This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 4, 2011 - When he published a collection of stories in 2006, Richard Burgins aid he was through with short fiction and would be concentrating on novels from then on.
But after that book, "The Identity Club," was published, he followed up with more stories before publishing a novel last fall, "Rivers Last Longer." Now, he has a new book of stories, "Shadow Traffic" from Johns Hopkins University Press.
So why didn't he stick to his plan to stick with longer fiction?
"I guess I've had more success with stories than with novels," Burgin told the Beacon this week. "They're easier to write and easier to finish, obviously. If you make an investment in a novel, it takes at least a year or two, and I didn't feel at this point in my life like undertaking that kind of project and that kind of time commitment when it's so hard to get published, not to mention successfully published.
"I meant what I said when I said it, but things have changed."
Burgin, who has taught writing at Saint Louis University for 15 years, is no stranger to critical success. Reviewers have hailed him as "one of America's most distinctive storytellers." Of his work, one said that "in the contemporary American short story nothing quite resembles his singular voice."
He has won five Pushcart Prizes, putting him in the company of such writers as John Irving, Tim O'Brien, Mona Simpson, Raymond Carver and others published by the nation's small presses.
"Shadow Traffic" follows in the tradition of his earlier work, with stories of people who haven't managed to find personal connections in a troubled landscape. In it, Publishers Weekly says, he "deftly exposes his character's most sacredly held fears with a tenderness that makes the reader exalt in their small triumphs."
The characters may be part of a secret group, where members may choose to take either a drug that sharpens their memory or one that wipes it out altogether; they may join Global Justice Society, to help people "determine the source of injustice in your life and, more importantly, what you can do about it."
They may be at the age where they "discover you're not going to win the Nobel Prize, or become a multimillionaire, or live for the rest of time with the love of your life." Or they may be authors who have been diagnosed with a dread disease and are feeling a strong sense of their own mortality:
"You know it's funny," the writer Emir says. "When I was younger, I thought that books could capture life, and the sense of time passing, much better than films, because films are too short. Now that I have so little time left, whether I beat cancer or not, when I think of my past now it seems much more like a movie than a book, because it all seems so fast-moving and so short."
In addition to writing and teaching, Burgin, 64, is editor of "Boulevard," a literary magazine published by Saint Louis University that has featured works by Joyce Carol Oates, David Mamet, Billy Collins, Donald Hall and John Updike. He also has edited books of conversations with Jorge Luis Borges and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
In an interview, he talked with the Beacon about the modern literary landscape, how his writing has changed as he has grown older, commercial success and how the best fiction comes out of a sense of sadness.
Tell me about the title of the new collection, "Shadow Traffic." There's no story in the book by that name. What does it mean?
Burgin: I submitted some suggested titles to my editor at Johns Hopkins, including some that had the name of one of the stories, like "Memo and Oblivion and other stories," but he didn't like them and suggested I think of another title. Then it occurred to me that a title doesn't always have to be the name of one of the stories, just because it generally is. I thought of the Beatles -- there's no song called "Rubber Soul" on "Rubber Soul," or "Revolver" on "Revolver." So I came up with a number of titles, and this was one of them.
I ended up being pleased with it. I guess shadow to me is an image of the past, and I write a lot about the relationship of the past with the present. Family dynamics get internalized and continue to affect you throughout your life. I thought that was a theme that occurs throughout the stories.
There aren't a lot of happy people in these stories. Is it easier to write about people who are unhappy than those who aren't?
Burgin: I once asked Borges something like that, about did he think that all writing proceeds out of a sense of sorrow of some kind. He said yes. When you're happy, you don't want to sit down and write. You might tweet that, you might send an email about that, but you're not likely to write a novel proclaiming your happiness. If you're happy, you want to live life, not reflect on it.
This collection has more balance than any other ones that I have done. Right now, it's my personal favorite of my collections. I think there are stories that are more positive, that have a more optimistic outlook.
My father once said to me years ago -- I don't know what we were exactly talking about -- don't you think biology influences psychology. At the time, I didn't get what he was saying or just took it on a superficial, intellectual level. It didn't penetrate emotionally. Now it makes a great deal of sense to me. It could well be that I know I'm aging, and since I do believe the way we look at the world is to a large extent determined by our age, that has affected me and therefore my writing.
One theme that recurs in your fiction is memory. Talk about how important you think it is in people's lives.
Burgin: If we didn't have memory, we wouldn't be men. We would be animals. I have always been fascinated by that. And yet we remember such a tiny percentage of our lives. That's paradoxical to me, and the fictive quality of memory, how we can be creative and compose our lives at least as much as we remember them, has been a lifelong fascination. If our memory deserted us, we would have total panic. But when we remember things that are painful, we can also go into total panic.
On the one hand, people have a wish to remember more of their life. In the futuristic story I wrote, science and technology come up with ways to increase your memory. But on the other hand, a lot of what people remember is painful and therefore potentially dangerous. I was exploring that paradox -- what we wish for can also undo us or disorient us or torment us, and I further explore it by the creation and existence of oblivion, the drug that erases memory.
I think human beings in general live on a kind of seesaw between struggling for more memory and struggling to forget. That seems to be part of the human condition. That's what I was writing about in that story and what I have written about in others.
You've had critical success with your work, but like most people who write fiction, you are not a household name. Does that bother you?
Burgin: I've never made commercial success the thing I'm seeking. I've never tried to write a book with the hopes that it would make money. I'm one of those fools who loves to try to create "art." That was my goal, and it always has been my goal. I never wrote to try to make money.
If your goal is to do nothing but write -- and I admit I would have loved that kind of a life -- that's very difficult. It's especially incompatible in many case with a desire to be an artist. If your goal is to make money from writing and that's predominantly it, you may have an easier time. There are a number of things you can do that would make it lucrative. But if your goal is to be an artist, it's practically impossible.
I note in one interview a while back you said that "Boulevard" was available at a number of stores, including Borders. Now that Borders is gone, what effect will it have on writers of your kind of fiction?
Burgin: Borders ate up a number of other smaller places, and now it's gone. I feel a sense of sadness. It's not good for me personally, or for "Boulevard," because we have lost quite a number of places where it was available to be bought.
I feel the same for every other literary magazine. It hurts them a lot. It hurts literary books a lot.