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What She Knows: Stories
Abstract
What She Knows is a collection of ten stories that may better illustrate what isn't known than what is. Often the characters in my stories are confronted with mysteries or problems for which there seem to be no right answers. In the course of events what they often understand, or don't understand, is that the world is much more complex than they in their naivete first imagined it to be. What makes the bildungsroman a literary form I find interesting is the idiosyncratic nature of how we all come to such awareness. The answers that we find are rarely those expected. And as a postmodern writer I've deliberately frustrated my readers' expectations as well. Perhaps my attempts will seem coy on occasion, but I am interested right now in exploring ways to tell the story as much as I am interested in content alone. Most of the stories in this collection came about through writing exercises, some I assigned myself and some inspired by others. The first line of “What She Knows,” came from an exercise in a class I was teaching at Nebraska Wesleyan. “This is Not the Tropics,” came about because of a poetry writing exercise described by Marcia Southwick (two objects and a central metaphor). I found those elements weren't enough with which to build a story and had to wait until the rest of the story came to me several months later, long after I'd given up on it. “A Break in the Weather” was assigned to me by my friends Liz Ahl and Chauna Craig on a writing/camping trip in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the ritual that forms the center of “Miss Kielbasa” was discovered during a visit to Sherman County. Although I had grown up in the area, and later learned that many of my family members had long been aware of the Polish Days Queen contest, it was a revelation to me. The story was hard won, and found its current form only on the eve of the deadline for this dissertation after many, many revisions. A friend of mine who loves novels but dislikes short stories says that there isn't enough in a short story for her to appreciate. She says she's frustrated by just starting to read about someone who interests her and then finding the story is over. I told her that if the novel is like a house (for want of a better analogy) where the reader is invited to open cupboards and closet doors, and is made welcome in a strange space, the short story is like looking into the window of that house and seeing only a partial view of what is inside. The rest we have to figure out for ourselves. “The short story offers more opportunity for collaboration with the reader,” I say hopefully. The unoccupied room of “The Blue Room,” represents for me the metaphorical space in which memory and imagination meet. It is the place where stories are told and retold, the site of an essential collaboration between the writer and the reader. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
Subject Area
American literature|Modern literature|Creative writing
Recommended Citation
Randolph, Ladette Elaine, "What She Knows: Stories" (1999). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9929224.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9929224