INTRODUCTION
The stories in this volume are selected from work published over a period of thirty years. As I read them chronologically, I had the sensation of falling through my life in writing. Though I was never consciously trying to change the way I write, on looking back, I note a distinct evolution.
My early stories have a young writer’s excitement about formal innovation, as well as a young woman’s preoccupation with personal relationships. They appear unsophisticated to me now, innocent, unguarded, and sometimes uncouth. My lifelong preoccupation with nature and with death as the debt we owe to nature makes these stories severe and lyrical. Many of the characters are animals, going about their animal lives while the human characters, vexed and tormented by their personal dramas, turn their backs on the natural world. I’ve gathered four of these here, under the title “Among the Animals.”
Sometime in the ‘90s, after living in Rome for a few years and reading Chekhov’s stories avidly and for the first time, I consciously raised the ante of the conversation I’d been having with myself about the short story. First by accident and then with intent, I undertook a series of stories about the lives of artists. My mental description of these excursions into the daily ordeals of painters, novelists, dancers, poets, and actors was “Art saves your life, art ruins your life.” The four stories included here under the title “Among the Artists,” are enlivened by an element somewhat dampened in the earlier work, namely humor. There’s still plenty of darkness, death is hanging over the scene, animals are getting the worst of it, the humans are competitive, mean-spirited, and engaged in a struggle that should be ennobling but is often degrading, yet the distant eye upon the dismal doings is lighthearted and amused.
The final grouping “Metamorphoses,” includes stories that hark back to my childhood fascination with a magical world in which animals and humans changed forms or merged. The last two stories, the only ones not previously collected in a single volume, are set in an imagined past that is both mythical and historical.
Acadia is the name given to the eighteenth-century French settlement in Nova Scotia by the residents thereof. It is a variant of the word Arcadia: the paradise of Greek myth inhabited by fantastic creatures, the playground of the gods. When the French were driven out of Acadia by the British, they made a long and difficult journey to Louisiana. The bayous and swamps where they settled, surviving by fishing and trapping, became known as Acadiana. This is the world, fantastical, atmospheric, and tragic, of the two final stories in this collection. The question “Are we animals, or are we something else?” has engaged my imagination throughout my writing career, and I have addressed it most particularly in short stories. These Acadiana stories offer an answer at once whimsical and disturbing: We are neither, and we are both.