Extramural or Workshop-based? The Situation of the Short Story

Abstract

This paper relates ideas in Irish criticism to recent practice in short fiction and creative writing teaching. For Sean O'Faolain, teaching writers is impossible until they have developed a distinctive response to their life experience, a ‘literary personality’; and for Frank O'Connor the personality called for is specific: a mystic response to the universe inspired by membership of a disadvantaged community. But Bernard Bergonzi cites this argument in accusing the form of affectation and moral vacancy, because it is obsessed with loneliness and poverty and is unable to develop its characters' humanity. Robert Olmstead's story ‘The Contas Girl‘places undifferentiated and unmotivated characters in an unnecessarily sordid setting, and while its squalor and their apathy are related, we are not told how either has come about. But the equally brutalised characters in Richard Ford's ‘Children‘are shown trying to understand and overcome their circumstances, to formulate a moral and spiritual response. Ford's literary personality is also expressed, but is of a solitary and self-questioning kind unlikely to evolve in the creative writing workshop. Neither mysticism nor loneliness is represented there, and while the academy encourages the short story, it cannot inspire excellence within it.