‘Move aside, NYC. The 505 Is Your New Short Story City’
— Reneé Bibby
I’m going to be upfront: I am biased about the southwest. I grew up in high plains of Colorado, five years in the humid greenery of the mid-west, and sought out the drought-prone burned ochre of Tucson, Arizona. Place-based narratives skew towards the big-city coasts, leaving our super-sunny patch as bereft of stories as it is of water (as in, there are some but it’d be really hard to drown in them). That was why I was immensely tickled by Alice Yang’s tongue-in-cheek ‘Move aside, NYC. The 505 Is Your New Short Story City.’ By reframing “classic” NYC moments in Donald Antrim’s ‘Another Manhattan,’ to take place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Yang alternately supports a theory of universality—people are people everywhere, while also flavoring the narrative with something new and exciting. The story could conceivably work anywhere. But the story is also subtly spiced up by a simple shift of location. I’m 100% behind Yang’s larger point, one which I would argue applies to writers as well as publishers, that narratives in new locales will bring diverse and interesting stories to the national scene. If people are shopping for new literary locales, may I also suggest the 520?