A Story For Us
"Paper Pills" by Sherwood Anderson
I thought you all did a great job with “The Coffin Maker.” Let’s bring forward, to our future discussions, an idea we talked about last time - this notion that a story makes its meaning, in part, from the little beautiful and memorable excesses it commits along the way.
If a story has no excesses (no bumps, no peccadilloes, no memorable features, etc,) it will prove impossible to finish. And a beautiful ending will, and must, somehow take those excesses into account.
Well, that’s big and general - but your responses to my challenge re “The Undertaker” seemed, already, to understand that idea.
I’m always so impressed and gratified by the quality, inventiveness, and kindness of the discussions we have here: thank you, all of you. This is a particularly bright space in a wobbly, discourteous time.
It came to me the other night that we’d never done a Sherwood Anderson story here at Story Club. His Winesburg, Ohio was important to me as a young writer and I read it a few years ago and found it stranger and even more wonderful (about America, about life) than I’d remembered it.