how to teach a short story

General directions: Read each story twice. Suspect your first response. Look for patterns (repetitive images, words, symbols, dialogue, scenes) and account for every element. An interpretation of all the elements taken together is called a reading. Support your reading with either historical or textual evidence.

1. Provide a summary. Discuss what happens in broad-strokes and remember to include only the most pertinent details. A good summary will account for plot, the action and the sequence of events in a narrative. A summary is not a retelling, so choose what details you need to include. This requires a clear understanding of the story  as a whole. This will force the reader to ask, whose story is this? And then on, consider, what happens to who? Include the thirty-minute montage of navel-gazing, clipped dialogue, and pacing back-and-forth: the drama of strangers on the sidewalk outside Shakey's Morato. Gloss over five hours of helplessness that succeeded a bad review with this careless summary: "Though she slumped over the table--half her body on the hard wood--shut her eyes and rested in a comfortable position, she found no escape from an exhaustion so arid it emptied her mouth, it hollowed her heart. She finally beheld the terrible conviction, she even turned it over in her hands--a spiked ball, a heavy thing rattling, full of bones--she was wrong, wrong, wrong, and she was in the wrong place, doing all the wrong things."

2. Clarify the elements, beginning with setting, which will include more than the space. How long does the story take, how much time does it account for? Large tracts of time can disappear in a story. If the story engages particular historical events, then examine the details of the story, mindful of how actions, objects, names or tropes might have been significant within the culture and time period in which it was written. Take note of how the setting is described. Vocabulary (word choice) and syntax (sentence construction) contribute significantly to tone and mood. For example: 

Transcript: "marumi sa katawan? my tattoos? that's rich coming from someone who smokes, drinks excessively, and allows his prick to lead him all over Ortigas & Makati." Is this a story? It has two characters (a child, her father), conflict (her tattoo, his promiscuity), and it even has an ending (this conversation).

3. Note patterns, repetitive images, scenes, words. Patterns dramatize a progression of events and are often used to build both the rising action and the denouement. The trick is to to recognize one from the other. Repetitions--or the recurrence of an event, dialogue--are perhaps much more apparent in other media, including music and film. In music, patterns are easier to discern because all kinds of sound--every shrill, human noise we create--build upon silence: yelling, and so much of it, has crystallized in the air between them, diamonds anyone could've picked, pocketed, or else launched at each other. The same words tumble through the air, explode : respect, ingratitude, domestic pursuits, money, not enough money. Her tongue has grown thick and fat on these words, fed upon them as a python gorges itself on some paralyzed animal with hooves (this scene, this hour, when the leaves are gold and the light drips into the room, fat droplets dapple the tile floor, throwing her mother into shadow).

4. The perspective is always important, because the story primarily exists through the prism of one character, or from a limited perspective. Distrust the point-of-view, question it, and demand that it explain itself. I always ask: who is the audience? Who was supposed to read this story, and who understands how I decided to forgive you long ago but it still took me by surprise how I must continue forgiving you, over and over, how there is no space between us for this conversation. How very little exists here, between you and I, where I must tear even the air to find you. Only these words grow: hello, hello again, when are you coming home, how far away from home are you?

5. Finally, what is its project? Ask: What is it trying to do?

facial recognition software {malfunction}

Before the jolt of recognition, I am alone.

Before Monday

The few hours I scraped together between checking and preparing for next week I spent relearning how to breathe. I forgot, even, that I was supposed to be writing a story. Writing, in fact, several stories. And an essay. I would show you a photograph of my list but I don't want to embarrass myself. Instead, Hemingway (hardness, clarity):

the terrible business of anticipating happiness

1

Doubt belongs right up there with all the other mortal sins.

2

It wasn't the first time I found myself walking in circles. Too ashamed to ask the cab driver to turn around and fiercely certain I could find my way on foot anyway, I swallowed my fear and got down in front of a faceless, unfamiliar building. I saw a convenience store in the lobby and headed in that direction but the guard on duty--an unassuming man in a wrinkled, off-white barong--stopped me at the door. When he didn't recognize me, he turned me away, explaining with the business end of his kindness that civilians and non-employes had to walk around the building instead of walking through it.

3

After months of dating, Eya met her boyfriend with all the whirling, unfocused energy of a storm meeting land. This was how I imagined it took place.

She watches the wall of turnstiles fifty meters away. The tiles of the floor and the low, white ceiling reflect giants and the blunt spires of cathedrals where there are only slumped passengers and their misshapen bags. Of course the group of women stand in a clump, heads bobbing on their strained necks, trying to catch a glimpse of someone they've only squinted at from the screen of Eya's smartphone.

But no sound announces his entrance into their lives. They almost miss each other they are looking so hard. How do they know? Do they recognize each other from a distance and then do they feel each other's arrival, like gravity or heat?

There is no running. Or maybe there is. In this iteration, Eya cannot run, there are too many people, the straight path to him disappears. She must pick her way across an ocean of bodies and across the long moment of unrequited recognition, the confusion before he sees and knows her.

And then is there relief?

I will imagine their (re)union brings relief and gratification in equal measure. How often do our plans succeed? She conjured his whole body, intact and full of wonder.

4

"Hindi ka hiyang sa pagtuturo, ano?" Hannah asks, watching me catch smoke with my mouth. I stand in the middle of the little cyclone I exhaled.

"What makes you say that?" My throat is full of bile. I will never be a smoker but I enjoy holding the stick between my fingers. Every rebellion I've ever staged has been against my own body: self-harm, body dysmorphia, bulimia.

"I know what the opposite looks like. My other friends thrive under the pressure."

I forgot that I hid nothing from these people; what I do not say remains only unsaid, neither unreachable nor inaccessible to them. 

I prepare for a barrage of questions and do not realize that Hannah spoke only for my benefit, because she knew I had not seen myself in a mirror lately. She doesn't talk for the same reasons I do: to argue or to draw out explanations the same way you would suck poison from a wound.

Fear is knotted with pleasure. There is no way to hold one without the other. Every angel is terrible and terrifying. I have that tattooed on my rib.

"How are they?" I ask.

"Not awkward." 

Face-to-face (FtF) communication works so well because more than 90% the information necessary to facilitate pleasurable dialogue is communicated through body language and non-verbal signals instead of spoken language.So despite Sony's halting English and his tenuous grasp of conversational Filipino, he is verbose. And Eya stops snapping her fingers at the dinner table after he gently explains--sotto voce, face turned away from us--how Europeans considered the gesture extremely rude.

"Don't do that," he says. Almost apologetic.

5

I talk to myself when I am lost. I've been talking to myself in silent classrooms all semester.