I Sing The Body Eclectic

When I was first sending out the manuscript for Fatted Calf Blues I received many rejections.  A few publishers commented that, although well written, the stories did not hang together as a collection.  I struggled to understand what they were talking about.  I assumed they meant that a group of stories should have some kind of common link.  It made me self-conscious about the disparities between my stories.  For example, they take place in different locales. Some, like Phone Booth, are distinctly urban, while others, such as Elephant Rock, have a rural setting. There is also the matter of style. The Bridge By Moonlight is told as a relatively straightforward narrative, while Home, James has the much more surreal quality of a recurring dream.  I couldn't help but feel defensive about the collection.  Why was it necessary to have some kind of facile connection to justify this particular grouping of stories?  Wasn't it enough of a common link that they were all written by me?  In fact, I believe the eclectic quality of these stories is what holds them together as a collection.

Perhaps I'm not the only one.  According to the Turnstone Press home page, Fatted Calf Blues is currently near the top of the Turnstone Top Ten. Although I'm not entirely sure how the top ten is calculated, I do know that it is related directly to sales. 

Nevertheless, it seems that eclecticism is somehow equated with commercial and artistic failure. Perhaps it has always been thus, but  those of us who grew up in the sixties  remember listening to commercial top ten radio where one could hear Johnny Cash followed by B. B. King followed by Tony Bennett. Twenty years later radio became much more compartmentalised with narrowly specialised stations popping up everywhere.  I also remember that when the Beatles' White album came out it was seen as an artistic oddity because of the eclectic nature of the songs.  The individuality of the four members' personalities seemed to be the focus rather than their strength as a band.  And yet, when I listen to it now, I marvel at how distinctive they were as a group because of those different personalities.  

The usual pattern for emerging writers is to put out a story collection as a kind of introduction or calling card and then "graduate" to the more lucrative novel.  And yes, I am working on a novel. Even so,  I have recently written a few new stories.  Some have their origins in material that has been excised from the novel-in-progress.  I can't imagine not writing short stories.  Who knows, maybe my next collection will have a more cohesive theme unifying it.  Possibly a novel constructed as a series of connected stories.  That seems to be particularly in fashion these days.  Call me fashionably unfashionable, but I'm more attracted to the unpredictability of a grab bag of stories that could fit anywhere and nowhere.