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Letters From Alex
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Kicking Down the Door, Part 3

Hey, this is part of a series on writers who kicked down a metaphorical door with their writing. Like Marie Curie with science and Little Richard with music.

Alice Munro passed away in May at the age of 92, after a long career publishing fiction. The first unusual thing about her is that she only wrote short stories, never a novel. The even more unusual thing is what she did with her short stories. 

Reading Munro takes patience. The writing style and characters aren’t flashy, most of the stories about folks living in small Canadian towns, facing the kinds of things you face in life.

The stories seldom start with a hook. For example, here’s the opening line of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”:

Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university.

Gosh, nothing terribly exciting there. Indeed, after reading the first few paragraphs of a Munro story, you might be tempted to set it aside. If you stick with it, however, you’ll soon find yourself inside a tunnel that keeps leading you deeper into something fascinating.

As in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Fiona and Grant are a married couple in their golden years. When Fiona discovers she has dementia, she consents to enter a “home” when it gets bad enough, which it does. One day Grant comes to visit and finds that Fiona has taken a beau at the home, something that happens when spouses forget that they’re married. But did Fiona really forget, or is she slyly chiding Grant for all those casual affairs he used to have? Either way, Fiona is genuinely upset when her beau’s wife removes him from the home. And then Grant begs the beau’s wife to bring her husband back, hoping to make his wife happy. And that tunnel keeps on deepening.

Did I mention that her short stories are long? A good deal longer than they’re supposed to be. When you’re inside them, though, they don’t feel long because they’re delivering the depth and complexity of a novel, leaping through time and evolutions so seamlessly you barely feel it until you’re done, dazed by what you’ve been through.

Though considered one of the best—if not the best—writer of contemporary short stories, Munro was a modest person. She led a quiet life and had no real interest in publicity or accolades (she won all the big awards). As she said, “I always got lunch for my children.”

If you forced me to pick my all-time favorite short story, I would tap Munro’s “Carried Away.” Don’t get me started on how wondrous I find it.

Alex Steele,

Gotham President

Letters From Kelly
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Psychic Distance

Lately, my students and I are preoccupied with psychic (or narrative) distance, or how close the reader feels to a story. In close psychic distance, the reader stands next to the characters, perhaps even sitting in their laps. Long psychic distance puts the reader across the street, or in a hot air balloon overhead, or looking down from heaven.

John Gardner said in The Art of Fiction, “In good fiction, shifts in psychic distance are carefully controlled.” Writers often interpret that to mean the change should be imperceptible.

And sure, that works. In her story “Snowfall,” Deesha Philyaw uses first-person plural to plunk her readers as close to her characters Arletha and Rhonda as possible— or so you think.

“We, who apparently are built for everything, are simply not built for this. No gloves exist that keep our hands from freezing as we move snow and ice from one spot to another and from the car windshield. And no, the physical activity does not warm us up. It makes usresentful.”

Later, Philyaw uses second person to pull the reader even closer:

“In the South, the weather does not hurt you down to your bones or force you to wake up a half an hour early to remedy what has been done to your steps, your sidewalk, your driveway and your car, as you slept.”

The tightening psychic distance in “Snowfall” is a tractor beam—invisible and inescapable.

But you can be equally effective when your reader is acutely aware of the change.

In his film Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock starts viewers medium-close to Richard, who may or may not have murdered his ex-wife. The audience is close enough to suspect him, but not enough to be sure.

Then, another character kills someone, and we’re in the room where it happens.

The film then alternates between Richard and the real killer, Hitchcock keeping his audience uncomfortably close to the murderer. We’re walking right alongside him as he runs into his former co-worker Babs, as they stroll through London, as he invites Babs to see his apartment. At this point, the audience is trying to use its close psychic distance to psychically communicate STAY OUT OF THE APARTMENT, BABS!

Spoiler: Babs goes into the apartment.

And then, famously, the camera leaves.

It backs away from the closed door, down three flights of a winding, silent stairwell, onto the sidewalk, and across the street, people and cars filling the space between the audience and the building. We’re as far from that apartment as we can get without a rocket.

I saw Frenzy in a crowded theater, and when that camera started gliding backward, the once-quiet audience started shouting, “GobackgobackGOBACK!”

Different stories, different styles, different distances, but one thing’s the same. When Philyaw and Hitchcock shift the psychic distance, the story intensifies.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Letters From Alex
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Hotels

For your travels, I wish you well with the places you rent through Airbnb and such. Myself, I prefer hotels.

The way you leave your life behind, allowing others to cook and clean and point you in the right direction. Watching a TV that may take you to strange channels, especially overseas. Working out the labyrinthine layout of the place. Oh, yes, room service.

Most of all, hanging out among a collection of random strangers that could be anyone from an insurance salesperson to a serial killer, without you knowing which is which. Sometimes you chat with them, sometimes you just watch and wonder.

As the Gotham tagline says: Stories. Everywhere.

Three of my favorite hotels:

The Menger Hotel – San Antonio, Texas, next to the Alamo. (It’s in the pic.) You feel the complicated spirit of the Old West in these walls. Teddy Roosevelt recruited Rough Riders for the Spanish-American War here and they say his ghost still lingers at the bar.

Hotel Kempinski – Geneva, Switzerland, right on Lake Geneva in view of the Jet d’Eau. In the elevator, I was alone with a man unimaginably magnificent: a pilot for Egypt Air, tall and straight as an airplane with jet-black hair and mustache and the face of an eagle.

Kwa Maritane Bush Lodge – Pilanesberg Game Reserve, South Africa. They offer game drives at dawn and dusk where you see lions and impalas and the like. You can also follow an underground tunnel into a “hide” to glimpse the animals without them knowing you’re around.

My life isn’t so grand as these places would lead you to believe, though I have stayed at each. I’m also drawn to the humbler places, even a low-slung motel along a strip of highway.

Hotels light up my imagination. I’m not alone; many great tales take place in these habitats:

The Shining – Stephen King’s horror novel and itsoffshoots,set at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado. REDRUM!

Schitt’s Creek – The TV series (created by Daniel and Eugene Levy) about a fallen-from-grace family forced to live in a run-down motel in rural Canada.

A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles’s novel about a Russian aristocrat sentenced to spend his life in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel, forbidden to ever set foot outside.

“Hotel California” – A song by The Eagles about a metaphoric hotel that’s seductive for a while; though you can check out, you can never leave.

What is it that excites your imagination, causing you to buzz with delight or intrigue or trepidation? There must be a handful of things that do the trick for you. Find those things and make them your muses.

Alex Steele

Gotham President