Director Of The World And Other Stories (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize)

Jane McCafferty's Director of the World and Other Stories was selected by John Edgar Wideman as the winner of the twelfth Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction. Her collection was chosen from 279 manuscripts submitted by published writers to the contest and read anonymously by the screening judges and the final judge.
The characters in Director of the World and Other Stories are often distanced, lonely, or displaced from others and the events around them, yet they are almost always ready to act, to become involved with others, and to change. In "Eyes of Others," a woman, stopping with her family at a Howard Johnson's during a trip, becomes fascinated by the meeting of two strangers and attempts to connect with them as she has been unable to connect with her own family. Two teenaged girls in "While Mother Was Gone with 571" play a practical joke on a lonely neighbor and watch from the roof of their house as the consequences of their actions unfold.
In "World Upon Her Shoulder," a young girl stands embarrassedly in the local supermarket while her mother, wearing a "Carmen Miranda fruit bowl tied with a scarf on top of her head," fills an entire shopping cart with bottles of maple syrup. "I saw her standing by the great mountain of syrup in her cart, grinning wildly," the narrator explains. "She didn't seem to see me. I grew up considerably in moments like these, digesting my own invisibility."
Implicit in these stories is a rootlessness that gives way to yearning and a passion for remembering. In "Director of the World," a disturbed child, whose father has recently abandoned the family, attempts, in language reflecting her shattered sense of the world, to recapture some of their last experiences together. An alcoholic father waiting at a bus stop for a visit from his teenage daughter, in "By the Light of Friendship," strikes up a conversation with two women. He "revels in the safety of how little whatever transpired...could matter," yet unexpectedly finds himself affected by the women's memories of their lifelong friendship together.
These characters, and others in the collection, attempt to make sense of their broken lives and shattered thoughts. As John Wideman writes of the stories, there is a "sense of commitment to the struggle of making silent worlds speak, of forcing what is threatening or evil or destructive into some form we can see and conjure with." As the woman sees the cows in "Replacement," one can also see these characters "apprehending the future, yearning to escape into some sleeker form and head down the road at top speed screaming."