Richard Bausch - The Stories of Richard Bausch

I started out, like almost every other writer I know, composing stories, as if to do so were a sort of apprenticeship for the novel. One learns later in life that the two forms have their own demands, and that the difficulties peculiar to each will age a writer as much as anything else will age him. Perhaps the greatest demand that can be put on the human imagination is that of time. One embarks on the composition of a novel with the knowledge that, added to all the other considerations of constructing an involving, believable imaginative expression about things that matter, one will be faced with the problem of getting it down over a span of months or years, of staying with it and working it over until it is right, and completeall emotions earned, all strands of interest played out, everything resonating as it should, everything as lucid as it can be made without doing violence to the demands of the story.

Writing a short story involves struggling with a different kind of timenot so much the time you will spend struggling with it (though in fact that can also take months or years, and there are several stories in this book that took that long, for one reason or another), but the time you will portray in it, and how much of it you will be able successfully to suggest, again without doing damage to the story. How deeply back you may go, or how deeply in, while remaining true to the confines of the form, its shapeliness and completeness: the world in miniature. But it is, finally, always about the story, long or short.

I dont remember which of these stories came first. Its probably Contrition. Since several stories are always lying around on my desk in various stages of completion, and they end up being finished as they come to hand, sometimes months or weeks or even years after any previous work on them, I have very sketchy memory as to when and where many of them were begun, or worked on, or finished. Probably it doesnt matter. Im always working on one or another, or several. I have noticed in the college anthologies, and in the various year-end anthologies an increasing interest about the circumstances surrounding the writing of any given story, and I have found myself growing irritable at the blow-by-blow descriptions of how this or that story got written, and what the writer was after. I dont think it should matter so much. The story is what matters.

In the present volume I have arranged the stories according to how I think the whole collection would read if it were not a compendium of several collections, with newer ones included, but a book of storiesits own. I place no importance on one story over another. I am fond of all of them. The ones Im not so fond of, I never let out of the house. Each of them calls up its own cache of memories, of what sorts of bustle and confusion obtained in our happy home when they were being written. Some were written in bed. Several were written while sitting at the kitchen table on pretty spring mornings, or in the fall, with the leaves turning and dropping outside the window, or in the middle of winter storms. Others were written late at night, all night, and I would look up and see that the sun had risen, and maybe there had been a rainstorm in the pre-dawn that I hadnt quite noticed, the leaves dripping and everything looking washed new, and I had that pins and needles feeling of having been awake all night.

I have always believed that writing stories is not so much a matter of obsession as it is of devotionbeing there for work in the days, as the good men and women who came before you were; attempting to be as determined and stubborn and willing to risk failure as they were. You work in the perfect understanding that you will probably never write as well as they, but that by being faithful to their example, you can be worthy of their company. The rest is silence.

RB
Broad Run, Va.
March, 2003

I was pummeled as a teenager. For some reason I had the sort of face that asked to be punched. It seemed to me in those days that everybody wanted to take a turn. Something about the curve of my mouth, I guess. It made me look like I was being cute with people, smirking at them. I am what is called a late life child. My brother, Doke, is twenty years older and played semipro football. But by the time I came along, Doke was through as a ballplayer and my father had given up on ever seeing a son play pro. I was a month premature, and very, very tiny as a child. Dad named me Ignatius, after an uncle of his that I never knew. Of course I didnt take to sports, though I could run pretty fast (that comes with having a face people want to hit). I liked to read; I was the family bookworm. Im four feet nine inches tall.