Story magazine

In which I seek literary revenge for Game 7, 2009, Caps vs. Penguins

Perhaps you’ve heard this depressing news: Story magazine will be on hiatus for an undefined length of time. The journal’s editor shared the news in an email over the weekend.

I’m sad. Story has been part of my literary life since the beginning, and I was desperate to see my work published there. Super-quick history: the journal started in 1931, edited by the legendary Martha Foley and Whit Burnett, showcasing authors such as Salinger, Capote, Cheever, and more. It shut down in 1967, then returned in 1989, overseen by the company that owned Writer’s Digest and edited by Lois Rosenthal, another legend. Almost immediately, Story rose to a level of prominence remarkable for a lit journal (I’m not kidding: Wikipedia says circulation was 40,000). The journal also had an aura of “cool” that’s hard to replicate, and IMO was one of the top 10 places to get your fiction published (by “your” I mean other people’s; despite my efforts and some close calls, I never got a story in there). Then it shut down again in 2000. Then opened again briefly with 3 issues in 2014 (I didn’t know about this iteration). Then in maybe 2019, I stumbled across the Story magazine table at the AWP bookfair: Story was back! Editor Michael Nye was charming and enthusiastic and delighted that I was familiar with the backstory. Of course I bought a subscription on the spot, and I believe I’ve kept a subscription ever since. (I also subscribed back in the 90s…about every fiction writer I knew did.)

So what a thrill that “Hat Trick” was accepted and came out in Issue 9, Autumn 2020. The story is set in DC, with the present of the story taking place primarily at a Washington Capitals hockey game. There are flashbacks to a complicated college friendship between the two women we see as adults here, one of whom has a sullen, teenage boy who’s being lured into dark places on the dark web. Of course Caps mascot Slapshot makes an appearance; I get to promote my favorite player from the team, T.J. Oshie; and I use a real-life incident that feels like perhaps the “DC-est” moment of all my years living there, when during a stadium-wide moment of silence to commemorate the recent death of Kobe Bryant, a man shouted out, “Alleged rapist!” –and it’s that lawyerly “alleged” that still makes me laugh though I know I shouldn’t. Oh, and the despised Pittsburgh Penguins—whose real-life play-off victories over my Caps gutted me countless times—lose this fictional game! (Hell, yes, revenge IS sweet!)

This story is also online if you want to read all of it.

I noted above that I laughed though I know I shouldn’t. Much of “Hat Trick” is uncomfortable and designed to be so. The story’s part of my collection ADMIT THIS TO NO ONE, and my writing goal there was to push characters into the most uncomfortable path or choice at every crossroad. Part of my real-life inspiration here was a conversation I had with a mom I had just met whose 15-year-old son was getting (IMO) dangerously deep into dark web rabbit holes. “Right now, I’m just listening to him,” the mom told me. “He’s very smart, and he’s really thinking hard about these things. Sometimes he makes a good case.” (YIKES. We were in a resort swimming pool at the time, which was all the more surreal.)

Here, I worked really hard to describe the teenager physically, the kind of writing I find difficult, because I needed the reader to feel at least somewhat connected to, possibly sympathetic toward his darker, harder personality. Because I know how hard I worked on those descriptions, those are some of my favorite lines here:

skin stretched over toothpick-thin bones that seem too long, and a stiff, ravenous face

But the writer giveth and the writer taketh: I also have the third person narrator secretly make fun of him for wearing a basketball jersey to a hockey game, one of my #secretscrapbook pet peeves. WEAR ATTIRE OF THE SPORT YOU’RE WATCHING—or wear regular clothes. I’ll also point to the power of writing in tiny observations one picks up in life if one isn’t hunched over a phone. I promise DC folks know exactly what I’m talking about:

Ben stands the entire Metro ride, spinning his body around the vertical pole like tourist children do March through August when they invade the city on school and family trips.

I noted above that I never had a story in the 90s Story, during its heyday. BUT! I did place 4^th in their short-short competition in 1999, so there’s my name (interestingly above ZZ Packer’s name). I remember feeling bitter that the journal published only the top 3. “Heat,” written to a prompt in a workshop at the Sewanee Writing Conference, was included in THIS ANGEL ON MY CHEST fifteen years later. But it never got published, despite my sending it to 20 different journals. And this never happens except when it does: Story is the first place I sent “Hat Trick” too--!! (Okay, I also sent it at the same time to The New Yorker, and apparently they loved my story so much they sent me not 1 but 2 emails of rejection.)

Then and now, you can see in the TOC the excellent writers Story found and encouraged along the way. There’s a reason I kept my subscription all those years. Here’s hoping this hiatus is brief.

Story, 2020

Story, 1999