Book Review/Going Away Shoes
Going Away Shoes By BILL DUNCAN Any writer will tell you it is much easier to write a novel than it is to write a short story. Jill McCorkle should know that, since she teaches writing at North Carolina State University and the fact that she has published five novels. However, she excels at writing short stories and has published three collections of her short stories. Her latest collection, “Going Away Shoes,” has 11 short stories, my favorite, “Me and Big Foot,” is the last of the 11, in this edition. Two of the stories included, “Intervention” and “Magic Words,” have been selected for the Best American Short Stories series for a forthcoming volume. “P.S.” an epistolary story in this edition, appeared in Atlantic Monthly’s annual fiction issue in August. McCorkle said in an interview the lesson she had to learn about short story writing was to fully appreciate its form. “For a long time, I was saving what didn’t fit into a novel thinking I could someday turn it into a story. Then I read an essay by Anne Tyler about how what goes into a story is every bit as rich and full and complicated as what goes into a novel. With that in mind, I started reading more short stories and practicing writing my own.” The advantage of a short story for readers is that the stories can be read in one sitting and the reader doesn’t have to start on page one and read to the end, but can pick and choose which story to read. The disadvantage for the writer is to tell the story with a beginning, middle and end in a tight space and yet hold the reader’s attention in that short space. McCorkle has accomplished this with a knack for outstanding humor that has the reader seeing the foibles of life – perhaps even seeing themselves in the words she writes. “I think most of my work does employ humor,” she said. “At the center is usually something painful or sad and from that vantage point I am on the lookout for moments of levity.” In the story entitled, “P.S.” she said she was obligated “to flip the rock over” to see what’s on the underside. “This writing interest is an extension of my real life interest. I know that we can rarely take a person or a situation at face value and it’s at this point where face value intersects with what’s underneath the rock – that you can show human complexity most vividly.” She said she chose the title, “Going Away Shoes,” because it is about a character named, Debbie Tyler, who is the dutiful daughter, the oldest child, who stays home to care for her sick and dying mother, while her sisters marry and have prosperous lives and pity her and tease her with comments about a late blooming love, yet to materialize. The mother in the story has saved a pair of shoes she wore on her honeymoon decades earlier. “It is a story about learning when to go, when to do something,” McCorkle said. In truth, that is a theme that goes through the entire collection of stories where all the characters are on some kind of journey in life. 
A collection of short stories
By Jill McCorkle
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Hardcover $22.95
The News-Review