A Snow Globe Theory of the Short Story

I met Nora Lange in the dream space of the Brown Creative Writing MFA Program where I was teaching and she was a graduate student. As a student, she seemed all possibility, all wonder, and I, the witness to that nascent, vulnerable state of becoming. There was an openness, a tenderness and hope, an optimism, an irreverence, a crazy faith. I loved her quiet audacity, her willingness to fail when need be, her tolerance for the unknown, her acute take on all that surrounded her. Nora had a great spirit and an enormous verve—the quality that is immediately recognizable in those students who are up for anything.

The anything in those days was weekly or bi-monthly writing assignments conducted in the experimental narrative laboratory being run under the guise of a writing workshop. Nora recently reminded me of one of the things her cohort was up to at the time: They had been asked to create a Cornell box in which the page itself wou...