EINSTEIN'S WRITERS DEN
This Writer's Den is inspired by EINSTEIN'S BEACH HOUSE, a book of stories by Jacob M. Appel. It is a place for discussion about the craft of these stories. Two aspiring writers are using this space as a workspace. All of the stories were published earlier in Reviews or Journals, so they were refereed to a certain extent. They were collected in this volume and published in 2014.
Allison Lynn, author of The Exiles and Now You See It, comments in the frontispiece: "Impossibly keen... a collection that takes a sharp look at the moments when we, whether child or adult, see who we truly are, and the inevitability of who we will become. Appel's achy, skewed, sometimes heartbreaky world is dense with truth and humor---the stuff of great literature."
High praise, indeed. My own experience in reading the book was one of amazement at the originality of the style of the stories, but distinctly feeling they were not all equally well-written. I detected flaws (of course from my particular perception), and I felt I was learning from the flaws as well as the excellence of his story telling. I was especially impressed with the range of subject matter. Appel is clearly an intelligent observer. Regardless of the verdict of excellence or not, I think observing the craft of his stories might help my friend and me as we pursue writing projects on our own.
So when a young friend of mine indicated an interest in becoming a writer, I was intrigued by his wide-rage of interests and that he impressed me as an intelligent observer. At the this point in his young career, he writes what he describes as essays. For me, an essay suggests a work of non-fiction. At one point essays were topical such as Yoshida Kenko's ESSAYS IN IDLENESS (1332), Ralph Waldo's SELF-RELIANCE (1841), William Hazlitt's ON THE PLEASURE OF HATING (1823) Joan Didion's ON KEEPING A NOTEBOOK (1968) or David Foster Wallace's CONSIDER THE LOBSTER (2005). Not too long ago, in noting how definitions sometimes change over time, I came upon Ashley Shannon's THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SHORT STORY AND A PERSONAL ESSAY, which in itself is an essay published on the Internet.
