Workshop Heretic

I've said I was quitting a million times, including twice recently.

When people who haven't been trained in literary analysis read the criticism of those who have, I imagine they often think the "pros" are just making it up and reading too much into the story.

As I write this in early February 2026, I'm not quite sure how I got to where I am.

Donald Trump does so many outrageous things, it's hard to remember the once-unthinkable thing he or his administration did last week let alone in his previous administration.

This must be that thing that happens once a year in blogging through a short story anthology where I have to pause to remark on how the stories in said anthology are not intentionally lined up such that two consecutive stories interact with one another.

A lot of story titles try to sneak in unassumingly and maybe even make you forget about them by page three.

Do you get it?

While being mostly unemployed the last ten months, I spent some time digging into the philosophy of religion.

If you've ever dabbled in cognitive therapy, you've probably encountered this adage from Epictetus that is thousands of years old: "Men are disturbed not by things, but the views which they take of them."

True to my word, I'm at least going to try to blog through Best American Short Stories again this year, even though I'm scheduled to begin law school in little over two weeks.

It looks like after nine months of wandering since leaving my government job and generally feeling for most of 2025 like I don't have any great path forward with my life, I'm going to find my way to law school at some point in 2026.

Once in a while, I put one of my own stories on this blog.

I joked a couple of posts ago about how doing a compare and contrast was a lazy way to make it seem like I was really engaging with a story while not actually working all that hard.

"Strange Fruit" by Yah Yah Scholfield takes the Billie Holliday song by the same name and runs with it.

I'm almost always running out of gas by the time I get to the end of blogging through a short story anthology, and this year's run through the 2025 O.Henry Anthology, a.k.a.

I don't have a grand unified theory for "Rosaura at Dawn," something that makes sense of all the parts both individually and in their relationship to the whole.

I was pretty sure during my first read-through of "Mornings at the Ministry" by Ehsaneh Sadr that I was dealing with an unreliable narrator.

There are two kinds of stories I feel I can mostly skip over when I'm blogging my way through one of the big short story anthologies.

First, an update: I said I might have to ditch blogging about contemporary short stories in my last post.

All evidence to the contrary, I don't like to indulge too much in talking about myself on this blog.

I had two thoughts during the first half of reading "The Spit of Him" by Thomas Korsgaard.

I once knew a co-worker who shared a gene with his wife that meant they had a one in four chance of passing along a very debilitating condition to their children.

The easiest critical posts for me to write about contemporary American short stories concern stories where a lay reader might be confused what makes the story in question worth reading.

(Personal update before launching into this: Obviously, my new job has slowed down my pace of posting here.

"Stump of the World" by Madeline ffitch joins "Thunderstruck" by Elizabeth McCracken at the top of my list of great contemporary short stories about the perils of raising children.