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Delta of Cassiopeia

Ted Morrissey

[“Delta of Cassiopeia” is the introduction to Delta of Cassiopeia: Collected Stories and Sonnets (2023). This is the expanded introduction that appears in the paperback edition.]

I’ve been wanting to publish a collection like this for a long while, and nearly did so in 2012. The plans with my publisher at the time fell through, which, in retrospect, was for the best. It was the proverbial spark that ignited what had been a longstanding urge to start my own press. The difficulty that I’d had finding outlets for my fiction, especially novels, and the frustrations that I encountered once such outlets were found prompted me to undertake Twelve Winters Press. I based the concept and the mission of Twelve Winters on that of the legendary Hogarth Press, created by Leonard and Virginia Woolf to not only publish her avant-garde fiction but the forward-thinking work of other writers who would become known as modernists.

In the decade since I began Twelve Winters, I have published several of my books in addition to novels, story collections, poetry collections and children’s books by other authors who encountered many of the same obstacles and disappointments that I did. None of us, to be sure, have become household names. In fact, Twelve Winters loses money every year, and I have kept it afloat by underwriting it with the money I’ve made as a teacher and librarian. Twelve Winters is not uniquely unsuccessful, from a financial standpoint (there are, thankfully, other ways to measure success). Book publishing has been an increasingly difficult business in, let’s say, the last thirty years or so. With the rise in popularity of television, then the internet, then the combining of them via streaming services (like Netflix and Hulu etc., etc., etc.), the number of people who are avid readers has declined at a steeper and steeper angle.

The writers and publishers of serious (or challenging, experimental, avant-garde, artful—choose your adjective) fiction have always attracted a small share of the reading audience, and now it’s a small share of what itself is a small share of the entertainment audience. The critic Steven Moore writes eloquently about the challenges facing what he calls “innovative” fiction in the introduction to volume I of his brilliant The Novel: An Alternative History. He quotes the Yugoslav writer Dubravka Ugrešić: “Nowadays, writers who cannot adapt to commercial demands end up in their own personal ghetto of anonymity and poverty.”

In this introduction I will expound, from time to time, on this topic (a writer’s personal ghetto of anonymity and poverty), but I also direct you to my blog for related papers I’ve delivered, specifically “Writing Too Good to Publish” and “The Loss of the Literary Voice and Its Consequences.” These papers speak more to the state of book publishing, and not so much to story publishing, which is my focus here.

For now let me return to the business at hand: this collection of stories and sonnets, which I’ve titled by borrowing from James Joyce (more regarding this in a bit). The stories here began appearing in the early 1990s, and the lion’s share were written and published in the early 2000s. Others have been written much more recently, within the last few years. Some appeared in well-known (or at least well-respected) journals (like Glimmer Train Stories, Paris Transcontinental and The Chariton Review), while others found homes in more obscure venues. Well-known or not, nearly all of them have ceased publication (and perhaps have been defunct for many years)—such is the way with literary journals. Therefore, without my collecting them and publishing the pieces as a book, they would, in essence, disappear, as if they had never been written. They may still.

It is perhaps doubly fortuitous that my first attempt at publishing a collection fell through. In addition to spurring me to found Twelve Winters, it also allowed the collection to grow, to mature, and (I believe) to become more meaningful (to me, if no one else). The situation is not unlike Joyce’s collection Dubliners, in that when originally accepted for publication it consisted of fewer stories than the version that eventually came out in 1914. The years of close calls and publishing disappointments allowed Dubliners to grow by three stories, including the masterpiece “The Dead.”

Similarly, had I managed to publish a collection in 2012, it would be missing several of the stories that are included here and all of the sonnets—and thus it would be absent, in my view, my best work to date.

I realize I’ve already compared myself, at least indirectly, to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and that I risk being seen as arrogant. It’s not a label I would aspire to, but all art requires an element of self-confidence, of ego. Artists must believe they have something worth saying, some perspective that is worthwhile, if they’re going to share their art with the public. I suppose the writer who has no desire to publish, or the painter no desire to show and so on, could be said to be creating art without an element of ego. But most artists create with the idea that they will share their art with someone, somehow, sometime, somewhere. And if the sharing is an act of ego, it is also an act of courage. To share one’s art is to make oneself vulnerable.

Perhaps the writer who self-publishes is the most vulnerable (and therefore the most courageous?). Unlike other art forms, there remains a stigma attached to self-publication, the idea being the writer who self-publishes is lesser somehow than one whose work is brought out by someone else. Meanwhile, the band that establishes its own record label, the artist who opens their own gallery, the fashion designer who establishes their own line, the architect who creates their own firm, the entrepreneur who begins their own business … they are all brave, forward-looking, independent, risk-taking rebels. But the writer who puts out their own work, as they want it presented to the world, is an amateurish hack in many eyes.

Yet there is a long and proud tradition of self- and self-funded publication. I’ve already mentioned Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press (a classic example), and I’ve alluded to Joyce’s Dubliners, whose eventual publisher only agreed to bring out the controversial collection if Joyce purchased enough copies himself to guarantee that the house would at least break even. A much-abridged list of other self-publishers (in some form or another) includes Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Samuel Clemens, Emily Dickinson and Anaïs Nin.

Profoundly aware of the stigma attached to self-publication, I deliberately attempted to make the first few books of my own that I published via Twelve Winters appear to be published by someone else. That is, I didn’t assert credit as the book designer and cover designer. However, with Crowsong for the Stricken (2017) I began stepping from behind the curtain, and with 2018’s Mrs Saville I fully embraced my books as wholly my own creative efforts. The advantage of being my own publisher (as well as design department, not to mention marketing department) is that I can integrate every aspect of the book into a single artistic vision. When working with other publishers, one must compromise with editors, graphic designers, and illustrators. The book becomes a group effort, for better or (not infrequently) for worse.

I prefer to have control over every element. This independence has allowed me to develop book designs that likely would not have been embraced by publishers of a more traditional bent. With Crowsong, for example, I printed each episode’s epigraph in mirror-image, and included the page number only on every fifth page (as one might number every fifth line of a poem). With Mrs Saville, a sequel to Frankenstein, I designed it in the epistolary motif of Mary Shelley’s original. I included in The Artist Spoke my own photography that only indirectly connects to the plot of the novel; in essence, the photos communicate a narrative of their own. In the hardcover edition of The Artist Spoke, the photographs are reproduced in color, an expense that practically no other publisher would have approved (probably prudently).

While writing a new work I begin to think about the eventual design, including the cover image. It’s not uncommon for me to have those elements largely worked out before the writing is done, sometimes years before. Of course, I’m open to revising those design plans as the book evolves.

For this collection, I’ve opted to keep the design simple. As you’ll see, I view the contents as four distinct parts; and only a plainspoken design harmonizes with all four sections. For the cover image, I scrolled through thousands of my photos until I found one that I think captures the mood of the collection as a whole, including its title, which was a late choice. I had been considering an “and Other Stories” sort of title. Then I was rereading Ulysses (I reread it often, in part because I teach a course in Ulysses), and a scene in “Proteus” seemed especially apropos to the spirit of this thing I was creating.

In the episode, Stephen Dedalus is strolling along Sandymount Strand (actually at the moment he is seated on a rock) when he is suddenly inspired to write a poem, which he scribbles on a piece of paper torn from a letter he is carrying. He thinks, “Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice.” The passage seems to capture the writer’s need to write without knowing who, if anyone, will read their work. Ultimately, it is not the reading of it that matters; it is the writing itself. I also like Joyce’s phrase “in your flutiest voice,” that is, your most poetic, your most musical, your most artistic voice. (I’ll return to this idea.)

Earlier in this same paragraph, Stephen, considering the image of his shadow on the beach, thinks, “Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds.” Joyce refers to the constellation Cassiopeia and its delta four times in Ulysses, and in typical Joycean fashion the image carries a complex of multiple and multiplying meanings. For me, though, in this moment on Sandymount Strand, “delta of Cassiopeia” evokes the idea of the worlds created through fictive imagination, and the fact that these worlds—no matter how expertly drawn by the writer—will always come (only come) to their fullest fruition via the participation of the reader. Behind every meaning deliberately constructed by the writer, there will be shadow meanings awaiting each individual reader. In fact, there are shadow meanings unknown, consciously, to writers themselves.

By titling this collection Delta of Cassiopeia, I want to emphasize these key aspects of the writing/reading process: that meaning-making is a joint enterprise of the writer and reader; and that there are meanings in the text not even the writer is aware of. As my literary idol William H. Gass expressed it, “You hope that the amount of meaning that you can pack into a book will always be more than you are capable of consciously understanding. Otherwise, the book is likely to be as thin as you are. You have to trick your medium into doing far better than you, as a conscious and clearheaded person, might manage.” One of my pleasures in bringing together this collection has been reading pieces that I haven’t looked at since the near-miss of the 2012 collection, which was more than a decade ago—and then I hadn’t read some of the stories in a decade or more. With the benefit of temporal distance, I see meanings and impetuses that were hidden from me when I was writing them originally. Oftentimes it is truly like reading the work of another writer; and, in a very genuine sense, I was another writer, another person.

I also like the phrase “delta of Cassiopeia” for the book’s title because in the paragraph in which it first appears Stephen Dedalus is compelled to write as if a slave to his creative process, to his Muse, if you will. This is a phenomenon, a feeling, a compulsion that most writers understand. I certainly do. That is, I’ve written these stories and sonnets because I must; in essence I had no choice in the matter. William Gass spoke to this aspect of the writing process as well, saying, “The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene…. Whatever work he does must proceed from a reckless inner need. The world does not beckon, nor does it greatly reward…. Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art.” I must underscore that Gass’s “nowadays” was 1976. The situation as he describes it has only grown more acute since then.

Indeed, Gass famously quipped (well, famous in certain circles) that he hoped the novel he was writing, The Tunnel, “will be such a good book no one will want to publish it.” Already, in 1971, Gass saw the handwriting on the wall: There was an inverse correlation between the quality of writing and the odds of finding a publisher; and that, of course, was due to the dearth of readers wanting truly well-written material. In the last half century, the situation has only gotten worse for writers of serious, challenging, experimental, avant-garde, artful, innovative books.

Thus I offer Delta of Cassiopeia to the world with the full understanding that in all likelihood practically no one will read these stories and sonnets, at least not now. I will be upfront and acknowledge that one of my motivations for bringing out this work, as well as every other, is the hope that one day they will find an appreciative audience of more than a handful of readers. It may take decades or centuries or millennia; or it may never happen. Regardless, like Stephen Dedalus on the strand, I’m compelled to keep writing, to proceed from my reckless inner need, as Gass phrased it.

Recently I had the realization that my attitude regarding for whom I write has shifted. I used to imagine idealized readers who would be drawn to my fiction because they wanted a book with more meat on the bone than the typical page-turning bestseller. Slowly I’ve come to understand that about the only people who will read my books are paid reviewers and contest judges. I feel like the farm kids who devotedly raise a piglet or calf or lamb from infancy for the sole purpose of having it judged at the fair and hopefully winning a blue ribbon. I have all but given up on book launches and signings, considering that the last two I planned (even before the pandemic) attracted precisely two people total, and they both came to the same sad launch (an interested wife who dragged along her accommodating husband). Accomplished mathematicians can determine how many attended the other launch.

I state for the record, historical and biographical, over a four-year period I spent in the neighborhood of $25,000 on promotion of my books—including advertisements in The New York Review of Books, Booklist (a journal of the American Library Association), Spotify, book club promotions, and various social media platforms—which led to a mere handful of book sales, probably less than $20 in revenue. I maintained a personal website (as well as the Twelve Winters website), and was active on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Meanwhile, my books had done well in independent press competitions and garnered many generous reviews. Nevertheless, establishing a readership has seemed all but impossible.

As I mentioned earlier, I see this collection as divided into four distinct parts, with the short stories falling into three of those divisions, and the sonnets constituting the fourth part. The reason for these distinctions has to do with two events in my life that reshaped my sense of myself as a writer of fiction, which I consider my primary creative focus. These events were encountering two writers who basically remade me—or, rather, who inspired me to remake myself in images that their aesthetic philosophies inspired.

I was born in 1962 and graduated from high school in 1980, consequently I was raised in the era of Ernest Hemingway. That is to say, Hemingway’s writing persona and his work were integral parts of my education and of my sense of what a writer should be. My high school and my undergraduate English teachers were, by and large, Hemingway devotees, so his stories and novels were omnipresent on course reading lists. My introduction to writing and publishing was in the context of journalism, which fit hand-in-glove with the image that Hemingway presented as a writer. He was a journalist first, before transitioning into becoming a short-story writer and novelist. I saw myself on a kindred trajectory.

As such, I emulated the journalistic style that Hemingway brought to his fictional prose: short, straightforward sentences whose clarity was paramount. When I began taking creative writing classes in college, I followed those Hemingway-inspired dicta, and I was still following them when I began working on my M.A. in English with an emphasis in fiction writing in 1992. There are pieces in this collection that were written for my master’s courses.
It was during this time that my first art-altering event occurred. Namely, I took a class with the poet Juan Felipe Herrera (who would much later become Poet Laureate of the United States). In addition to being a gifted poet, Juan Felipe was an amazing teacher. With Juan Felipe’s encouragement and guidance, I began to cast off the example of Hemingway as a model for my writing, and in particular his reliance on personal experience for fictive material. I had always followed the (cliché) advice of “write what you know,” as Hemingway had done—but, let’s face it, Papa lived an exceedingly colorful life, while my life had been the epitome of mundane, of monochrome.

Juan Felipe forced me outside the bubble of autobiography by having us write something (a poem, a story, a script—Juan Felipe didn’t care) based on the text we were studying at the time: I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. In response to the assignment, I fictionalized an episode from Menchu’s book by writing a first-person story in the persona of a made-up Indian character named Chinkó. When Juan Felipe returned the short story to me his only comment was written on the top of the first page: “Ready for pub.,” meaning it was ready for publication (without a single revision), which was a stark contrast to what I was experiencing in my fiction workshopping courses, where every story was torn asunder and ground beneath my classmates’ bootheels. Autopsied to death.

To that point, I hadn’t been able to get any of my short stories published, but with the encouragement of Juan Felipe’s lone comment, I found a little journal at Indiana University, Chiricú, that published stories and poems in English, Spanish and Portuguese. I sent it to them (and only them). A few months later the miracle happened for which all unpublished writers yearn: I received my first acceptance letter. The experience taught me two invaluable lessons. First, I didn’t have to rely on personal experience (“what I know”) to write effective stories; in fact, writing in the guise of a totally unfamiliar persona can be quite liberating and allow writers to tell stories well beyond their usual frame of reference. Moreover, I could build a believable fictional world solely through the use of secondary-source material. Unlike Hemingway, I didn’t have to experience firsthand war or bullfighting or infidelity or big-game hunting to write about it convincingly. My imagination was up to the challenge of writing outside my own life story.

The second invaluable lesson was that I was capable of writing a publishable story without any assistance or intervention from anyone. During this time I was mainly working with the novelist Kent Haruf, and he helped me to understand this concept as well. Frequently it was Kent who was leading the workshopping classes I was taking, yet his advice to me was to largely ignore the critiques I was receiving from my classmates (and even the critiques I was receiving from my instructors). Kent’s point was that writers can’t possibly integrate every suggestion that they receive in workshop. Trying to incorporate them all into a revision leads to a disastrous mishmash of styles, combined with incongruent plots and characters who are conflicted but not in a good way. Instead, said Kent, when writers submit stories for critique they probably have a suspicion or two already regarding this or that element that may not be working as well as it might. So during the critique session, just listen for comments about those specific things. Essentially, disregard everything else.

It took some time for Juan Felipe’s lessons to fully take hold, so I continued to write autobiographically rooted material, much of which found publication, and those pieces are included here in the section titled “Early Stories.” The stories that I wrote that were not overtly autobiographical, including “Chinkó,” are in the section titled “Transitional Stories.” I might also call them “Post-Juan Felipe” stories.

I graduated with my master’s in 1995. I was determined to become a novelist, and not just a short-story writer. Still under the sway of Hemingway, I wrote a novel based on my undergraduate days at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, titled “Recalling Susanna” (to date unpublished). Then with the lessons learned from Juan Felipe I wrote a novella titled Weeping with an Ancient God (a fictionalized version of author Herman Melville’s real-life experience of living among cannibals on the Marquesas Islands), and a novel titled Men of Winter (a sequel, of sorts, to Homer’s Odyssey set in early-twentieth-century Siberia).

The next art-altering event happened in 2009, while preparing to write my doctoral dissertation on postmodern literature: my discovery of William H. Gass, whose influence on my writing, my teaching, my thinking, my life has been absolutely profound. Gass’s prose style was antithetical to Hemingway’s. His sentences are elaborate, rife with poetic flourishes—what he refers to as “jingling” in his essay “Retrospection” in which he identifies seven “quirks” that dominated his writing style (he wrote the essay when he was 87). In short, Gass taught me not to be afraid of language. Or said differently, he gave me license to use my linguistic gifts, and not hide them like a self-conscious teenage girl who tries to disguise her sudden development in folds of loose-fitting fabric.

I love language, and I let that love-light shine into every corner of the composition, no matter how remote from the load-bearing claim: William Gass gave me that.

So, the twenty stories in this collection appear in three categories: “Early Stories” (my Hemingway days, so to speak), “Transitional Stories” (the kinds of stories I wrote after my fortunate encounter with Juan Felipe Herrera), and “Crowsong Stories” (my after-Gass work). I present them in reverse chronology, perhaps in the spirit of putting my favorite foot forward.

The term “Crowsong” derives from my 2017 novel Crowsong for the Stricken, an experimental narrative comprising twelve episodes that work as both chapters of the novel and stand-alone short stories. After the novel’s publication I continued to be interested in the characters and their world, so I kept writing chapters/stories, thinking that I may release a revised edition of the novel that includes the new material. I wrote two such pieces—“Vox Humana” and “The Cold Dark March to Winter” —and a third, “Weird Soliloquies,” grew out of the second. That is, what became “Weird Soliloquies” was originally intended to be a section of “The Cold Dark March to Winter.” However, I decided that it wasn’t working as part of the story and took it out. Nevertheless, I liked the piece, so I developed it further and ended up publishing it as a stand-alone . . . thing (it strikes me as perhaps a prose poem more than a short story). For the collection, I considered reintegrating it into “The Cold Dark March” but ultimately my previous assessments still seem sound.

(I’ll mention that I wrote a fourth story, “First Kings,” while still thinking about releasing a new edition of Crowsong with the added material. Instead, “First Kings” propelled me in a revised direction, and it has become the beginning of a new novel, titled, I think, The Strophes of Job—how and when it will be published remain uncertain. Even though the three “Crowsong Stories” offered here make sense as stand-alone pieces, there is greater sense to be made of them if read in the context of the novel Crowsong for the Stricken, and more so still with the coming novel, The Strophes of Job, a prequel. Several of the Strophes have been published independently, including in some online journals—I mention in case anyone would like a preview.) [Update: The Strophes of Job has been published.]

Also included in this section is “Retribution,” which is not a Crowsong story. It is a translation of the Grendel’s mother episode in the Old English poem Beowulf. I assert that it fits because it was written in the midst of the Crowsong pieces (in the summer and fall of 2019), and it shares with them several attributes (which I’ll leave the reader to judge). In recent months I’ve returned to work on the poem and hope to eventually publish a complete translation of Beowulf. As demonstrated in “Retribution,” mine is a noncanonical reading that is still firmly rooted in the poet’s original language. I’ve discussed my approach in academic articles that can be found online: “Abreat v. Abræd: Reconsidering the Grendel’s Mother Episode in Beowulf” and “The Abduction of Aeschere: A Few Words Regarding a Few Words in My Translation of the Grendel’s Mother Episode.”

I find I want to say a few words about the early stories for posterity’s sake. I’ve already mentioned the situation that led to “Chinkó,” my first published story. As grateful as I was to Chiricú for taking the story, it felt a bit like a freakish occurrence that was unlikely to be repeated. That is, my sense of myself as a writer was still in that realistic, Hemingway-esque mode. I wasn’t going to be writing a series of stories—leave be a novel—in the persona of an indigenous person in Guatemala. So, in a way, I still felt that my true writer-self was unpublished. That soon changed when Paris Transcontinental accepted “Mix,” the story that prompted Kent Haruf to tell me to disregard nearly all of the suggestions I was getting in workshop. My classmates had destroyed “Mix” when I shared it with them, so I totally rewrote it, trying to incorporate as many of their suggestions as possible. The resulting monstrosity is what led Kent to tell me to trust my own writing instincts over the well-meaning but often wrongheaded advice of my classmates. So I went back to the original draft, except with one significant change that was completely my idea. I had written the story in first-person, and I decided to give the narrator some distance from the story by revising it into close third-person. I didn’t change anything about the story other than to turn “I” into “he,” “my” into “his,” and so on. It was the same story but with a distinctly different feel.

So when the envelope arrived from Paris informing me the editor had accepted “Mix,” it felt like my first acceptance all over again. It is, then, in my personal history as a writer, quite significant. Nevertheless, I feel some uneasiness including it here. It is a story about race, and it includes the n-word (twice). It is an honest story: true in the way Hemingway encouraged truth. The year 2023, however, is very different from the early 1990s (I reference the 1992 Los Angeles riots in the beginning of the story—the riots that were sparked by the acquittal of the police officers who had mercilessly beaten Rodney King), and it’s trickier now for white, male, heterosexual writers to write about certain issues, like race, or women, or sexual orientation. I’ve felt more and more boxed in as a writer—like many of the most important and engaging issues of the day are off limits to me. I get it; I understand. And I’d never write “Mix” or a story like it today. I just wouldn’t risk the potential backlash, and I’m wary to include it here. Yet I have … in part because I think of this collection as a message in a bottle to future readers, and there’s no way to predict what the climate will be like then when it comes to such matters. Perhaps, if nothing else, it will provide a useful snapshot into the historical and cultural record of the time of its writing and publication.

Another noteworthy early short story is “Fische Stories,” which appeared in Glimmer Train Stories. It’s noteworthy for at least two reasons. Glimmer Train was one of those magazines practically every short-story writer wanted to be in. Sisters Linda Davies and Susan Burmeister began the journal in 1990, ceasing publication in 2019. According to the journal’s website, they would receive about 40,000 submissions a year. Besides the prestige, Glimmer Train actually paid its contributors for their work. For “Fische Stories,” which was in issue number 43, summer 2002, I was paid $500 (an amount approaching $900 today).

Because of the publication in Glimmer Train, I was contacted by a New York literary agent (keep in mind that for a born-and-raised Midwestern writer, New York City seems as distant and as magical as Xanadu). At the time I was as adjunct instructor at Springfield College in Illinois, and I vividly recall going to my faculty mailbox and finding a letter from the agent. It was thrilling. Things were finally unfolding as they were meant to, I thought. There’d been a standard path to book publication for writers of fiction throughout the twentieth century (and the nineteenth, perhaps even rooted in the eighteenth). Writers would begin by placing stories in literary magazines with small circulations. As they continued to hone their craft, they’d start placing stories in nationally distributed magazines (like Atlantic Monthly, Collier’s, Esquire, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, etc.), which would allow them to build an audience of readers and get the attention of an agent or publisher who would champion their first novel.

There had been a Golden Age of magazine publication for much of the twentieth century, when fiction writers could make a good living selling stories to magazines. In the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda lived their legendary highlife almost solely from Fitz’s short stories, which could fetch as much as $4,000 each (nearly $60,000 in 2023 money). It’s estimated that during the 1920s and 30s Fitzgerald made almost a quarter of a million dollars from 164 magazine stories (more than $3.25 million today). A generation later, in the 1950s, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. sold four stories to magazines in the course of about eighteen months, allowing him to quit his job in the marketing department at General Electric and devote himself fully to writing. At the time, Vonnegut was supporting a wife and six children.

By the 1960s, however, television had begun turning the Golden Age into lead. And by the time I started to write effectively enough to publish, the Golden Age was a rapidly receding memory. In sum, television had superseded book reading as a popular pastime, and nationally distributed magazines had either severely cut back or eliminated space for short stories altogether, thus closing a crucial avenue for new writers to build an audience—let alone make a living.

With the Glimmer Train publication, I had at last attracted the attention of a New York-based agent. I replied immediately of course, letting her know I didn’t have a novel yet (I said I was writing one—if I was, I had a draft of a chapter or something like that), but I had a novella: a 36,000-word fictionalized biography of Herman Melville’s experience in the Marquesas Islands when he was a young sailor. She wasn’t especially excited about a novella but agreed to look at it. Not surprisingly, she wasn’t interested in representing it. When my novel was finished, she’d be happy to take a look.

I’d barely begun writing what would become Men of Winter, a sequel of sorts to Homer’s Odyssey. It took another three years to complete the manuscript. The ink was barely dry when I began looking for the agent. She’d moved to a different agency in New York. I contacted her. She remembered me and was willing to read the manuscript. I eagerly watched the mailbox for weeks, and she eventually replied … in the negative. She wouldn’t be taking on Men of Winter. To say I was disappointed barely begins to describe what I was feeling.

Over time I found two other agents who would try to get Men of Winter published. Neither was successful. After years and years of searching for a publisher, I found a new small press to bring it out. The experience was underwhelming, and we ultimately fell out over the collection I was hoping they’d bring out next (the collection that evolved into this collection).

Let me go back to the Glimmer Train publication because it was significant in another way. When the journal’s editor (either Susan or Linda—I can’t recall) contacted me, the acceptance was provisional. She thought I’d used the main character’s name too frequently, and that I should change some of the Fische and Fische’s to he and him and his. Not a problem. It’s hard to imagine now, but we were in a technological transition period. I’d contacted Glimmer Train the old-fashioned way, via a physical manuscript sent in a brown envelope, accompanied by a cover letter and an SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope). However, Susan (let’s say) contacted me via email. This was, I think, the year 2000 (or 1999 … Christmas Eve).

Email was a new-fangled thing, but attaching files to email wasn’t yet. I made the revisions to “Fische Stories” promptly and sent the revised story to Glimmer Train. I’m sure I included a cover letter, but I didn’t bother sending an SASE because I knew I’d hear back via email (fancy). I waited a couple of weeks before emailing Susan to see if she’d received the revised manuscript. No, but they received so many submissions, it may take awhile to unearth it. She said we should wait a bit longer, and if it didn’t show up, I should resend it and write “MS REQUESTED BY SUSAN” in huge letters on the envelope. It didn’t show, so I sent the story again, labeled as directed. In a few days, Susan emailed to say she’d read it and it was what they had in mind; she’d be mailing me a contract. Hooray.

(Fear not, whoever may still be with me: We’re getting to the point of this anecdote.) It was the first Monday in March, what used to be Casimir Pulaski Day here in Illinois, when I went to my mailbox and found two envelopes from Glimmer Train: a large FedEx envelope, and a business-size envelope. A little surprised, I opened the business-size envelope first, and it contained a rejection of “Fische Stories” along with a mild admonishment for not including a self-addressed, stamped envelope. In the FedEx envelope was the contract to publish it.

I knew immediately what had happened. The first revised story was received by some assistant or junior editor who didn’t bother reading the cover letter to know that it was a requested manuscript. The reader didn’t care for it, and rejected it.

So, in the long history of writing and publishing, I’m surely the only writer to simultaneously receive an acceptance and rejection for the same story from the same magazine side by side in the mailbox. The unique experience underscored, for me, the subjectivity of publication. In one reader’s eyes, the story beat out literally tens of thousands of other submissions to win a place in one of the most prestigious journals of the day; meanwhile, for another reader, it was easily rejected out of hand. The Glimmer Train Stories episode (along with many others that speak to this subjectivity) has softened the blow of rejection through the years.

Subjectivity is one wild-card factor when it comes to publishing. Another is timing. Included in this volume is the early story “Unnatural Deeds,” which caught the eye of the fiction editor at Esquire magazine. Publishing in Esquire would’ve been another opportunity to attract the attention of an agent and have my work read by a larger audience. Unfortunately, wrote the editor, they had either just published or just accepted for publication (I don’t recall) a story by T. C. Boyle (at the time, T. Coraghessan Boyle) that was very similar to “Unnatural Deeds” so he was going to pass. Otherwise….

And then of course there’s dumb luck, including dumb bad luck. I don’t remember the year exactly (maybe around 2008 or 2009), and I don’t remember which story I was shopping around (then and now I have multiple pieces in circulation looking for a publisher). I’d sent something to Harvard Review, and a few months later I received an email from a young woman named Rachel (M. R.) Branwen who identified herself as a reader for Harvard Review. She said she liked whatever story I’d sent them, and she’d recommended it up the editorial food chain. Her reason for contacting me, though, was that she was founding her own literary journal, Slush Pile Magazine, and she wondered if I had anything I’d like to contribute to the inaugural issue.

I appreciated her interest in my writing, so I sent her two chapters from Men of Winter (still unpublished at the time). Meanwhile, I waited for word from Harvard Review, mildly optimistic (or a shade less pessimistic than usual). And waited, and waited, until I forgot about it altogether. Truly. Then one day, some two years later, I received an email from the (an) editor at the Review. It wasn’t an acceptance or rejection, but an apology. They’d been rearranging the furniture in the editorial office, and when they moved a filing cabinet they discovered a folder of submissions (all earmarked for further consideration) that had somehow fallen behind the cabinet and gone missing.

My submission was among the lost-and-found. Whatever story I’d sent them, it had been published elsewhere. It didn’t matter—the editor wasn’t offering publication. Rather, to make amends, Harvard Review was offering to look at something else and give it a prioritized reading and response. I sent them another piece, and true to their word they read it—and rejected it—with impressive celerity.

To be clear, I don’t record these anecdotes as evidence of my unusually ill-fated efforts. Poor, poor me. On the contrary, I record them because I suspect they are similar to the disappointments and near-misses of practically every writer. As I tell my MFA students: It’s a jungle out there. Writers must develop a skin as thick as an elephant’s to survive the vicissitudes of the writing life. For every acceptance, for every modest award, for every publishing pittance, there are a hundred rejections and setbacks and unkind criticisms. But mostly there is no response whatsoever. To be published is not to be read. Most things, whether a haiku or an epic novel, seem to be born into a black void completely vacant of readers. They are elsewhere, bingeing on Netflix, betting on sports, and blasting virtual enemies.

When I attended the 16th International Conference on the Short Story in English, in Singapore, June 2023, participants were asked to respond to the open-ended question “Why the short story?” The following is my response:

I began writing short stories as a teenager—not good ones, mind you, but I was writing them—and I continue to write them. I turned 61 on my last birthday. However, it’s only been the last decade or so that my aesthetic sense of the short story has become developed enough to articulate and to put into specific practice.

The short story, I have come to understand, is the basic building block of all narrative. Even long narratives —“novels,” as we like to call them—are constructed from these building blocks. A long novel is merely a series of closely associated stories. We’ve always had this sense and have tended to relabel the short stories as “chapters” or “parts” or “books” or something fancy like “cantos” when they are housed within an overarching narrative superstructure, which, again, we’ve come to call a “novel.”

This fact is laid bare in works whose authors (or publishers) have elected to call them a “linked story collection” or a “conceptual novel” or a “novel in stories.” I submit that any such work could be called a novel, and we the readers would readily accept the designation. It’s true, of course, that some collections of short stories are not novels. They’re clearly a grouping of narratives that are unrelated other than having been written by the same author. We can all think of many examples. Any such independent story could be repurposed by the author to become part of a novel, and indeed authors have often used one of their short stories as inspiration and building fodder for an eventual novel. For example, two years prior to the publication of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf published the short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” Repurposing short stories into novels has been especially prevalent in the genre of science fiction. A noteworthy example is Ray Bradbury’s use of at least three of his stories—“Bright Phoenix,” “The Pedestrian” and “The Fireman”—to construct the classic novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953).

In Singapore I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Olen Butler, an author I’ve known of since his collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain won the Pulitizer Prize for Fiction in 1993, but whom I didn’t know until we met at the conference and were able to spend some quality time together. (By the way, he’s everything you’d want a famous author to be: friendly, funny, wise, kind.) I mention our encounter because at one point I asked him what he was working on now, and he said he was expanding one of his short stories into a novel—one of the stories from Tabloid Dreams (1996), I think “Jealous Husband Returns in the Form of a Parrot” (but don’t quote me on that).

Let’s look for a moment at well-known works by a well-known author: James Joyce. A quick reading of his bibliography would tell us that he wrote a collection of stories, Dubliners; and three novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. But when we look more closely at their constituent pieces, it becomes unclear why one is called a collection and the rest novels. Each is composed of a series of stories (let’s use stories in a general sense) that work together to form an artistic whole. Dubliners, after all, has several telltale signs of a typical novel, like a single setting and a steady chronological movement from youth to maturity to death (similar to A Portrait). Meanwhile, the novels were all published serially prior to book publication. That each of these novels is made of interconnected stories is probably most obvious with Ulysses, whose eighteen episodes have distinct nicknames (not titles per se) corresponding to characters in Homer’s Odyssey. Even the famously complex structure of Finnegans Wake can be viewed as a combination of recognizable stories, known informally among Joyceans by unofficial titles like “The Humphriad I [II and III],” “Battery at the Gate,” “Nightgames,” “Nightlessons,” and “How Buckley Shot the Russian General.”

With my novel Crowsong for the Stricken (2017; begun, though, in 2012), I started to deliberately write narrative pieces with dual purposes. Each would be both a stand-alone short story and the chapter of a novel. All twelve pieces of Crowsong were published as discreet short stories prior to its book publication. Since then, every story I’ve written has also been in the service of an overarching narrative framework, that is, a novel. To date, via this approach I’ve written the novels Mrs Saville (which was published serially prior to book publication), The Artist Spoke (about 80% of which was published here and there prior to book publication), and the [now available] The Strophes of Job (again, about 80% of the stories/chapters—or as I call them, strophes—have been published as stand-alone pieces). It now seems strange to think of a short story as a solely independent narrative, unattached to a larger project. In fact, I have difficulty imagining writing such a thing.

As a teacher of creative writing, I believe this understanding of the short story—as a basic narrative building block—is useful to my students, especially my MFA students. Most prose writers aspire to be novelists, but it can seem to be an Everest-like endeavor to write a novel, especially one that is carefully constructed. But if one thinks of a novel as being made of stories (either in a general or a specialized sense), the task shrinks to something less than an Everest, something manageable even. Another benefit of this mindset is that one can send out the stories as one toils away on the larger project, piece by piece. Each acceptance fuels the momentum required to complete the whole work, which can take years: a fact that leads to many unfinished novels being buried in desk drawers and resting in peace among the clouds.

The final section of this collection is my “Laertes Sonnet Sequence,” twelve poems written in apostrophe to my father, Vince, who passed away suddenly in 2012. I’ve always been interested in poetry, especially the sonnet form, but rarely had I written poetry in my own name. I mean that I’ve frequently included characters in my fiction who are poets, and I’ve written poems or parts of poems in their names (see, for example, Men of Winter and, especially, An Untimely Frost). Perhaps I lacked confidence in my abilities as a poet, so I preferred to hide behind my fictional characters. If readers found the poetry wanting, it was their poetry, not mine.

As I said, my father died in 2012, and I was having difficulty processing the loss. It occurred to me in late 2015 or early 2016 that I may be able to use my interest in sonnets to help with the grief by writing some sonnets to my father. We spoke every Sunday morning by telephone for an hour or two, and I was missing those conversations especially. Over the next few years, I would write a sonnet every so often, and I had some success in placing them and in their receiving some modest accolades. They are Petrarchan sonnets, with strong narrative threads. That is, each tells a story in miniature, and together they create an almost novelistic impression. At least, I believe they do.

Laertes, by the way, is Odysseus’ beloved father, and they are reunited when the lost wanderer at last returns to Ithaca.

It is appropriate to acknowledge where these stories and sonnets were first published, so I’ll (nearly) end this introduction with an expression of appreciation to the editors who found value in them and shared them with readers for the first time.

Crowsong Stories: “Vox Humana” (Blue Lake Review), “Weird Soliloquies” (briars lit), and “The Cold Dark March to Winter” (The Road Not Taken: A Global Short Story Journey).The Beowulf translation, “Retribution,” appeared in EKL Review.

Transitional Stories: “Chinkó” (Chiricú), “A Wintering Place” (Eleven Eleven; also reprinted as an appendix to the paperback edition of Mrs Saville), and “Communion with the Dead” (The Chariton Review; note that the original title of this story was “Nekuia”). I’m also including two pieces that aren’t quite like the others in that they have been published in book form: the long story “Figures in Blue” (originally published as an e-book novelette by Battered Suitcase Press), and “Melvill in the Marquesas” (published by The Final Draft; it is the first section of Weeping with an Ancient God, which I brought out via Twelve Winters Press; incidentally, “Melvill” is not a typo, but rather the way the author’s family spelled their name originally).

Early Stories: “The Composure of Death” (Pisgah Review), “Walkin’ the Dog” (Spilling Ink Review), “Unnatural Deeds” (Leaf Garden), “Missing the Earth” (Oakbend Review), “An Alabaster Moon” (PANK), “In a Strange City” (Eureka Literary Magazine), “Fische Stories” (Glimmer Train Stories), “When the Night Is New” (self-published in A Summer’s Reading, a literary journal I edited and published from 1997 to 2004), “Mix” (Paris Transcontinental), and “Cougars in the Hills” and “Watching Close” (both in The Sleepy Weasel). These last two pieces were written for Kent Haruf’s workshop courses. Kent would challenge us to write a single-page story with a beginning, middle and end. I suppose they qualify as “flash” fiction, my only such examples.

Laertes Sonnet Sequence: “Shroud” (Bellevue Literary Review), “Pilgrim” (the tiny journal), “Ingots” (Haunted Waters Press), “Obsolescence” (Prime Number Magazine), “Galaxie” (Fare Forward), and “Mass” (Grand Little Things). “Awakening” and “Dignity” were accepted for publication, but, alas, the editors held onto the poems for two years before acknowledging that they would be unable to continue publishing their journal. I understand, and appreciate their intentions nevertheless; thus, the sonnets appear here for the first time in print, as do “Acts,” “Argonaut,” “Seedlings,” and “Symmetry.” Their first public airing was for the Facebook program C.A.M.P. in which I read the complete sequence.

I began writing this introduction in Honolulu, where my wife and I were vacationing. We were only there, in Waikiki, a few days, but I immediately established a routine of waking before sunrise, going to the balcony of our hotel room (on the fourteenth floor), and drinking Kona coffee while I waited for my friend the ocean to materialize, little by little, out of the black of night. It was a near-religious experience each morning. Once the sun was fully up, I’d turn to my laptop and this introduction. It occurred to me that the slowly appearing Pacific was like the creative process. At first, the writer knows there is something there in the psyche—a story, a novel, a poem, something.

Maybe they have a vague sense of it (some of what is out there is black sky, some is black ocean, but where one begins and the other ends is undefinable). There may be distant lights that lisp some sense of the seascape. Whether the lights are a cruise ship or a fishing boat or a tanker, it’s difficult to say. As the writer begins to work through the process—putting words on paper or screen—contours emerge. Sky, ocean, clouds, waves … all become clear with the dawning daylight. It’s a story; it’s a novel; it’s this; it’s that. And the thing becomes more and more populated with characters and circumstances and nuances of color, just as charter boats and surfers and particolored parasailers begin their day in the brilliant tropical sun.

The tableau, over time, achieves its form.

I hope that you, dear reader, will find a tableau or two to taste within this delta, Delta of Cassiopeia.

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Where not specifically noted, my sources are (in order): Gass’s preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country; Conversations with William H. Gass; Gass’s Life Sentences; Fitzgerald-related websites and the film The Great Gatsby in Connecticut; introductory material for Kurt Vonnegut Complete Stories; and online resources for Bradbury and Woolf.

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Ted Morrissey‘s novel excerpts, short stories, poems, critical articles, reviews, and translations have appeared in some 120 publications. His most recent books are the novel The Strophes of Job (2024) and Delta of Cassiopeia: Collected Stories and Sonnets (2023). He co-hosts the podcast A Lesson before Writing with Brady Harrison and Grant Tracey. Ted is the publisher of Twelve Winters and its various entities.

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