Learning to ‘pirouette'

Zoe Whittall feels she finally got the hang of the short story with “Wild Failure"

- STEVEN W. BEATTIE

Zoe Whittall, author of "Wild Failure," says she enjoys writing sex scenes "because it is difficult to do well on a language and syntax level." Her debut short-story collection, "Wild Failure," is out Wednesday.

Zoe Whittall began her literary career writing poetry. Before her 2007 fiction debut, "Bottle Rocket Hearts," there were two collections of verse: "The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life" (2001) and "The Emily Valentine Poems" (2006). A third volume of poetry, "Precordial Thump," appeared in 2008. (There is another on the way this fall.) This may at first glance seem to have little to do with her latest book, a debut short-story collection called "Wild Failure" that comes out Wednesday, but that is actually far from the case.

Many writers of short fiction will acknowledge that while it, like the novel, is written in prose, that's about where the relationship ends. In its narrative compression, linguistic concision and tight focus, the short story has much more in common with poetry. It's an affinity Whittall readily embraces.

"There's definitely more of a relationship between my poetry and short fiction in terms of the specific things I'm interested in on the line level," she said. "I feel like there's so much room in a novel, but a novel is a whole ballet and a story is just one pirouette." As a beginning writer, Whittall had produced short stories with the hope of selling them to magazines or journals, but she never really felt comfortable with the form. Indeed, "Bottle Rocket Hearts" began life as a story collection, with one story getting longer and longer until Whittall's publisher, Marc Côté of Cormorant Books, suggested that it wanted to be at least a novella.