Review by Martha Quillen
Local talent – August 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Valley Voices – Ripples in the Streams of Life
An anthology of Central Colorado Writers
Published in 2002 by CCCA
ISBN 0-939101-07-6
The Chaffee County Council on the Arts Writer’s Exchange has come out with its third anthology of work by local writers, Valley Voices, Ripples in the Streams of Life. The book offers poems, essays, short stories, and some very short prose sketches (which aren’t really long enough to be called short stories).
There are some nice pieces in Ripples, but they tend to get lost — or at least that’s the feeling I had when I read CCCA’s latest anthology. There are over 75 pieces in 105 pages, and a lot of them are short stories — very, very short, short stories.
Presumably the editors required shorter submissions in order to include more material, but the longest short stories in this volume are four pages and most of them are a mere page or two which doesn’t allow for very much plot or character development. And although it’s certainly possible to write a good but very short story — and there are some fairly clever ones here — there’s not much that grabs your attention and holds you.
Ripples is an easy read, a fast volume that will take you an hour or so to finish, and strange as it may seem, in this case, that’s a problem. Just as you’re getting into the rhythm of a story, it’s over and you’re on to the next one. There’s so many short stories, brief sketches, and vignettes that few tend to stand out in your memory.
A little more diversity would have served this volume better.
Even the poetry is affected. The poetry does offer diversity in form and subject, but with so many items of just a page or so, it’s easy to read right past a poem that you like without even noticing it the first time around. I found that it helped to read some of the poems out loud. In our region — where performance poetry reigns supreme — some of the poems were probably written to be delivered, and several of them really seemed to take on extra vitality when they were given voice.
Altogether, I liked the essays best; particularly “The Lost Grandfather” by Carol Peeples: an essay about how World War I changed an “easy-go-lucky” young man into a difficult and cranky husband, father and grandfather.
On the other hand, though, the short stories are probably the most important contribution the Valley Voices anthologies make. There are poetry readings and festivals locally, and musicians and songwriters who perform original material, and newspapers and magazines that publish essays, but there are very few outlets for short stories. Even at the national level, not many magazines are publishing short stories these days.
For the most part, the short stories in Ripples are jocular, and it would have been nice to see some variety; perhaps something moody like Poe or Hawthorne; or something dramatic; or romantic; or morally uplifting; or tragic; or intellectual.
But maybe next time.
