SHORT STORY SALVATION [Sat, 2-8-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—SHORT STORY SALVATION [Sat, 2-8-25]

 

[Warning redux: This is my birthday month, so the February columns are mundanely personal…at least, until spring training starts.]

Mrs. Powers gave me an old copy of “Capper’s Weekly” to take to Mother, for the recipes and hints on canning. On the way home, I looked into the magazine and found a story. Just a few pages. I read the whole thing before I got home.

I was astounded. You didn’t have to write a whole book to tell a whole story. It didn’t have to be the length of Treasure Island or Two Years Before the Mast. It could be whole in just a few pages, the time it took to walk the dirt road between the Powers house and ours.

I was eleven years old. I didn’t know then that as a literary genre, they were known as “Short Stories,” [Duh?] but I knew I had discovered something significant, something for a lifetime. I knew that I wanted to read short stories. I knew that I wanted to write short stories.

I did not know then that a sermon is a short story. I thought when I agreed to be a preacher that I would have to give up writing stories. Preaching, instead, was a fulfillment of that short story aspiration.

For sixty years, I told short stories from a pulpit. They were called sermons. That’s what it said in the worship bulletin-Sermon. But they were really short stories, about how God relates to the world and the creatures in it, each one a story in whole, that has no beginning and no ending.

Rarely did I actually write them. Yes, in the early days of my preaching, the days of Civil Rights and Viet Nam, I would write a manuscript, so that I could prove to some critic what I actually said rather than what they misunderstood me to say.

Also, because church and clergy periodicals sometimes wanted to print those sermons. It was easier to have a manuscript already prepared than to try to recreate it from memory. Once cassette recorders became common, though, I just recorded the sermon. If a copy were needed, it was simple enough for my secretary to take it off the tape.

Stories are always in the imagination before they are on the page. The “oral tradition” is much older than the printed page or the computer screen.

The Bible is not a book, a novel; it’s a collection of short stories.

The Gospel is not a book, a novel; it’s a collection of short stories.

When a tyrant tries to take over a nation, he wants to write a novel, a book, a long book, like Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich. It is difficult for the rest of us to write a book when the tyrant has the only pen. But there is still time to tell a short story, one that can be read even on a short and dusty road. We combat the long book of evil by telling the short stories of love.

John Robert McFarland

I say that Mrs. Powers gave me a “Capper’s Weekly,” but it might have been a “Collier’s.” There were several general-interest magazines then that included short stories. We could not afford to buy magazines, or subscribe to them, but neighbors kindly shared magazines with us when they were through with them. I loved them all.

My short story awakening did not cause me to give up on books. I’ve read plenty of them. Even wrote a few. Still read them. But I read books in short story form—a few pages at a time. Indeed, at any given time, I have 6 or 8 books in my “page a day” rotation, which is exactly what it says. I love to see how the authors and stories react to one another. Yes, sometimes I take 610 days to read a book. It’s how I judge the ability of an author, to hold my attention from day to day.