Every few months I get together with some friends from my old MFA program for a “story club,” where we talk about a story one of us selected. Not one of our stories, just something one of us loved or hated or thought about a lot and wanted to share with the group. Like a book club but with short stories, because 1) it’s a lighter lift to read and talk about a single short story, and 2) the club was my idea, and I’m really a short story guy at heart.
After an early, failed attempt (by me) to get everyone on board with sharing ideas by email so we could be even lazier and more long-winded about things, we switched to Zoom meetings. Zoom has its own unique challenges, but we’ve tried to make it work, although I would say we’ve never figured out the perfect format, mostly because the organizer (me) is merely the least-terrible organizer among a group of folks who want no part in organizing things like this. But we all like each other, and because we meet only every few months, it’s usually just fun to see everyone’s face again and hear what’s going on.
But I want to talk about one thing that’s been unexpected and kind of fun about the experience, at least for me. We all expect to hear different takes on the same story, that’s true. If we all agreed on everything it might seem fun at first, the joy of recognition (I felt that way too!), but there’s not a lot you can do with that. It’s great to have someone else articulate something you couldn’t find the words for, but it doesn’t push you to think any more. So we want and expect to get different reactions, and the reasons for those reactions are what makes this kind of thing fun in the first place. It’s not meant to be a fan club. We’re all writers and we love the craft, and we’re here to talk about what works for us and what doesn’t, and why that might be.
Even so, we probably think we’re going to be in general agreement on what a story *is*, what it’s about at all. So one of the unexpected joys of the group has been to see how wildly different our readings really are. And yes, often it’s been me, I’m the one who completely missed what everyone else saw, or who thought something totally different was going on. But not always.
On more than one occasion it’s been the gender of the narrator that’s in question. This is probably pretty common with literary short fiction, where you don’t get as much hand-holding and setup. And we all bring our biases into any story we read, so when you have a first person narrator, for example, without any explicit or contextual clues, you’re more likely to assume the narrator is either the same gender as the author, or the same gender as you, the reader. It’s the “contextual clues” that make this a fun one, though. There are things I’ve missed because I’ve decided oh, this is a woman telling this story, and the reasons why I’ve decided that are probably stupid to begin with. But what’s cooler is how, when the author doesn’t clue you in, your assumptions can shape your reading of the story.
We read “Bounty” by Diane Cook, for example, and I was so happily convinced the monstrous narrator was a woman, unlike everyone else in our group. I didn’t know why it pleased me to think of the narrator as a woman, but it did, and once I thought otherwise, it was fun to think through how that affected my reading. A monstrous woman without any empathy for the suffering of others in the middle of an apocalypse? Intriguing! A monstrous man in the same context? Kind of a “been there, done that” thing. I expect the asshole to be a guy. I suspect I also imagined the narrator as a woman because the author is a woman, but I’ve also written unnamed woman narrators myself, so I’m not so sure. It was just fun to ride along with that assumption.
We also read “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak” by Jamil Jan Kochai, which we all loved. But I was the only one who read the entire story thinking the narrator was a ghost. I’m sure I was wrong, and I just took the title too literally and leaned into it. Obviously it’s *as if* the narrator was ghost, hence the title. And yet I had such a great time with the story imagining that it was being told by a wildly delusional ghost. That informed my reading of every single line, and adding to the “haunting” vibe in really lovely ways. I heard the voice differently, as something much more vulnerable and conflicted.
As a writer, I think all this resonates with me because my own stuff is full of ambiguity, and insofar as anyone reads my stuff, I have to accept that people are going to have wildly different and creative readings of anything I write. If I’m not willing to spell things out all the time, and I’m really not, then that’s the price. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. Even if there are people who end up absolutely hating something I’ve written because I (accidentally or intentionally) made it impossible to know with certainty what’s even going on, there will be other readers who enjoy that. Who love letting the story unfold in their minds with more than the usual help from their own creative imaginations.
