AP News, April 12th, 2007
Cynthia Ozick stood before a full house of literary fans, her white hair shining as she assessed an art form that could be likened to an old, but vital patriarch _ rich, historic and, the author feared, increasingly neglected.
"In serious mainstream magazines nowadays, with very few exceptions, the topical piece, more journalism than essay, has replaced the short story and usurped its stature," Ozick stated Wednesday night at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, part of Manhattan's Symphony Space.
"The topical piece will inform us, certainly, but will never enlarge us, as fiction can. The topical piece may inflame us as citizens, but it will never fire a reciprocating imaginative burning, as the short story can."
The short story was young and on fire Wednesday, thanks to such masters as Ozick, John Updike, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford and Joyce Carol Oates. All are among the past winners of the Rea Award, "the short story's Nobel," according to Ozick _ its 20th anniversary the occasion for what Updike called an evening of "short story magic."
The two-hour program featured numerous tributes to the Rea's founder, the late businessman, arts patron and literary aficionado Michael Rea, and readings that demonstrated the diversity of both the authors and their stories.
There was Ozick's frigid, terrifying Holocaust tale, "The Shawl," and Tobias Wolff's earthy "That Room." Deborah Eisenberg's comic "Some Other, Better Otto" was followed by an excerpt from Richard Ford's lonely "Calling," which he confided put some fellow Mississippians to sleep when he read it to them in full. Oates' "Slow" allowed no time even for a cat nap, running just a single sentence.
The look of each author was itself a tale: Ozick's bangs and large glasses; Oates, paperback-thin in a pink pants suit; Ford, with his high forehead and custard-colored slacks; John Edgar Wideman, frowning, even as he joked that he would read 37 stories, or ended his story "Cuckoo" by reciting the title word three times: "Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuckoo."
Symphony Space is also home to "Selected Shorts," the stage and radio series of actors reading literary works, and two stories Wednesday were read by performers. Lois Smith took on Ozick's "The Shawl," while Campbell Scott handled Updike's "The Orphaned Swimming Pool," about a swimming pool's brief, scandalous life.
Some authors favored their own voices, notably Paley, who at age 84 was the evening's oldest, tiniest and funniest reader. "I'm all for actors," she began, wearing a blue cloth cap, her girlish voice practically pickled by the Old New York of her childhood. "But they should, you know, act."
Updike, the Rea's most recent winner, was the final guest. Tall, yet bent slightly, nervously wiping his forehead and white, puffy eyebrows, he recalled a now unthinkable time when he actually supported himself and his family by writing short stories, with six pieces a year enough to make a "living wage."
"It is with some sadness that I reflect that I don't see how any young writer could do that now," he said, acknowledging his stories were often autobiographical, giving him "aesthetic pleasure" and the "benefits of confession."
"The short story has always been somewhat between longer fiction _ a novel _ and a poem. It has that delicacy a poem can have, of not a word being out of place."
