Muse & the Marketplace 2019

Short story collections are curious beasts. The individual stories are often the result of many drafts, intensive labor, and rounds of feedback from the workshop. Yet so often the manuscript as a whole is not given the same consideration, and may struggle to form a book, rather than a collection of discrete objects. What are the strategies a writer might use to tie a collection together? How might one use character, geography, theme, resonance of imagery, juxtaposition, and line-level echoes to achieve this goal? How do the stories speak to each other across the collection, and what opportunities might there be for narrative progression in the book? This session will examine these questions and more from an editor’s point of view.