Welcome to week 2 of our Read/Write Challenge guys, and our next two short stories. Today we’re going to look at “Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid. This very short story is wonderful to read but even better to listen to. You can hear it at the New Yorker’s Fiction podcast, read by Edwidge Danticat. The Fiction podcast enlists contemporary authors to read and comment on short stories by their favorite authors, chosen from the magazine’s archives. I highly recommend it, as well as the New Yorker’s Author’s Voice podcast, which showcases authors reading their own short fiction, from current issues of the magazine.
One Thing I Noticed: If Ursula Le Guin’s story “Walking Away from Omelas” defies genre, then Kincaid’s story “Girl” defies form. In it, a mother gives instructions to her daughter, both mundane (how to do laundry, how to make pumpkin fritters) and revealing (how to negotiate a man’s world). The tone varies from motherly and thoughtful, to aggrieved and accusatory. The story is not only very short, it is a single sentence. Kincaid employs repetition in a way that makes the piece incantatory, that begs you read it aloud. In this way, it blurs the boundary between fiction and prose poetry. The piece also does not have a traditional linear narrative. It offers instead a glimpse, much like a piece of flash fiction and is structured as a list story.
One Idea: Write a story in which the narrator gives the reader “the rules for surviving in this place.” Maybe the “place” is a physical location (the New York subway), maybe it is an occupation (tenured university professor), a role (motherhood), a relationship (marriage). Try to reveal something about the narrator and the person he or she is speaking to through the narrator’s elucidation of “the rules.”
See you tomorrow for another story!
