This week, we’re featuring an essay from Spencer K.M. Brown on 5 story collections that made him want to be a writer.
Spencer K.M. Brown is an award-winning novelist and poet. A finalist for the CMA National Book Awards, and winner of the Penelope Niven Award and the Flying South Fiction Prize, his work has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines.
He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast. He lives in the foothills of North Carolina with his wife and three sons. SLOW FIRE is his first collection of stories, available June 2026 from Loblolly Press. Pre-orders open in May.
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Growing up, our house had floor-to-ceiling shelves full of books on just about any subject you could imagine.
I’m among the last generation who grew up before the internet and cell phones, and so if we ever had a question, the answer was always, “Look it up,” which meant running into the library room, finding the right books and reading until you found the answer.
My love of books, then, came before I could read a word. I fell in love with the feeling of old books, the weight and sturdy shape of them, the images on some, or the shiny golden letters on others. I’d often look for the oldest ones I could, open them, and bury my nose in the pages, breathing in that blissful bookish scent. I remember one day in particular when I was sitting and playing in front of the bookshelves. I watched my dad walk over, search among the titles, pull a book from the shelf, and sit down to read. I was suddenly overcome, thinking about all of the ideas, all of the stories, all of the lives that those books contained. What did they say? Who wrote them? Why? After that, I wanted to read everything. I wanted to hear every story, every poem. I wanted to know every little fact in those encyclopedias. And though I couldn’t read a word (I was maybe three or four years old at the time), I would pull my favorite books off the shelf and stack them in a secret place, telling myself that, when I could, these would be the ones I’d read first.
Like any little boy, as soon as sports and friends and life began bringing new wonders, I was a little too distracted to read and loathed the idea of having to sit and read aloud to my mom instead of going to the woods to explore or track animals.
That changed toward the end of high school when became obsessed with classic poetry, especially Keats, Shelley, Yeats, Blake, Donne, and Dante. I started reading the gothic tales of Poe, Lovecraft, and Stoker (to this day, I still read Dracula at least once a year). I soaked up all the strange stories I could, slowly learning what my favorite authors read, then reading everything that influenced them. I would take books with me into the woods on walks and hikes, my head swimming with stories and myths and poems.
Of course, as an introvert, I kept all of this private. Those hours I spent alone reading in the woods and fields where I grew up were something of a crucible for me. Little did I know that all of those stories and myths and poems were crawling their way into the fabric of my imagination, and deeper into the very folds of my being. I had to capture the characters coming to life in my head. I had to write and tell stories.
Therein lies the deep, unfathomable beauty of books. Each of our beating hearts are fighting each day for survival, we fight for understanding, wisdom, love, hope; we fight to overcome hardship, despair, sorrow; we fight for the virtue between the extremes of unbridled excess and deficiency.
Books and the stories they contain are often our signposts in a strange land, reminding us that this life, this world, does not center or revolve around us. Reminding us there is something more. They are timeless conversations of the human spirit rallying to survive and preparing to witness true wonder. They are what connect mankind’s unique disposition and struggle through all time. They remind us that we are dust, that we are but strangers and sojourners passing through. They remind us of the horrors of broken spirits and the sublime graces of hope that rain down each day.
But more beautiful than all of it is the fact that books are nothing more than bound paper with black marks on them. Yet what they contain—those ideas of truth, beauty, goodness; those comforts of fellow pilgrims come and gone before us, reminding us we are not alone—they are why we read. They are what make the heart move and tear back the veil of ennui and disillusioned slumber and call us to rise again, to become reborn in the grace of this life, to rise and open our eyes to new wonder each day.
The following list of books are five short story collections that changed my life in some way, and, more specifically, made me want to become a writer.
The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake
My good friend, mentor Kevin Watson first introduced me to Breece D’J Pancake shortly after I graduated high school. I was just beginning to take writing seriously and had brought a manuscript of my crappy stories and poems into the Press 53 publishing office. I’d never met Kevin before, but full of hubris and determination, I walked into his office and introduced myself. He read my stories, and we talked for a long time about writing. He invited me to work for him, helping to read manuscripts and edit, but really, he was teaching me.
Never did we sit down and go through a story line-by-line, but he taught me how to think and how to see like a writer, or more specifically, like a poet. One day, he told me to go out and find a copy of The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. I thought it was a joke at first. Whose name was “Pancake”? I found a copy and went home that afternoon and read the first story, “Trilobites.” The raw, powerful voice of the writing took hold of me. Pancake was the first writer I’d come across who I felt was writing about me, about my home, and where I lived.
Even though he was a native West Virginian, he wrote about the South and rural life with such clarity and purity. There were no frills, no need for a thesaurus, no need to reread pretentious paragraphs. Pancake wrote from a vantage of raw humanity, of desperation, of unfiltered grace and wonder. His stories combine a stark realism with an almost biblical sense of weight and silence. His prose is stripped down but razor-sharp, carving out living people and showing them to me, but without sentimentality or tricks. He made the rugged ordinariness of life seem beautiful and worth lingering upon.
The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones
This was one of the books I coveted as a little boy, hiding it away on my parents’ bookshelf for later. I was first and foremost drawn to the image on the cover—an image of the famous “Boxer at Rest” statue. There was something about that boxer’s swollen, tired face that I had to know more about. There was some longing I noticed in that statue that I was certain the book would reveal to me.
I first read these stories in high school. The title story blew me away with its brutal portrayal of the protagonist and humanity in general. Thom Jones’ voice is so distinctive, not only perfection on a sentence level, but the way in which he builds a story and narrative feels completely novel while at once timeless. At once, he is able to create sentences and scenes that are both visceral and philosophically complex. For me, he brought the ideas and truths of Aristotelian thought and crushed them into the skulls and mouths of morally broken characters. Add on top of that, Jones has perhaps the deftest descriptions of boxing and fighting I’ve ever read (so good in fact that I went out that day and bought a jump rope and heavy bag to start my own training).
The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
What could I possibly say about Flannery O’Connor, other than, for me, her stories caused a fault line in my writing/reading life. Suddenly, there was only a time before I’d read her stories, and then after.
O’Connor’s ability to write about the bizarre, the absurd, and the outcast, and gild them all with a golden brush stroke of the divine deeply changed how I viewed the world and stories altogether. Her work showed me that the grotesque, the dark shadow lurking behind us madmen, is nothing to shy away from or to avoid due to fear of offending readers; rather, she taught me not only to embrace the strangeness of this world, but to follow those characters fearlessly as far as they would allow. Because, when you do that, you end up uncovering whole caverns of grace and truth you never imagined were possible.
In much the same way as we ourselves can only come to know who we are when we’re put to the test, O’Connor showed me that it is only when you can push your characters to the very brink of madness and destruction that you finally find out who they are and what they’re made of. O’Connor’s ability to seamlessly weave philosophy and theology (she was aptly nicknamed the “Hillbilly Thomist” due to her love and admiration for St. Thomas Aquinas) was unlike anything I’d ever read before. Growing up homeschooled with a classical education, I’d never known what use there was for reading Herodotus or Aquinas or Livy or any of these ancient thinkers.
O’Connor was the first writer who made me realize that even those ancient histories are timeless, as they document and reveal the human condition. It is the same forces that drove people mad in 400 BC that drove them mad in O’Connor’s 1950s Georgia that drives them mad to this very day. But sometimes it requires stories and myths for us to be able to peel the mud from our eyes and see those lurking shadows so that they do not overcome us.
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson
When I was in college, I was working three jobs and going to classes in between and not sleeping all that much. One of my jobs was as a lifeguard, working the opening shift at the YMCA. I would go in at 4 a.m. to unlock the doors so a few fitness obsessed professionals could get some laps in before they went to work. But from about 4:30 a.m. until nearly 6:30 a.m., the place was empty. To pass the time, I would bring books with me or take a few magazines from the lobby area. One morning, I picked up a copy of The New Yorker and flipped it open to the fiction section. The story was titled “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” by Denis Johnson. My mind was in a strange state back then, always drowsy from the lack of sleep, yet pulsing madly from drinking way too much coffee. Wired and drifting in constant waves. But when I began reading this story, something seemed to almost breathe into me from the page. It was as if something cosmic had shifted into place, and I was in a perfect state to receive a perfect transmission.
Johnson’s writing was utterly powerful in its form of luminous simplicity. Much like Thom Jones, there was a raw brutality to Johnson’s language, and at the same time, he was able to force the reader to join him in staring into the abyss, in holding the grotesque in his hand and considering it from all angles like O’Connor. That story meanders and moves like a drowsy conversation, yet every sentence — hell, every word — forces you to listen a little closer. When the whole collection was published a few years later, I devoured those five stories, and have probably read them all at least fifty times since. Johnson’s writing is layered, and each time you read anything of his, you see something new. His voice on the page is so perfectly realized and his use of language flows as naturally as if he were simply exhaling. The stories in the collection move effortlessly between moments of banality, shock, poetry, mystery, absurdity, and sublimity. But what they all have and what they achieve are moments of pure redemption, grace, and epiphany. Nothing is ever perfectly resolved, but it doesn’t have to be.
Johnson showed me how to trust in my own authentic voice as a writer. He showed me that plot is rarely what makes a story memorable or lasting or powerful. It’s about authenticity; it’s about trusting yourself entirely and allowing yourself to become raw and vulnerable on the page, because that’s where all the good stuff is.
I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down by William Gay
While the razor-sharp clarity of Pancake and Jones changed how I approached writing and stories, it was William Gay who somewhat gave me permission to tap into my love of poetry and myth again. His brilliant collection contains thirteen stories, and I dare say that each one is as near a perfect story as a mere human is capable of. Gay writes of landscape and place with a mythic excellence that elevates what seems banal, calling it toward transcendence.
Gay’s prose is lush and lyrical and elevates the music in your head, but at once he can turn on a dime and break into scenes of such bleak, brutal humanity without ever losing the poetry of language. Gay’s stories are complex, not in plot, but on a sentence level. He builds character and story as if carving them from wood. You read his words, as if watching him pare away the wood one knife stroke at a time, until you are suddenly able to see.
While the title story and “Closure and Roadkill on the Life’s Highway” plunge into the depths of the human condition, other stories, such as “The Paperhanger” and “A Death in the Woods” are pitch-perfect stories of the Southern Gothic lineage, so utterly disturbing and brutal, yet told with a language that rivals the divine beauty of a Caravaggio painting. William Gay never shies away from the darker side of humanity; rather, he walks coolly into it, at times looking for the faintest glimmer of light, and at other times simply observing, as if to give name to that darkness which every soul should all be vigilant of and fight at all costs. Gay showed me that the great spectrum of life, from the bleakest sorrows to the most divine theophanies, all make us who we are, they make us beautifully human and fragile.
Gay’s stories remind us to hold tight to what is good and beautiful, to keep quietly trudging along that narrow path, lest we crack our hearts open to the darkness, and find ourselves upon that other wide path to despair.
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