Stuart Dybek, "Vigil"

It’s December 24. Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots, would pry open another manhole if given half a chance.

How would you describe your story?

STUART DYBEK: Memoir-like, and for good reason—it pretty much happened as told. It is part of a collection of stories that takes the narrative shape of a bildungsroman, though that wouldn’t be apparent from this story without the context of the others. Dickens’s Christmas Carol single-handedly establishes the sub-genre of the Christmas story and I’d like to think that “Vigil” belongs to the club.

When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?

SD: I wrote the story maybe ten years ago. It’s a story that I carried around with me for a much longer time. I have taught in Prague every summer for the last 20-some years and restaurants there such as King Solomon have carp on the menu. In the Czech Republic it is traditional to prepare carp for the holidays. I grew up in an inner-city neighborhood in Chicago called Pilsen that was a port of entry for Czech immigrants in the 19th century, and so seeing carp on Prague menus naturally reminded me of people in my old neighborhood. I fish, but I would never fish for carp. I love seafood and over the holidays always make the Feast of Seven Fishes. Carp is never one of those fishes. But sometimes the most useful memories for a story are those that are conflicted. I have written several autobiographical stories and all of them have the element of a complicated emotion in them.

What kind of research went into this story?

SD: Trying to eat a carp dinner at King Solomon. Walking around 18th and Blue Island where the story is set. The neighborhood is now the largest barrio in the midwest and is undergoing some gentrification but it still looks much the same as when I grew up there.

What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?

SD: I don’t know who was first to make the claim that the short story is closer to a poem than a novel, and like most generalizations that is an oversimplification. Obviously, it depends on what particular writer has harnessed the form. But for me, my love of the story as a form does have to do with aspects—compression, in particular, and all the techniques that make for compression—it shares with poetry.

Given all the innovation, hybridization, experimentation of the 20th and 21st century, I don’t know that there’s anything fiction can do that non-fiction can’t, or that poetry can do that prose can’t. Still, I think it is safe to say that given its literary history a story comes with a recognizable set of expectations. That there’s something wonderful that is shared between reader and writer by the story form when on a conscious or unconscious level both know they are collaborating on the form that gave us so many stunning pieces of literature: Joyce, Babel, Flannery O’Conner, Welty, Hemingway, Munro… just to list a few favorites. It was the story form Chekhov employed to arrive at the idea that an ending could be a realization. It was the story form that gave us the epiphany. The story form in which Poe came up with the notion of an “effect.” In other words it was the story form that redefined for international literature what a story can be.

Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

SD: All my books are currently in print. Hopefully they’re in libraries and if not on the shelves of a bookstore, hopefully they’ll order them. I don’t have a website but there is plenty of stuff online.

What's the best gift you've ever been given?

SD: Thinking about an answer makes me think of W. S. Merwin, a favorite poet and friend who died in May of this year at 91 in his home in Hawaii, and of his poem “Thanks”: “Listen / with the night falling we are saying thank you...”

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