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Shannon Ravenel, Interviewee 
David Applefield, Interviewer
Shannon Ravenel, co-founder and managing editor of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, former series editor of The Best American Short Stories, and editor of New Stories from the South, spoke with Frank editor David Applefield.
Frank: As you know, your comments here are appearing in a dossier of writing from North Carolina. Does this geographic distinction make sense to you? You´ve just edited a collection of southern American writing, why don´t you talk about the region? Shannon Ravenel: Well, everybody wants to know what makes southern fiction southern, and there´s no answer to it nor should there ever be. While Algonquin makes a point of riding on our southern image, I think we do it somewhat fallaciously. I think good writing is good writing, and I think good American writing certainly has a distinctive quality, but I´m not absolutely sure that southern writing has anything particularly special about it. Now, this is heresy of course! Frank: But on the other hand there has been a decentralization of intellectual circles in America and regional literature has surely emerged as some of the most original work being written today. SR: So have all circles in America, mostly because of television and travel. We´re all eating at the same chain restaurants and wearing clothes from the Gap and I think all of this shows up in contemporary fiction unless one is writing historical fiction which is usually not literary. The most graphic example of this is a story called Peeling. It´s set in Louisiana, and it´s about black women who peel cray fish. It´s by John Sayles from New Jersey and it´s a brilliant southern story because the people and the setting he is describing are southern. Frank: There´s an undeniably impressive concentration of writing coming out of North Carolina. How do you explain this? Does Algonquin play a role? SR: Well, a lot of that has to do with Louis Rubin I think, because he taught at the University of North Carolina with Max Steele and Jessie Rader and Doris Betts, and Reynolds Price was at Duke University and Lee Smith, one of Louis´s students at Hollins College, teaches at North Carolina State University. There are a lot of literary people there. I think Algonquin´s presence has some bearing on this. Algonquin is very much involved with a lot of writers. It´s fun to be there. It´s a very close-knit community. Almost all of those people are friends and they read each other. It´s the right place to be. Frank: Shannon, you´re certainly one of the few people in the United States to have read such a great number and variety of contemporary American short stories. Can you comment on trends or tendencies you have observed recently in the genre? SR: I think the American short story has in the last ten years become much more of an important force and I don´t exactly know why, except that more serious people are now paying attention to it, including reviewers. One very obvious thing that happened to the short story was the proliferation of MFA programs in universities and colleges. Since the Sixties these have grown--there are many, many more now than when I was in college--and the short story is the easiest fictional form to work on in a workshop setting. It´s pretty hard to work on a novel... Frank: Does the short story then perhaps say more about our society´s reading habits in general--attention span, etc.--and its writing habits than any inherent characteristic of the story as an art form. These writing programs, are you generally supportive of them? SR: I´m very supportive of them. I think that each one has quality and value in itself. It doesn´t matter who the teachers are and I don´t think that particular writers, like Stanley Elkin at Washington University for example, have a great influence on style. I think what those workshops provide is one to three years of time to write with an audience that´s willing to read you critically and honestly. I think it has done a lot of good stuff for American fiction. Frank: Some writers and critics feel that the end result is the "workshop story." SR: There is the workshop story. There are lots of stories published in literary journals, and I´ve read thousands of them, that are skillful, technically perfect, without the spark or whatever the little thing is that makes things work, but at least people are writing skillfully. I think writers make readers and I´m really more interested in increasing readership in America than writership. I wrote in college and I think the reason I became a good reader is because I tried to write. So I think they´re great, they buy our books, they´re serious literary people and we need more of them. And these programs work very well for the schools, that´s why they´re there. Frank: You founded Algonquin with Lewis Rubin in 1982. What was the controlling idea behind the press? SR: Well, Lewis, who had taught writing most of his life at two colleges, at Hollins and the University of North Carolina, found that the writers he taught had a very difficult time going beyond the classroom or workshop. He thought this was particularly true in the South and probably in other parts of the country, because those people did not have contacts in New York and at that time it was very necessary to have them. It was harder and harder--now even more so than when Lewis started the company--to get published if you were writing serious literary fiction. The first work is almost impossible to place. So he wanted to do something about making a place happen that was not so scary. You didn´t need an agent to get anything read at Algonquin. Frank: How have things changed since the early 80s? SR: They haven´t. In terms of submissions, we read everything. Lewis had this wonderful rule that we read them as they came in. So every manuscript is put on the shelf in the order in which it arrives in the office and that´s how they are read. Frank: How many new titles do you publish a year? SR: We do 20 new titles per year and we now have a few commercial titles like calendars to help us along financially. Frank: And what are the artistic principles you apply to the novels that you publish? SR: When people call us up and say they have a manuscript, I always ask if they consider it literary or commercial. If they say "literary," I ask them what do they think that means, and they often say it means it´s serious. I always say that literary means how it is written more than what it´s about and that´s the situation by which we choose them. We do not read very far into something that looks like it´s going to be genre or written for a particular market. Frank: You probably stun these callers because writers are not used to being asked a lot of substantive questions about their work. SR: They never expect this question and there´s always a long pause and they think, what does she want me to say? Frank: The dangerous thing about our world of rampant mass-marketing is that marketing has become a personal reflex that has intruded into the thought process of even non-commercial writers and artists. SR: Yes, but there is a place in American bookselling for all kinds of writing. I mean there´s no reason not to be the writer of genre books if that´s what you want to do. But that´s not what Algonquin is interested in doing and we really won´t buy them. We´re perfectly willing for our literary novels to become big successes if that happens, but that´s not really what we´re looking for.
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