The Bookworm: Short Takes

Essay welcomes the ordinary, knowing that there are big things — true things — nestled within the small and familiar. Essay counts on the notion that good writing comes from good thinking from ordinary people on ordinary subjects. In some ways, it seems a simple thing.

The above quote comes from Sandra Swinburne’s “Essay, Dresses, and Fish,” one of 76 nonfiction shorts presented in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction, edited by Judith Kitchen. Short Takes is the third collection of shorts edited by Kitchen. In Short was published in 1996 and In Brief in 1999.

I’d like to think the nonfiction short has become my forte. It’s what I write (or try to write) on the bus every morning. I’ve always been a writer of vignettes — short, self-contained, powerful scenes of the human experience — and have found that only nonfiction appreciates and embraces that variety of writing. Fiction is too busy with novels and short stories, too obsessed with devices and the avant-garde, to even consider something so short to be literary and worthy of value. Usually, by definition, poetry is short, terse, minimalistic, but…it’s poetry. Only the “fourth genre” has nourished the short.

In regards to length, most non-writers think in terms of pages. A lot of people ask me how many pages my novel is. That’s a complicated and contentious question, and impossible for me to answer because I’ve started and restarted writing it about three times (the fourth restart is coming up). Writers, editors, and publishers don’t think in terms of pages when they write or receive a manuscript. Words are what count. Though a piece is considered novel length when it eclipses 45,000 words, the average first novel runs between 80,000 and 100,000. A novella is anything between 15,000 and 45,000. Newspaper articles are measured in column inches because there is limited space, but my articles averaged 400 words — 12 to 14 inches. A short, by Kitchen’s definition, is anything 2,000 words and less, so the essays in Short Takes vary between a few paragraphs in length to five or six pages. It’s very quick reading.

(Interestingly, I think the longest short in the whole collection was one written by Kitchen herself: eight pages. Hmm. Wonder how that happened?)

The subject matter is just as varied. Short Takes authors expound on hitch hiking, retired Crayola colors, jet lag, small towns, big cities, love, dating, farming, war, childhood, manliness, and writing. As in the other two collections, Kitchen, an essayist and former editor of the Georgia Review, has arranged the shorts so the essays with like subjects are together. This gives the collection an easy, gentle flow. Alphabetizing the pieces by author name would probably be too jarring as you’d never know what to expect next.

Like it’s three older siblings, Short Takes is an incredible collection. For me it’s inspiring and liberating. Good art gives artists a boost of confidence, the urge to cut loose and create something as incredible. But it’s also humbling. At multiple points while reading Short Takes I caught myself thinking, “How can I ever write something as good as this?” or “Could any of my shorts make the cut in this lineup?” It makes me wonder if I have a forte at all. Like Swinburne says, it seems simple. But it's not.