Book Review — Writers Harvest

By Haley M. Walker

Writers Harvest, edited by William H. Shore

With the growing trend in self-help and enlightenment books intent on showing us things like “the secret,” our true inner beings, and the reasons why we are broke, sick, divorced, or lonely, I have realized that the genre of fiction and storytelling is quickly dying. Society is becoming so intrigued with things like “the present moment,” the facts and statistics on the news, and how we can fix ourselves, that we are slowly forgetting about the benefits of reading good, fictional stories from the mind and world of someone else. One book re-inspired the age-old entertainment of storytelling in me.

Grown from the imaginations and hearts of twenty-two contemporary authors, Writers Harvest is a compilation of short, fiction stories encompassing all genres that exist together not only to inspire and induce creative thought, but for a significant purpose as well. This particular edition, edited by William H. Shore, is one in a series of fiction anthologies created to benefit the Share our Strength Hunger Relief Program. The collection includes unpublished stories from names like Barbara Kingsolver, Tobias Wolfe, Amy Bloom, Elizabeth Graver, and Stephen Dixon.

A favorite story of mine within the medley was one called Hobbits and Hobgoblins by Randall Kenan. The account chronicles Malcom, a little boy who paints an artistic fantasy out of his family life. In the story, while his separated parents fight, he begins to create an entirely new world out of his situation and sees creatures and characters that can only be seen through a child’s eyes. While sitting in his grandmother’s chair he envisions it being a throne that was once owned by an Egyptian princess, and while in the midst of his parents yelling he sees blue cockatoos, a hobbit named Fidor, a black winged horse named Yamor and a green orangutan hanging from the ceiling. He makes his father into a Prince and his mother an empress and imagines himself being swept away from his “kingdom in the land of New Jersey” to a place called the “savage land” with his father. This story in particular reminded me of the cherished ability that only a child has to enter another dimension and see things in a situation that most cannot. While all the stories may not be as whimsical or fanciful as this one, and some deal with more common, worldly concepts, each is just as inventive as the next.

After indulging in 316 pages of the written imaginations of some of the best fiction writers of today, I was left with a strong desire to fill a notebook with characters, places and plots that only I had developed. Coming from a journalistic background, I am not in any way undermining non-fictional material, or the importance of the knowledge gained through learning about what is going on in today’s world.

However, through reading these stories that had only been seen in the minds of these authors, I gained a different knowledge about the weight of creativity and the sort of relief that comes from escaping our own realities for a little while.