The first short story I ever read – not for a school assignment, just for me – was Ursula K Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. I read it in 1991, at the Zaul Memorial Library in Saginaw, Michigan. I read it in a collection of short stories – or maybe a magazine? I honestly don’t recall – and then I read it again, and I renewed it three times (which was the limit, back then), and then I had to have it so badly I painstakingly photocopied each page and stapled it together and brought it home. The whole thing only cost me fifty cents to copy and take home with me forever*.
It was so many firsts for me, all at once. It fucking blew my mind.
You could contain something that powerful, that many revelations, in that few words? The story was TINY. I could keep it in a folder in my trapper keeper and take it everywhere. I could read it almost everywhere!
It was a story about an idea, more than about the plot or the characters, even. You could… do that? You could just write things, and stuff doesn’t have to Happen the way it does in novels, in some kind of concrete set of scenes in an order that makes sense? You can talk about things that have happened and are happening and will happen again all at once, and you don’t have to make your story about Stan Manly, the Man who Things Happen To? You can make it about a people, a city, a town?
And you could address the reader directly? You could make the story about them, you could tell them things, you could send images right to their mind like that? You didn’t have to be coy, and you didn’t have to put it all out there? You could just ask the reader and if you ask the right questions, it all comes together in like, a personal way?
And a woman could write this? Not fluff, not genre, but literature?** Girls wrote this stuff too??? Not just girls, not pretty twenty-somethings with ponytails and Appropriately Cute Skirts, but old ladies who looked like they had a secret, with white hair and the weight of wisdom staring out of their author photo.
And things like this could be literature?** Like, proper award winning literature that makes it into Important Looking Collections and Best Ofs and stuff? It doesn’t have to be 350 pages of Historical Truth. Five pages of an idea. Just. Five pages, clean and pure, of something that never was, just a dream you had, just a thought, and it was Real Important Writing.
And Literature could make you feel like this? It wasn’t just for fun, it was for learning and knowing and for your heart as much as your head? I cried for the child in Omelas, because I was 11 and I didn’t know what else to do. I cried.***
And your heart breaking, did you know that can be a good thing? It can mean that you feel and understand, that you’re not broken but a real, whole person who wants good things, that no matter how much you dissociate, you’re still a part of this world. Reading that story would ground me, it would help me come back to the world. I didn’t know why but it did.
And then you can request all this stuff by the same author, and it all comes flooding in to you from all the branches of the libraries all over your town, and you understand for the first time how some people can have a favorite author, and some authors can have a voice. You can understand what it feels like to have someone reach out to you through time and give you words that feel like they were written just for you.
I wrote her a letter, once, and she never wrote me back, but I will forever hope that she read it at least, my shaky thirteen-year-old handwriting that said something to the tune of Thank you so much for writing what you did, because my life is better now that I’ve read it, and you’re my favorite forever, and thank you.
And now she’s gone, and though we never met I’m sitting here at my desk at work crying all over again, crying my heart out, because the loss of her is palpable and real, because there’s a hole in the universe that’ll never get filled, because the collective wisdom of the human race has slipped, ever so slightly, without her.
I miss you. Thank you. The end.
* Oh, that dime-a-page copy machine at the front of the library was my friend for like, most of the 90s.
**I’ve learned a lot about literature since then, and about the bullshit of the genre ghetto, and exactly what women could write, but back then I had only the opinion of a few banal elementary teachers and some old english textbooks in my head.
*** And when I got older I cried for the ones who walked away. And when I got older still I cried for the ones who stayed. And then for the thought that I might stay, if I were there, and what that meant about me. And then for how hard it was going to be for me to change.
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