to Sethe: “You your best thing.”
Just take a look at the stories in this collection. What you hold in your hands is the world; these stories allow us to traverse countries and continents, dive into familial love or love woes, and yearn for and arrive at freedom. And that is your best thing.
– Ivelisse Rodriguez, PhD
Guest Co-Editor of The Fiction Issue
