Alison Baker's short stories explain what it means to be human: We have boring jobs, sometimes. We have ex-spouses, some of us, whom we hate for awhile. Pretty soon we can no longer muster the energy.
Some of us have children, whom we adore. But raising them turns out to be harder than we, or they, would wish. Our pets also turn out to be more trouble and less devoted than we thought they'd be. Eventually we get sick. But it turns out we don't want to die, even though life is weird and hard. Being alive is too entertaining.And Baker's stories are entertaining in the same way that real life is entertaining. Her characters are as wry and wacky as anyone you'd meet in an Anne Tyler novel. Like Tyler, Baker is gaining recognition for her storytelling skill. She has had a short story included in the O. Henry Award collection for two years in a row now.
Baker's new book, "Loving Wanda Beaver," is her second collection of short stories. The first, published in 1993, was titled "How I Came West and Why I Stayed."
She was living in Utah when that first collection came out. Baker says her writing changed during the four years she lived in Salt Lake City. In a phone interview from her home in Ruch, Ore., Baker said the difference between the landscape in Utah and on the East Coast is one of scale. Landscape, nature, became a bigger part of her stories just because it was a bigger part of the author's life.
"Everything is so much more extreme: the mountains, the desert. The light is different and the streets are much wider - not like in Boston. The landscape is one of major factors of living here."
Baker grew up in Crawfordsville, "the Athens of Indiana," she notes in a short author's autobiography. The town was also the home of Gen. Lew Wallace, who wrote "Ben-Hur." Baker says, "We had a Ben-Hur Office Building, a Ben-Hur Drive-in, a Ben-Hur Museum and a Ben-Hur Nursing Home. All this may have given me the idea that literature was to be taken seriously; Gen. Wallace had, of course, been a famous general, but everything in town but the Lew Wallace Motor Inn was named after his book, not his battles."
Her father was a poet who taught at Wabash College. Baker went to Reed College, where she too was a poet. "When I graduated from Reed I snared a job at a hospital in Portland, where I was a library assistant. I was elated to discover I could do something other than write poems: I was pretty good at looking things up" and did a heck of a job shelving books.
She returned to Indiana for a master's degree in library science. She describes the next decade or so, being a medical librarian in Chicago and at a genetic research lab in Maine ("the world's largest producer of inbred strains of mice. Nude mice, waltzer mice, spotted and twirler and dwarf mice. I was a mouse librarian!") as "an exciting life."
She was, however, willing to give it all up when she fell in love with a visiting biochemist. They married. They moved to Utah. Baker found being "supported" gave her time and space to write something longer than poems.
For several years she was on the board of the local group Writers at Work. She did her first public reading in Park City in 1992. She read a story about cheerleaders. Baker says she can still remember how nervous she was.
Now, about to embark on her first major promotional tour, Baker finds she is still nervous. (She will be in Salt Lake City on Sunday, Nov. 12, reading at a Woman's Place Bookstore on Foothill Boulevard at 2 p.m.) Part of her is scared, but part of her likes reading. She says, "I don't have any kids, so this is one of my few opportunities to read aloud."
Over the past years as her free time expanded, Baker's form expanded from poetry to short stories to longer stories and novellas. But she says she thinks the expansion will stop here. Despite the conventional wisdom that says novels are more marketable than short-story collections, Baker doesn't ever see herself writing a novel.
"A novel seems like such a different thing. Writing one seems more of an organizational effort, getting into detail and analyzing." For the reader, she says, a novel is also a different experience. Perhaps reading a novel is more like watching television, where you see the whole scene, and reading a short story is more like listening to the radio, where your imagination is called on to supply context.
Stories grab the reader for a shorter, more intense period of time, Baker says. "A novel can be comforting. Or involving. But stories are exciting."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Excerpts from `Loving Wanda Beaver'
From "Loving Wanda Beaver," a novella and stories, by Alison Baker:
I was tired of the whole thing. My mother's optimism wore me down, and I was relieved to be with my father, who had a glum view of the world and didn't believe anything would improve the situation.
- from "The Rich Man's Easy Charm"
"You in Nam?" Bear said, looking up at Decker from under his bushy eyebrows.
"No," Decker said. Bear was gazing expectantly at him, so Decker said, "Asthma." He left out the part about running up and down the stairs of his doctor's building while smoking a cigarette.
- from "Almost Home"
He knew he was a pushover. He saw himself as a large, man-shaped marshmallow, dented all over where women had poked at him to make him do things. The thought made him hungry.
- from "Ooh, Baby, Baby"