Short Story or Vignette???

Since the time I entered Upward Bound at Alice Lloyd College when I was about 14, I have known and been friends with a fairly large number of published authors.  During my first summer in that program, I met and became friendly with Albert Stewart and William Howard Cohen both of whom were major American poets.  Albert Stewart was also the founder of Appalachian Heritage Magazine and a mentor to numerous young writers throughout his career.  William Howard Cohen was an internationally recognized expert on Haiku and served as the American Cultural Delegate in the area of poetry at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. Cohen was also an outspoken and highly effective environmental advocate who fought bravely and well against strip mining in Appalachia. He also mentored numerous young writers in both Eastern Kentucky and Florida where he lived the last years of his life.  I have always been extremely proud to have known and been friendly with both men.  During that first Upward Bound summer, the program directors also brought Harry Caudill to speak at one of our assemblies.  His strongly negative book about Appalachia, "Night Comes To The Cumberlands", was still in the height of its popularity and he was considered by many to be an expert on Appalachia.  I can say that I met Caudill and I can also say that I am proud that, as a native Appalachian, I was not pleased with him and still am not.  I have said all the preceding, a rather long winded introduction, in order to say this once again, I have known and been friends with a fairly large number of published authors, learned a great deal from them both about life and writing.  And that brings me to the title of this article, Short Story or Vignette???

Which is it, a short story or a vignette is a question which is frequently asked by readers and writers about short works of fiction.  It is also a question which should be asked even more frequently, especially by the numerous people who mistakenly believe they are writing short stories.  As a result of having known the writers I have known, I have come to regularly either buy or be given books by many people some of whom are genuine writers and some of whom only wish to be but have managed to make it into print anyway.  I have in my possession at this time several books written and published by people I know and labeled as short story collections.  A sizable portion of those "short story collections", most of them self-published through vanity presses, do not contain a single actual short story and are, instead, collections of vignettes some of which could have been turned into short stories by a skillful writer, and others which Leo Tolstoy, Flannery O'Connor, or William Faulkner could not have stretched enough to make them an actual short story.  That brings us to the key question I hope to address in this article.  What is the difference between a short story and a vignette?

A commonly used definition of the term "short story" runs something like this:  the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no shorter than 1,000 and no longer than 20,000 words. An actual short story should contain these five essential elements, characters, plot, setting, conflict, and theme. An equally common definition of the term "vignette" runs something like this: a brief, evocative account, description, or episode.  A less common definition of the term "vignette" runs something like this: a vignette is a cute little story which, on a good day, might include one or two of those key elements of a short story but never by any stretch of the imagination will a vignette contal all five.  By that I mean that a vignette is something a first grader might tell her mother when she returns home from school. Two or three old men sitting in the local country store, gas station, or barber shop swap vignettes.  Old, blue haired widows do the same in beauty shops, meat markets, and boutiques.  While I almost never say anything this personal or negative to any of my friends and acquaintances who have produced collections of vignettes which they insist on forcing to masquerade as short stories, I really do not like buying, borrowing, or being given such collections of vignettes which a vanity press has managed to make a buck on while perpetuating the misbegotten dreams of the people who cranked them out on a PC or antique Underwood in the lonely silence of their home.  

It is also interesting that, for a skillful writer, it is not necessary to produce a work the size of "War And Peace" in order to tell a good story with all five of those key elements, characters, plot, theme, setting, and conflict. While I despise what is now known and inordinately popular as "flash fiction", I also recognize that it is possible to tell a great story with a bare minimum number of well chosen, well organized words.  The best example of this I can think of is the classic Kate Chopin short story, "The Story Of An Hour".  This incredible little masterpiece of roughly a thousand words contains every one of those five key elements and perfection to boot.  With an opening sentence of less than thirty words, we meet the central character, Mrs. Mallard, learn that she has a heart condition, that she is/was married, that her husband is dead, and that someone cares enough about her to "break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death."  Then the story goes on in the remaining 950 or so words to work in a couple of absolutely masterful twists in which she weeps loudly and publicly in the company of her family and friends, retreats to her bedroom where she realizes with great joy that she is "Free!  Body and soul...free!" and then, as a combination of that great joy and her aforementioned heart condition, she dies without her family and friends ever knowing how happy she was to anticipate that freedom.  That my friends is a short story.  And I haven't even mentioned that in those thousand words, Kate Chopin threw in a train wreck.  

I am not completely opposed to vignettes and often use them myself, sometimes in the middle of what I believe are short stories I produce, sometimes in country stores, gas stations, and barber shops with my illiterate friends, and even at rare times in beauty shops.  As an addendum to this little article I will also insert a short list of some of my other favorite short stories and suggest that you read them sometime if you haven't already.

Desiree's Baby by Kate Chopin

The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Parker's Back by Flannery O'Connor

Ugly by Guy de Maupassant

A Rose For Emily by William Faulkner

Big Two-Hearted River by Ernest Hemingway
A View Of The Woods by Flannery O'Connor

"The Running Man Flying High For The Glory Of God" by Orville Rogers with Barbara Norris--Book Review

Roger, Orville with Norris, Barbara, The Running Man Flying High For The Glory Of God (Franklin, Tennessee. Clovercroft Publishing, 2016) 

Orville Rogers was born in relatively poor Oklahoma farm family in 1917 and when he was fairly young his father ran off to never be heard from again until Rogers encountered a half-sister when he was nearly eighty and learned that their father had died drunk in a flop house.  But, with the help of mother, grandparents, and a couple of uncles, Orville Rogers accomplished an exemplary life as a commercial airline pilot, oilfield investor, a volunteer pilot for a religious organization upon his retirement, a board member of a couple of religious organizations, and a world record holding elderly runner. He is still alive today at 100 and managed to run a mile on his last birthday. I chose to read this book, which is outside my normal purview, after seeing Orville Rogers featured on a television news show as he approached his centennial.  I always respect and pay attention to elderly achievers and did so even when I could not have been thought to be even approaching that aged status.  I still remember the well known Old Regular Baptist Preacher Clabe Mosley who was said to have preached a three hour sermon on his 102nd birthday when I was only 7 years old.  I have also come to understand that if I wish to live as long as two of my half-sisters and reach centenarian status that I must exercise and maintain as much of my physical condition as I can.  Orville Rogers did not begin running until he was about sixty and is still doing so today although not at the same pace at which he set several senior citizen records.  I thought Orville's book might be something I could learn from in the field of physical fitness for the aged.

The book was written with a named ghost writer, Barbara Norris, and I am not a fan of ghost written books.  But at 97 or 98, I can understand why Orville Rogers might have thought it was wise to use a professional writer if for no other reason than to ensure that the job would be finished in the event he died.  I am only superficially aware of Clovercroft Publishing, the vanity press which Rogers and Norris used to produce the book.  But the book itself is professionally acceptable in terms of printing, paper, photographic reproduction, and most other areas.  It does have a typical amount of typographical errors which one is likely to find in books from such companies.  

Orville Rogers led a sufficiently interesting life to keep me reading until the end when, at times, I knew I had better things to do with my time.   The book moves along in a manner which keeps the reader awake without ever approaching the status of literature.  Rogers and Norris tell his life story in a direct timeline fashion from poor Oklahoma farm boy to millionaire pilot, investor, runner, and religious believer.  But, for my original purpose of learning about physical fitness for the elderly, the book fall short.  It simply discusses how Rogers met Kenneth H. Cooper, M. D., who runs the Cooper Clinic in Dallas and wrote the early physical fitness book "Aerobics" in 1968 and has been a well known proponent of running and physical fitness for many years.  The book virtually leaves training routines untouched and focuses primarily on the religious life of Orville Rogers.  Shortly after I read the book, I saw in the media that Orville Rogers family threw a major birthday party for his 100th birthday and collectively ran a hundred miles in his honor with Mr. Rogers joining his family for the last mile.  It is good to know that even at 100 he has not given up running in which field he holds several world records for competitors in their 80's and 90's.  

If you are seeking an autobiography about an airline pilot or a religious believer and volunteer, you will find this book worth reading.  If you are looking for literature or advice or running, don't bother.  But I still hope Orville Rogers lives another hundred years and runs every day of his life. 

 

"A Pictorial History Of Knott County Kentucky 125th Anniversary"--Book Review

Editorial Staff Troublesome Creek Times 2010 A Pictorial History Of Knott County Kentucky 125th Anniversary (Morley, MO Acclaim Press 2010)

Somehow when this book was fresh off the press I missed it and only learned of its publication recently when I attended the traveling Smithsonian Exhibition on Community Sports called Hometown Teams in Wayland, KY.  My cousin, Charlotte Hicks Caudill, who writes on a part time basis for the Troublesome Creek Times informed me of its existence.  As soon as I returned home from the exhibition, I called several numbers in Hindman, KY, the county seat of Knott County and the site of the Troublesome Creek Times.  No one including the man who answered the phone at the newspaper office could give me a location where I could buy a copy of the book. That individual even told me that there were no plans to publish other copies or editions of the book. I found that interesting since the web site of Acclaim Press still says to this very day, July 6, 2017, that you can obtain a copy of the book by sending a check or money order to the Troublesome Creek Times.  Based on my own somewhat confusing and convoluted experience, rest assured that the only way to obtain a copy is to order it directly from Acclaim Press which my wife did after I became frustrated and intended to give up.  

Photo By Acclaim Press and Troublesome Creek Times

But that is enough grousing about the vagaries of such presses and the difficulty of buying their books.   Acclaim Press is in some ways a small press with a narrow base of publishing interest.  In other ways, if you peruse their online catalogue, they appear to be a money making enterprise and offer a sizable list of books, primarily of local interest to small geographic entities all across the Midwest and South.  They would have to be considered a vanity press since one of the largest and most visible link buttons on their homepage reads "Publish Me".  They seem to make a well funded living publishing the "literary" and "historical" whims of well funded would be writers all across the country.  Physically, "A Pictorial History Of Knott County Kentucky 125th Anniversary" is a solid, very presentable hardback book with a strong binding, relatively good reproduction of the multitude of photographs of many ages and qualities which comprise the book, and printed on good quality paper.  If you are in the mood to spend your hard earned money in order to see your dearly beloved moniker smiling back at you from the cover of a book, Acclaim Press is probably just as good a place to start as any other vanity press.  For those of you who have never heard the term "vanity press", such presses are publishing houses which publish books for which the authors pay all or most of the cost.  Most vanity presses offer little or not editorial control or criticism and publish exactly what they receive from an author complete with typographical errors, general errata, and outright lies which an author might believe will serve their particular purposes.  Consider the foregoing paragraph to be my little sermon for the day about the weaknesses of vanity presses if you are in the mood to be famous at your own expense.  

Now, let me say a few words about these types of "historical" books in general and this book in particular.  As a genre, these types of books have little or nothing to do with history. They are more accurately to be described as a collection of fairly recent to ancient episodes in the life of a community at best.  At worst, such books are a potpourri of randomly selected and arranged photographs from the area in question and have little or no textual discussion of the material offered.  They also have a tendency to have a very prevalent volunteer bias.  "Volunteer bias" is a term from academic research which describes the many short comings of research which uses only those people who step out of anonymity for their own undisclosed reasons and tend to skew research toward whatever opinions or biases they hold.  In the case of "A Pictorial History of Knott County Kentucky 125th Anniversary", what has happened is that the only photographs included in the book are those whose owners had a desire to see them included.  I do not know if the editors and publishers charged a submission fee for each photograph or not but it is a common practice in such books to do so.  Therefore, do not delude yourself into believing that this is a historical book.  It does contain some photographs of people who were well known in Knott County.  It also does not contain any photographs of most of the previous elected officials in Knott County, most of the more notorious murders and criminals, or any of the better known bootleggers and moonshiners who called the county home.  It leaves a great deal to be desired if you are actually looking for historical information about the county and its people.  Some families whose members had lots of photographs and an inherent desire to see those photographs memorialized in "black and ink" to quote Lum and Abner managed to get the book to appear as if their families were among the most prominent in the county.  Other families whose members played highly important roles in the county are not represented by a single photograph because none of the family members submitted to the editors.  The bottom line is that you should take this book with a very large grain of salt.  

If you approach the book, "A Pictorial History Of Knott County Kentucky 125th Anniversary", with the idea that it would be nice to see some photographs of your family and friends, old teachers, old companions long forgotten, or just someone you detested and don't ever want to forget, then you won't be disappointed.  But don't approach this book with the delusion that you are looking at history.  History and this book have never been introduced and did not bump into each other going up or down the courthouse steps skittering to and fro on Goose Avenue.