All Stories by Kevin Wilson, 2025
The magic trick:
A film of melancholy over the entire thing
A second college campus story for you this week, following yesterday’s feature, “Lawns” by Mona Simpson.
“All Stories” is one of those stories so good that it makes you seek out every other word its author has ever written.
I loved it so much.
It’s the story of a college freshman’s difficult first year. The whole thing is so perfectly overlaid with melancholy.
Some of that comes from the facts of the situation. The narrator is very lonely. He has no friends. He has a suicide attempt in his recent past. These are not plot points that add sunshine to a story.
But I think the real melancholy comes from the storytelling. It’s all very measured. Sad developments, disappointments, happy progress, lifesaving discoveries – they’re all reported with a measured muteness. The narrator has many years of distance from the events, too, so we get different long-term outcomes, which takes some of the raw emotion out of the equation.
The whole thing feels perfectly like an overcast autumn day.
And that’s quite a trick on Wilson’s part.
The selection:
I had signed up for a creative writing workshop, and we read Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing” and Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.” It wasn’t like everything got better for me, because it was still so bad, but I liked reading these stories. I liked it when my professor, who had written an award-winning collection of stories and was so soft-spoken and sensitive, would diagram sentences on the chalkboard. One time he drew a stick figure, and then he drew a giant boulder in the figure’s way, and he said this was what stories were: simply finding a way to get the figure over that boulder. In my notebook I drew a boulder on top of a stick figure, his little arms and legs poking out from under this massive rock. To me, that’s what a story was. I wanted to tell the professor that I’d tried to drive through the boulder, smash into it, but I wasn’t sure what had happened. I didn’t know where the boulder had gone.
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