"Where Is Here" by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published nearly 60 novels, several plays and novellas, and several collections of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels "Black Water", "What I Lived For", and "Blonde" along with two of her short story collections, "The Wheel of Love" and "Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories" were all nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won the National Book Award, for her novel "Them", plus two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize. For many years, she has been acknowledged as a master of the short story...and, yet, I had never read her work before I strayed into this little collection of stories, "Where Is Here". It is an interesting and entertaining little book containing 35 stories in less than 200 pages. In defense of my having never previously read her work, I can only say that nobody has the time to read every popular writer's works, and many writers whose work is popular are not worth reading anyway. That statement does not fit the work of Joyce Carol Oates. The stories are almost all markedly short, not quite what gets called "Flash Fiction" in today's world but generally shorter than most people write short stories. The stories only average about 5 1/2 pages each, maybe 1,500 words, with the longest being 15 pages. I am not and never will be a fan of "Flash Fiction" since I can get the same kind of thing sitting in a country store or small town restaurant listening to conversations between men with dirty work boots and women who haven't worn anything except Levis in 99% of their lives as waitresses, maids, factory workers, and store clerks. But I like Joyce Carol Oates' stories. They generally contain all the important elements of a good story: Plot, Character Development, Conflict, and most times Conflict Resolution. One aspect of her stories which is interesting is that she almost never gives names to her characters. She describes them with a few choice words which generally do not include a lot of adjectives about appearance, clothes, or other aspects which are not directly a part of her story. It works. But it probably does not work for most other short story writers. She frequently writes stories about men and women who can be extremely violent, aggressive, and not the kind of person you would want to bring home to meet your mother. She writes stories about ordinary people in ordinary situations which might not end in ordinary ways. I recently attended the funeral of a man I had known for about 20 or so years who, the first time I met him, introduced himself to me and in the next 30 minutes told me the story of his life which began with the words "my name is...and I shot my brother six times in that little restaurant up the road in front of ten witnesses." He was the kind of character you might find in a Joyce Carol Oates short story. If that doesn't make her work worth reading, what else could I ever say about it. Will that make me write a 1,500 word short story about somebody like that...probably not. I could never adequately tell his story in 1,500 words...but Joyce Carol Oates might. It can sure be interesting to read stories like that when the author is someone like Joyce Carol Oats.