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To call short stories depressing is to use an impoverished critical language; stories can be terrifying or heartbreaking or, yes, sure, depressing, but those same stories can also be thrilling, funny, thought-provoking, entertaining, can make us feel less alone in the world, etc.
A related thought: one reason a story is rarely entirely happy or joyful is that those are static (if complex and important) states and therefore difficult to make into a compelling narrative . . . poetry is a better form for evoking or meditating on a single emotion
And even my favorite poem about joy (Mary Doty's "Visitation") contrasts joy with grief, because in the contrast, I think, we're better able to see the profundity of and experience the relief at the end
And though grief
has seemed to me itself a dim,
salt suspension in which I've moved,
blind thing, day by day,
through the wreckage, barely aware
of what I stumbled toward, even I
couldn't help but look
has seemed to me itself a dim,
salt suspension in which I've moved,
blind thing, day by day,
through the wreckage, barely aware
of what I stumbled toward, even I
couldn't help but look
at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness
which is no burden to itself.
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness
which is no burden to itself.
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?
