Exercises aside, I like to teach Bausch's "What Feels Like the World" not simply because it's a terrific story, but because it reminds my students that the even the smallest, quietest subject matter can make for wonderful fiction. The story, as I mentioned, is about whether this ten-year-old girl is going to get over the exercise horse at the PTA meeting, but of course on a deeper level it's about much more than that. It's about the relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter and, more broadly, about the ways we're unable to protect the people we love. Reading this story reminds me of something a writing professor of mine said years ago, which is that there are three stages of writing--although the way I would put it is that there are three stages of writerly confidence. In the first stage, all your characters are dying, they're exploding, you believe that if something cataclysmic isn't taking place nothing worthwhile is going on in your story. The second stage is quirky characters. You give your character a tic, a lisp, a twitch, something that will, you hope, make your characters interesting. In the third stage, you're just writing. It's not easy just to write, of course (it often feels well-nigh impossible), but it's what Bausch is doing in "What Feels Like the World," a story that was anthologized and celebrated when it first came out, probably close to thirty years ago now. If you haven't read it, you should, along with just about all of Bausch's stories, which were collected a few years ago in a volume that weighs in at around 800 pages. "What Feels Like the World" first appeared in Spirits and Other Stories.
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