I will begin with a scowl.

William Maxwell's short story, "The Pilgrimage," grates my nerves. It revolves around an American couple in France trying to get to a restaurant their friend said was the best, and the drama of their pilgrimage - how they call themselves pilgrims - and their outrage over menus and changes in the offerings, all mixed with a ton of fancy dishes, flat dialogue with waiters, chunks of an untranslated decorative French – and a dance scene at the end which is supposed to convey happiness. The Americans dance in the street. Frankly, it's not that interesting. It’s not his best work, yet it gets read more often than his incredibe stuff—which is probably due to over-identification on the part of the American reading audience.

I do love William K. Maxwell’s writing. The one I love most is a lesser-known collection of short stories, or fables, titled The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales. Maxwell dedicated the book to Em, his wife. In the preface, he explains that many of the stories grew from tales he invented for her on sleepless nights.

The compositional method began with the first sentence: “The first sentence was usually a surprise…From the first sentence, everything else followed.”

Structured as fairy tales, many begin with that lingustic frame, as in “Once upon a time there was a man who had no enemies, only friends.”

Or: “Once upon a time there was a man who lost his father.”

And: “There was an old woman whose house was beside a bend in a running stream.”

Or else they phrase the problem at the outset, as in “Not everybody’s heart and mind reside in this body.”

The table of contents, itself, feels like a writing prompt—and I play a fun game where I attempt to match the first line to the title, to trace the tale’s costume to the thread.

“There are things that cannot be said except in a roundabout way,” Maxwell fables, “and things that cannot be done until you have done something else.” So in country where pigs bury their thoughts in hay, everybody has a special relationship to the hayloft, or to their knowledge of it. In a country where it only rains on Sundays, no one makes plans to host picnics on Sundays. Each fable creates a world by describing its peculiarities—or limitations. These are rules. And we can create entire stories by beginning with a rule about a world. The birds eat all the bells. The queens are actually kings. The creek is a highway to hell.

Borrowing from oral storytelling traditions, Maxwell changes the frame by adding explicative statements like “This is not as strange as it first seems..” or “One might have supposed that…”

To express the characters’ alienation from time, Maxwell gives us an image: “Every year the earth grows more out of touch with the sky.”

Here’s an excerpt from “The lamplighter,” one of my favorite stories in this collection—to give you a sense of the language and texture, the structure of the sky and time (see “coda”), and the anachronstic character of the lamplighter.

A large view of the boulevard feels grandiose and magnificent unless all the streets are boulevards, and all the views are large ones, in which case the magnificent grows monotonous. The strange is the storyteller’s best friend. A few writing games for those who love words and language—

Game 1

Write a brief tale titled after one of Maxwell’s stories as listed in the table of contents. Make the first sentence a surprise. Consider using an enchanted object. Develop your images by focusing on strange metaphors and fabulist time.

Game 2

Write a brief fable that begins with the statement: “Twice upon a time…” Let an object be the narrator.

Game 3

“Ahoretia” is the malady of lack of determination. Write a vignette about a character suffering from ahoretia who has gone to see a therapist for help. Let dialogue drive the story. Play with misunderstanding, or the absence of a shared daily world in which the protagonist attempts to create this world for the therapist, only to be met with the therapist’s world.