way through time to reach the present.nWhy this quality is now so rare among younger andnnewer Southern storywriters is a mystery whosensolution may be suggested by the probability that thenSouthern writer’s education now takes place not in splendidlynromantic isolation but in some writers’ workshop somewhere.nCreative Writing instruction has been too carelesslyndemonized of late; good workshops do more good thannharm, bad ones the reverse, but all workshops do tend tonfunction as behavioral training modules, where apprenticenwriters are in one way or another rewarded for success andnpunished for failure. The most basic success expected ofnthem is verisimilitude, which is more easily gained by thennovice through action and dialogue than by summary. Thusnthe trainee writer is apt to be discouraged from evernattempting to write the sort of brilliant summary at whichnTaylor and Elizabeth Spencer excel, although, as AndrewnLytic has observed, “fiction is a summary — summary ofnscenes leading up to the scene which you need.” Thenspecifically scenic quality of fiction, its real-time component,nLytle regards as a borrowing from theater. Nothing wrongnwith that method — Welty, O’Connor, and Garrett havenwritten their finest stories in this mode — except that itsnlimits are arbitrary.nThere are still exceptions to this rule to be found — a fewnSouthern storywriters who have found some highly unusualnways of breaking the constraint of real time. Richard Dillard,nin long stories like “The Bog,” “The Road,” “The Deatheater,”nand “Omniphobia,” has pretty well managed tonsmash the clock altogether with his signature blend of trulyncomic and truly frightening surrealism. In a somewhatnsimilar vein, Cathryn Hankla and Fred Chappell have inntheir different ways used highly unusual techniques tonencapsulate personal history. The title story of Hankla’s firstncollection. Learning the Mother Tongue, ties the history of anchildhood to the acquisition of language; in another, thennarrator’s life story is cunningly summarized by a parrot. InnChappell’s I Am One of You Forever, stories that seemnfirmly grounded in a verisimilar here and now can suddenly,nvastly enlarge their temporal scope by dextrous shifts intonthe fantastic:nThe tear on my mother’s cheek got larger andnlarger. It detached from her face and became anshiny globe, widening outward like an inflatingnballoon. At first the tear floated in air betweennthem, but as it expanded took my mother andnfather into itself. I saw them suspended, separatenbut beginning to drift slowly toward one another.nThen my mother looked past my father’s shoulder,nlooked through the bright skin of the tear, at me.nThe tear enlarged until at last it took me in too. Itnwas warm and salt. As soon as I got used to thenstrange light inside the tear, I began to swimnclumsily toward my parents.nDillard, Hankla, and Chappell are mavericks, uniquelyninnovative stylists who seem to come out of nowhere, but ifnany younger writer can write the profoundly historical storynin the same grand old manner, it is Richard Bausch, in hisnlatest collection. The Fireman’s Wife. “Letter to the Lady ofn30/CHRONICLESnnnthe House,” which elegantiy evokes the sweet and the sournof a five-decade-long marriage, might in its technique and itsntone almost be a deliberate homage to Peter Taylor. Innstories of a more contemporary feeling, “The Brace,”n”Equity,” and the titie story, Bausch displays the differentnways he’s discovered for bringing a long history forward tonthe moment where it matters most.nAnd in that skill he is almost alone, at least in hisngeneration. If the Southern short story is by and large losingnits peculiar historical sense, then what is it that makes itnpeculiarly Southern? That question, academic or not, tendsnto come up in quarters where the old touchstones arenfondled — asked by younger writers and critics like DavidnMadden and Marc Stengel who seem to feel that thenliterature promoted under the Southern label is becomingnincreasingly remote from the realities of present-day Southernnlife. It’s a subject that can hardly help but arise at a timenwhen the South, demographically, and culturally, is losing angreat deal of its separateness. “Personally,” Richard Ford hasnsaid in a Harper’s article, “I think there is no such thing asnSouthern writing or Southern literature or Southern ethos.n. . . What ‘Southern writing’ has always alibied for, ofncourse, is regional writing — writing with an asterisk. Thenminor leagues.”nFord, whose collection Rock Springs was certainly one ofnthe most critically successful volumes of the last decade,nseems to have largely succeeded in his effort to disassociatenhimself from what he conceives as the curse of regionalism.nHis wish to do so is roughly congruent with the nature of hisnwork: to tell and retell the story of a drifter who begins in anstate of total moral isolation. For the typical Ford protagonist,nthe deracination of Miss Welty’s Harris is carried to the nthndegree, though the Ford character will make a morenstrenuous effort to invent his own rules for honorable livingnwithin that condition.n”And by Southern. literature, what would we mean,nanyway?” Ford asks. “Writing just by Southerners? Or justnwriting about the South? Could we also mean writing bynpeople born in the South but living elsewhere? Or writingnby people not born in the South but living there? Wouldnwriting by Southerners on non-Southern subjects alsonqualify?” One need not share Ford’s disparaging attitudentoward “regional writing” to think these are all very goodnquestions.nIt’s not only Southerners, now or ever, who know how tondo the regional. But the new popularity of regional fiction,nall over, provides a salutary counterbalance to the powerfulnwaves of homogenization that keep sweeping the countrynagain and again. There are always temptations for Southernnwriters to indulge in “mainstreaming,” after the fashion ofnBobbie Ann Mason’s schooling herself to write rulebooknNew Yorker stories with a Southern flavoring. On the othernhand there are several young women writers whose storiesnare authentically, intransigently rooted in their places.n”Bypass” is a lovely example from Lisa Koger’s firstncollection, Farlanburg Stories, a volume that braids thenrelentless modernization of Southern life with much of the’nold agrarian ethic. That’s a trick also brought off by AlysonnHagy in Madonna on Her Back and the recent HardwarenRiver, two volumes that show an impressive range, from thenclassic in the traditional manner, “Mister Makes,” to then