Recommendation: A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN by George Saunders

Welcome to a masterclass with George Saunders—and 19th Century Russian greats Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol. Saunders has taught an MFA program at Syracuse University for twenty years and pulls from his lessons to help readers assess craft in order to improve one’s own. He asks, and then explains: How does a story create meaning line by line? Specifically, how did these four Russians do it in seven short stories?

The selections are pulled from these writers’ more obscure works. I wasn’t as engaged on first pass, but Saunders’ love and admiration are infectious. His essays mix revelations with memoir, much like Stephen King’s On Writing. I recommend A Swim in a Pond in the Rain to all writers and all fans of George Saunders. (He’s been one of my favorite writers and human beings since I devoured CivilWarLand in Bad Decline in college in 1999.)

“In Buddhism, it’s said that a teaching is like ‘a finger pointing at the moon.’ The moon (enlightenment) is the essential thing and the pointing finger is trying to direct us to it, but it’s important not to confuse finger with moon. For those of us who are writers, who dream of someday writing a story like the ones we’ve loved, into which we’ve disappeared pleasurably, and that briefly seemed more real to us than so-called reality, the goal (‘the moon’) is to attain the state of mind from which we might write such a story. All of the workshop talk and story theory and aphoristic, clever, craft-encouraging slogans are just fingers pointing at that moon, trying to lead us to that state of mind. The criterion by which we accept or reject a given finger: ‘Is it helping?’

I offer what follows in that spirit…”

— George Saunders