Photo by Tennessee Photography
Image courtesy Virginia Pye
Happiness, elusive and ephemeral, is enshrined in the nation’s Declaration of Independence, written by a Virginian, and also in that song by Virginia Beach native Pharrell Williams. Now, author and former Richmonder Virginia Pye offers varying views on the subject in nine short stories bound up as “Shelf Life of Happiness.” Pye, now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, carries in her credits two award-winning novels (“Dreams of the Red Phoenix” and “River of Dust”), and this month she’s here for the 16th annual James River Writers Conference (Oct. 13-14). Pye will teach a pre-conference master class about getting started with your own stories on Oct. 12. She’s also a conference panelist addressing the importance of the short story and finding reliable “beta readers” who’ll give an aspiring writer the kind of response they need rather than what might make them … happy.
Richmond magazine: Selecting stories for a collection like this is a bit like composing music, isn’t it? You’re taking the reader through nine movements.
Virginia Pye: You’re trying to build a mood, and each story is supposed to take the reader to another emotional level. It’s a little mysterious about how it works. You arrange them in different configurations to see how they fit together.
RM: Did these stories happen over time or all at once?
Pye: These stories were written, and rewritten, through the past decade and more. I’ve worked on some of them for many years. Some of them were published individually in other places, but this is the first time that they’re all together.
RM: These stories are about realizations, endings, scenes from marriages and marriages breaking up, the confrontation of death and relationships.
Pye: They’re definitely about relationships, and how people strive for happiness, and what gets in their way and between each other. They may achieve, if not full happiness, then some shade of it. The hope I have is that in the resolution of each story, the reader comes to see how to better navigate the pitfalls that keep us from feeling fully happy. But this is not a self-help manual. One of the epigraphs at the front of the book is from Guillaume Apollinaire, who said, “Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”
Virginia Pye will sign her books at the Page Bond Gallery, 1625 W Main St., on Oct. 11 at 5 p.m. 804-359-3633 or pagebondgallery.com.
