The Trouble with Anthologies

A few stories in and that's enough of that.

Photo by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash

A few years ago I ordered three issues of DRR (Down River Road), a literary journal. I was living in Bomet town, where the only physically and socially stimulating thing that I experienced all year was a Kenya Red Cross-organised hike to a waterfall. It was okay. Everything they say about sleepy, rural towns is true. I was in need of something new and interesting, so I had the magazine copies delivered to me by shuttle. 

I read half of one, perused the second, never opened the third. To this day. 

I take full responsibility for this. Literary magazines struggle with enough and I would not lay any more at their doorstep. But at the time, I was engaged in my master’s degree in children’s literature and most of my thinking was about publishing and how little sense the entire industry made to me. Looking at the DRR issues lying on my desk every day for months got me thinking about why I kept leaving them unopened.

Some time after, I forget how much, Lolwe, the online literary magazine to whose editing I have contributed since 2021, did a few print copies. Then I heard nothing more about that. When I asked Troy, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, he said it was too expensive and that he was looking for ways to make it more sustainable before we tried that again. Valid. An interesting thought that arose for me was: if I had a chance to buy print copies of any of the literary magazines whose websites I visit sometimes, would I?

No. No, I would not. 

Because what the DRR issues had taught me eventually was that I am simply not the kind of person who wants to read a collection of short stories, essays, and poetry. 

To clarify, I read short stories. I read essays, and I have a particular love for these. I read poetry. Given that most of my life is reading, writing, and editing, it would be an atrocity for me to say that I do not. But my reading habits are not systematic. I am not convinced that they ever were. Which means that I generally don’t do very well with anthologies, whether in book form or in literary magazine form. I will read one or two or five shortform works in a sitting and then that will be enough of that, and I will carry them in my mind for a few days or weeks, noticing how their presence seeps into my conversation, my writing, my dreams, even. I will intend to return to the collection, but self-awareness is important, and I will always know that the odds of that happening are not very good. I have bought many short story, essay, and poetry collections over the last decade and have failed to finish most. 

There are two things here. 

One, must a body of work always be consumed in its entirety? 

Two, when it comes to anthologies, is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?

Once, on the app formerly known as Twitter, a Kenyan musician expressed displeasure at music listeners who do not honour the curation that has gone into putting together an album. The musician has put thought into the order of the songs on the album; the details are intentional. Why, then, would you, on your first listen of an album, start with whatever singles you’ve already heard and then listen to the rest of it on shuffle? Like a lunatic? Do you have any appreciation at all for artistic process or do you go about the rest of your life as well with only madness, no method? 

I understood him. I, a non-lunatic, listen to albums in order the first few times. We live in a society, after all. But I’ve found that this approach does not work when the body of work in question is a short story collection. Or a literary magazine issue. Not because I prefer to start from a random story in the middle but because I start at the beginning and then find that I do not have the stamina to get to the end. That’s enough of that.

Initially, I thought that the challenge was in the absence of cohesiveness of theme. And there is still truth to this for me. I will read a short story about, say, a woman struggling with motherhood. I will be engaged. I will be turning over in my mind this theme and the story carrying it. And then, ghafla bin vuu, that’s done, and I turn the page and I am now in a story about a young queer person struggling to make a living in a homophobic society. The shift is always jarring to me. I know this is not the case for everyone. 

But it is more than jumping from one theme to another. Because my inability to finish collections remains even when they are themed. I love love, so you would think that a collection of love stories would be utterly spellbinding for me. But the same thing happens. A few stories in, that’s enough of that. 

My current conclusion is that, for whatever reason, whether screen-time-related or not, I have limited focus for every creative work that I engage with. When a stand-alone piece is done, so am I. It is enough. Nshachoka, yaishe. There is so much story and word-work in the world, so much creativity expressed in different forms and shared on different media. And I flit from thing to thing, enjoying it all, governed by nothing more than my own whimsy. Reading is not duty to me, it is delight. So, in truth, I feel no need to “finish” a body of work. I take what I will, allow it to refine me in some way, and I move on. And despite my purest intentions, typically, once I put down a book, saying to myself that I will just read this other thing first and then come back to it, I do not return. I may keep it on my nightstand for months, think about it for years, but that is all I will do. 

This is not exclusive to my consumption of literary anthologies. As soon as I recognise a dullness or restlessness within my body, I move on from novels, non-fiction books, albums, TikTok pages, YouTube channels, movies, TV shows, swiftly and painlessly. Anything can be abandoned unceremoniously save for lighthearted romance novels and movies because the plot carries me in the most delicious way and I simply must know how the two get together in the end. I abandoned the show Suits in Season 6 and skipped ahead to watch just the episode where Harvey and Donna’s will-they-won’t-they is finally resolved. I know many would disagree, but I am of the opinion that your relationship to any work can be dictated by only yourself, and it does not have to be justified to anybody else.

Assuming that I am not the only person on earth whose reading habits make little space for entire collections, what do I think this means for the production and consumption of literary anthologies?

1. I have clear memories of enjoying short story collections as a child, both Kenyan and international. Nothing opened me up to different languages, cultures, and social issues like anthologies whose stories carried this diversity. My very first experience of an anthology, the first time I came across the word itself, was with my cousin’s copy of Encounters from Africa, then a high school English setbook. I was maybe 10. Today, I can barely recall the stories themselves, but my understanding of the world was changed after that book, and it changed a little more with each re-read as I got older. 

Additionally, from my stint at a publishing house focused on children’s books, I learnt that collections are popular with teachers, and at the time, there was demand for more. This was a few years ago, so I do not know whether this is still the case, but I can see why collections would work really well for children’s and young adult literature. A class can discuss one short story in full in one lesson. For teaching purposes, I imagine it is helpful to be able to wring everything out of a short story. Plus, the diversity of stories, the jumping from theme to theme and from cast to cast, was likely stimulating rather than overwhelming for me at that age. 

I am not saying anthologies are valuable only for this demographic or only for pedagogical purposes. I am saying that given my specific background in publishing and literature, I see a demand for this literary production in this demographic that I do not see in adult audiences. 

2. If I were the publisher of an online literary magazine, I would not pursue print unless I knew exactly who was going to buy it regularly. I would throw more of my effort into further curating my curation. By which I mean, whether we like it or not, the gorgeously written and deeply heart-wrenching narratives we publish are on the same playing field as a reader’s various subscriptions, feeds, and For You pages, not to mention the rest of noisy, noisy life. Some readers will dive into the latest issue unprompted and take in the whole thing without coming up for air. Others, the majority, I suspect, will be happy to read one or two or five things as part of their regular media consumption, and that is okay. 

So is there a way to meet this second lot where they are? Is there a way to treat the shortform works as the stand-alone pieces that they are and offer them as such? Are there ways to slide these works into daily life, create relevant conversation around them outside of small literary circles, make them matter to people who admit they have not read a single poem since KCSE English Paper 2? Can it be an à la carte menu rather than a buffet? I have not run a literary magazine; I may be arriving at the dead-horse-flogging shindig after everyone has already left. All I have to offer is curiosity and hope.

3. Anthologies serve an essential archival function, like other literary works. This matters especially as concerns the stories of peoples whose languages and cultures and histories have been diminished and erased by colonialism and its relatives. It matters that these stories are told, published, disseminated, preserved. It matters that we know where we can find them. I think of my bookshelf this way. My copies of various anthologies are not less valuable because I did not get to the end of them. Because I have them, I may yet become changed by them, and so can others in my life. Everyone with literary material in their home is a librarian of sorts, constantly curating and cataloguing our specific tastes, calling others into our experiences. Once in a while, when I am pondering something or other, I take out one essay collection, flip to a random story or two, read. Then I put it away. It could happen once a year; this does not matter. Because one story is enough. One poem is enough. One essay is enough. It matters that the work of putting anthologies together continues.

I do not have answers to questions about how to make people engage more with literary magazines, how to make people read more in general. There is no aha moment I have experienced that gave me the ability to read anthologies all the way to the end. That’s not an outcome I am attached to. There are more stories in the world, in Africa, in Kenya, in Nairobi, than I could possibly hope to even know of. I do hope to be able to read a few of them, to appreciate them, to enjoy them, and to notice how I am changed by them. I genuinely think that all readers can do is find what they like to read, and all publishers can do is find what they like to publish, and with any luck, every work will find its place.

Early this year, Debunk Media published the first issue of Debunk Quarterly, a magazine of non-fiction and reportage. The news was exciting to me, and I bought it as soon as I could. It has been on my desk since, and every week or so, I open a new story, read. It has been delightful, stimulating. As I have discovered in the years since I bought my copies of DRR, I may not read very much of a lengthy collection of many short stories, essays, and poems, but I will read a collection of 10 longform creative nonfiction stories. Like I said, just find what you like to read.