21 Short Stories by 18-Year-Olds

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21 Short Stories by 18-Year-Olds

And the Teacher They Inspired:

High School Alumni Reflect on the Fiction They Wrote As Seniors

Jim Zervanos

For Years I had been thinking that the stories my seniors wrote deserved a larger audience, an audience of not only readers who wanted to read good fiction but writers who wanted to write good fiction. In my sabbatical project I set out to compile a collection of excellent student stories that would be the foundation for a book with a larger, instructional purpose. First, I read through piles of class collections from my last nine years of teaching; I selected the best stories and began tracking down one writer after another. Once I eventually made contact with all of them, they agreed, enthusiastically, not only to contribute their “old” short story from high school, but also to compose a reflection on their story. Next, I read several excellent story collections—among them The Best American Short Stories 2004 and The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work—in which authors reflect on their own fiction writing; then, considering these books, I developed a series of questions that would stimulate interesting reflections from “my” writers. One by one their reflections came in, and one by one I was mesmerized. The reflections are stunning not only for their general quality but for their variety, honesty, depth of feeling, and humor. Without question, the most gratifying aspect of working on this project was my ongoing correspondence with these twenty-one committed writers, most of whom are in college or graduate school, some of whom have begun careers, and at least one of whom has gotten married and has been living outside of the country. In each and every case, these writers recalled their stories passionately, and offered their own distinctive take on their personal writing process. I read multiple drafts of their reflections and offered editorial advice, pushing them to write the best, most interesting, most articulate reflection that they could—and revise they did. As the title indicates, these students—along with their stories and, ultimately, their reflections—inspired me; they inspired me to be a better teacher when they were students, and they once again inspired me when they wrote their reflections with such insight and care. As their reflections were submitted to me over the course of several months, I proceeded to write my reflections on their stories—and on their reflections as well. I examined each story from some distinctive critical and pedagogical angle, highlighting, for example, the skillful use of the omniscient point of view in one story, while admiring the brave use of a writer’s personal life (as he confides in his reflection) in another story; subsequently, I developed a unique writing exercise to correspond with each story and to correspond, specifically, with the distinctive quality or technique I highlighted in my reflection of the story. All together, the result is a panorama of neatly arranged voices, each offering up useful advice and insights, not to mention inspiration—for both students and teachers of writing. Ultimately, I conclude the book with a short story of my own, a story about writing stories—followed by my reflection, which traces the story’s inspiration back to my experience as a teacher at Penncrest High School.

21 Short Stories by 18-Year-Olds

And the Teacher They Inspired

High School Alumni Reflect on the Fiction They Wrote as Seniors

Edited by

Jim Zervanos

Sabbatical Project

Rose Tree Media School District

2005-2006

CONTENTS

Foreword & Introduction by Jim Zervanos  4 & 8

Stories & Writers’ Reflections

1. DEREK SCHMIDT, 1998 Rossi’s Bar  18 & 28

2. RUTH HARIU, 1999 Christmas Cards  32 & 42

3. EMERSON BRENEMAN, 2000 The Reign of the Last Caesar  46 & 61

4. JOSHUA JORDAN, 2000 Have-Nots Like Us  67 & 74

5. LAURIE RINES, 2000 Primal Scream Therapy  79 & 93

6. LEE GOLDSMITH, 2001 In True Silence  98 & 111

7. JEN MALKOUN, 2001 All That You Can’t Leave Behind  115 & 120

8. MIKE MASTROIANNI, 2001 Freehold  125 & 133

9. NOAH PAINTER-DAVIS, 2002 Pet Store Therapy  137 & 143

10. JON PITTS, 2002 Leaving Places  147& 152

11. SCOTT PRITCHARD, 2002 Stasis  155 & 167

12. PABLO SIERRA, 2002 Las Golondrinas  172 & 181

13. ANDREW CHOE, 2003 Smoke and Mist  185 & 199

14. ELENIE SOLOMOS, 2003 Trajectory, Velocity  203 & 216

15. JULIE WASSON, 2003 Megan and Michael  220 & 226

16. RACHAEL ELLIOTT, 2004 Cynical Girl  230 & 241

17. PAUL SCHERER, 2004 Breath  245 & 254

18. PAT SHUBERT, 2004 Share the Darkness  258 & 266

19. MORGAN TUOHY, 2004 Anticipating  270 & 278

20. MATT GILBRIDE, 2005 Moving Out  281 & 289

21. ANGELA ROSENBERG, 2005 Deal With It  296 & 304

O Captain! by Jim Zervanos and Reflection  308 & 316

Teacher’s Reflections and Exercises

1. The Perfect Ending in Derek Schmidt’s Rossi’s Bar  30

2. Showing, Not Telling, in Ruth Hariu’s Christmas Cards  44

3. Pop Culture and the News as Inspiration in Emerson Breneman’s The Reign of the

Last Caesar  65

4. The Sympathetic Rant in Joshua Jordan’s Have-Nots Like Us  77

5. Narration as Story in Laurie Rines’s Primal Scream Therapy  96

6. Going to the Limit and Beyond in Lee Goldsmith’s In True Silence  113

7. Plot “Triggers” in Jen Malkoun’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind  123

8. The Road Story—Mike Mastroianni’s Freehold  135

9. The Setting As Battleground in Noah Painter-Davis’s Pet Store Therapy  145

10. The Story Arc—and Scene Arcs—in Jonathan Pitts’s Leaving Places  153

11. Verisimilitude in Scott Pritchard’s Stasis  170

12. The Magical Structure in Pablo Sierra’s Las Golondrinas  183

13. Motifs, Mood, and Pacing in Andrew Choe’s Smoke and Mist  201

14. Omniscient Point of View in Eleni Solomos’s Trajectory, Velocity  218

15. The “Simple” Style of Julie Wasson’s Megan and Michael  228

16. Romantic Comedy in Rachael Elliott’s Cynical Girl  243

17. Starting In Medias Res—In the Middle—in Paul Scherer’s Breath  256

18. The Unlikely Narrator in Patrick Shubert’s Share the Darkness  268

19. The Taboo Topic in Morgan Tuohy’s Anticipating  279

20. Fiction Inspired by “Real Life” in Matt Gilbride’s Moving Out  293

21. Seeking Closure in Angela Rosenberg’s Deal With It  306

Foreword

In the spring of 2005 I was invited to speak at a Pennsylvania State Press Association conference in Harrisburg, to talk about the teaching and writing process that resulted in the short stories published annually in Penncrest High School’s literary magazine; I had been the magazine’s faculty supervisor for nine years, and almost all of the fiction that appeared in the Gryphon had been born out of an assignment in the Modern Literature course I taught. My immediate—if not rude—response to the conference organizer, Mr. Hankes, was “No.” I was eager to get off the phone. No way was I going to stand in front of God-knew-how-many teachers and students and for an hour presume to be an expert on “how to write a good story”—or even pretend to believe that such an expert existed. Only a fool would attempt to boil the whole mystery down to a one-hour lesson. Even if I took a less dogmatic approach and just reported what went on in my classroom, I still couldn’t sum up in one hour—or ten—all that transpired in a semester of my Modern Literature class—all the readings, the discussions, the knowledge and understanding that, at least in this teacher’s eyes, seemed to snowball into an unquantifiable mass—all of which led to the students’ writing of their own short stories.

Determined, Mr. Hankes asked me, rhetorically, if I realized that no other high school literary magazine in the state published such great fiction. Flattery wasn’t going to work, I promised myself; I considered that as a conference organizer he would say what was necessary to fill the empty one-hour slot in the day’s schedule. He went on to say that some of the magazines didn’t publish any fiction at all and the ones that did, published only very short stories—a page or two long. He confessed that every year he greedily plucked the Gryphon from the pile of contest submissions before any other judge could get his hands on it; he had a collection of Gryphons in his classroom, he said, and, when encouraging students to write fiction, he often directed them to the Gryphon stories as models—“I especially love the orange issue,” he said—the 2002 issue, I thought—“and that one—oh, man—Pet-Store Therapy, about the kid with obsessive-compulsive disorder”—Noah’s story. “That’s one of my favorites, too,” I said. Then his tone changed—as if what he was about to say was off the record. He admitted that it was hard even for him—a high-school English teacher himself—to believe that the stories were written by eighteen year olds; they’re “so adult,” he said, in one breath asking “how do you get them to write such powerful stuff?” and in the next daring to ask, in so many words, if I’d ever run into trouble, you know, as their teacher…. As if I were an encourager of criminals! The mastermind behind these beautiful crimes! No trouble, I said, and offered some philosophical inanity about how you can’t write out of fear any better than you can teach out of fear.

“So will you do it?” He knew he’d hooked me, but I kept my mouth shut. “I’m telling you,” he went on, “No one in the state is doing anything even close.” I had no idea. He taught in a school district west of Harrisburg. I sat there at my desk, in a school district in the suburbs of Philadelphia, beaming, secretly imagining Gryphons—their stories—littered about classrooms all over the state; and yet I felt unsettled: I wanted my students—all of them, past and present—to be hearing this—this praise that was theirs. I reiterated to Mr. Hankes that it would be impossible for me to stand there and, in a single hour, teach anyone how to write a short story, let alone teach other teachers how to teach anyone how to write a short story. I yammered on about how proud I was of my students and how, if you really wanted to know how they wrote such great stories, you’d have to ask them. Patiently he listened and then suggested I bring a couple of my students along with me, to have them read their stories and discuss their writing process—I could chime in if I wanted to, he said. I liked this idea. Suddenly I was grateful that this skilled conference organizer had hung on the line after my ungrateful resistance. I already knew which students I was going to ask—one of them was Angela Rosenberg, whose story, “Deal With It,” I’d just recently fallen in love with.

I spoke for about twenty minutes that day in Harrisburg—said a few words about my teaching philosophy, offered up a few basic story-writing strategies—and then introduced the two student writers, who read their stories to an awestruck audience and then gracefully fielded questions—from students and teachers alike—speaking with confidence and a sense of authority that blew away even their teacher, who was already gushing with admiration: they were not my students, standing there at the lectern; they were writers, whose company I was proud to share.

As it turned out, the conference experience was inspiration for this book. And yet nothing about this collection has anything to do with the Gryphon or literary magazines; it certainly has nothing to do with writing with the prospect of publication in mind—no more than the writing of these stories had anything to do with publishing in the first place. While many of these stories didappear in the Gryphon—and, in fact, won awards that recognized them as among the finest works of creative writing in the state—many of the stories, simply because their writers, by chance, were assigned to me in the spring semester, and not the fall, of their senior years, had been written too late to be submitted for publication. As much as I stress to my students that they must write fearlessly, not for me or their friends or their parents, but for themselves and perhaps for some imagined ideal audience, who might never read their stories, I am always thrilled by the prospect that others—especially their peers—might read their work, whether through their high school literary magazine, through the bound collections I assemble in the classroom, or through the stapled copies they pass on to their friends. Assembling this collection has afforded me the opportunity to follow through on the impulse I’ve experienced countless times after reading my students’ stories: to share them, to give them an audience outside my classroom, and to point out, still amazed after ten years of teaching, “This was written by an eighteen year old.”

I am once again, in the context of these pages, sharing space with people who were once my students but who are, at least herein, writers whose company I am proud to share. Originally, I had planned to cull from old classroom collections the best eighteen stories from my first ten years of teaching—for no other reason than to justify the title “18 Short Stories by 18-Year-Olds.” After berating myself for not having bound and saved the short stories written by my earliest Modern Literature students—who, of course, being my beloved first, seem to me now the best and brightest I’ve taught—I read through the pile, which rose up to my waist, and narrowed the best down to twenty-three. It seemed foolish, then, to eliminate one, let alone five, stories for the sake of a title; two of the writers bowed out of the project, leaving me with twenty-one stories.

The format of the book resembles that of the hour-long presentation my two students and I made at the conference in Harrisburg: the stories are followed by the writers’ own commentary—their reflections—which were written for this collection (for most of these contributors that meant several years since reading, let alone writing, their stories); first, in the Introduction, I try to boil down my teaching philosophy as well as some basic story concepts, all in an effort to stimulate creative thinking in the minds of both high-school students and their English teachers.

None of these stories was written in a Creative Writing class, but in a Modern Literature class, whose focus was reading and writing “critically,” not “creatively.” It has always been my hope that the short story—the culminating assignment—would not be a tangent for the student of literature but a natural, if not exhilarating, opportunity to demonstrate knowledge and understanding impossible to quantify in a single analytical paper. If nothing else, I hope this book might serve as inspiration for English teachers who might feel ill-equipped to teach “creative writing” and who, having read these stories as well as the writers’ reflections, might free themselves—and their students—to incorporate fiction writing into their literature classes, to think of storytelling not only as a form of personal expression but as an alternative means of demonstrating an understanding and appreciation of learned material—particularly of a given body of studied literature.

In this collection I’ve added my own brief reflection after each story, an attempt to highlight what qualities I think are worthy of not only admiration but emulation; again, with an audience of students and English teachers in mind, I’ve also offered writing exercises that consider the preceding story as a model. Finally, I’ve included a story of mine, “O Captain!” which was inspired by my students, too many of whom did not live long enough to tell another story—all of whom—collectively—have taught me unquantifiable things: it is just that, I think—the unquantifiable things we’ve learned—that we try to capture in our stories.

Introduction

I. Students and Their English Teacher

Teachers aren’t the only ones who might see fiction writing as a guilty pleasure, as an activity that shouldn’t be indulged for too long before getting back to business as usual, reading Shakespeare or imitating his sonnets. The students themselves often think of fiction writing as a break long overdue, at least students like many of my seniors, who look forward to the fiction-writing assignment almost as much as they dread it, for fear they’ve lost a certain storytelling talent they remember having in elementary school, before the word “practical” entered their vocabulary.

But when it comes to learning, context is everything, and even the most practical of math lessons could end up pointless nonsense—or even pointless fun—without some purposeful framework. I’m not proposing more “pointless fun”—certainly not through fiction writing—in the English classroom; rather, I’m proposing more purposeful fiction writing, specifically in standard English Literature courses—not just in Creative Writing classes, electives whose electors tend to fall into two groups: those who are determined to write purposefully, albeit creatively, and those who think “creative” is synonymous with purposeless, not to mention easy. Any author worth his salt will emphasize what hard work fiction writing is—and it is hard work, no doubt—but it is also fun; in fact, if it weren’t so fun, maybe students would be encouraged to do more of it, because it’s good for them, whether they know it or not.

One of the pleasant things about the typical English research or literary analysis paper—for both teachers and students—is that the criteria for excellence can be taught, learned, and, at least theoretically, met, and not only by the highest-achieving students. One of the daunting things about creative writing—for both teachers and students—is that the criteria for excellence—or at least the qualities that make up an excellent story—are impossible to quantify. After all, the very nature of fiction is that it is an invention born of the creator’s imagination, and so—to the frustration of teachers and students alike—natural talent, that intangible yet identifiable thing, is often the only thing that distinguishes the work of one student from another.