The highlight of my time at this year's Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference, without a doubt, was the reading held to commemorate the publication of the 100th issue of One Story, the magazine with the editorial strategy embedded in its title. Ron Carlson was on hand to read from "Beanball," his contribution to that milestone issue, while Paul Yoon and Brock Clarke read from earlier issues, as did N.M. Kelby, seen here being videotaped as she read from "Jubilation, Florida" just before the fire alarms at the Hilton went off three minutes into her presentation, creating a string of intermittent interruptions from hotel security ("when the cause of the alarm has been determined, you will be notified") for the next ten minutes. Kelby handled the distractions with grace and good humor, though, and though her story had already won the crowd over, they were totally on her side by the time she was through.

(This clip's about ten minutes long, a bit grainy, and the sound's a bit echo-y in spots, because of the microphone, but it should be viewable. The situation of Kelby's story—two people about to have an adulterous encounter in a hotel room—might be considered NSFW, but there's just about nothing in the way she tells it you need to worry about.)

I met Story Prize director Larry Dark at the One Story event, and when he told me that he was headed straight from there to a panel on the state of short American fiction, I asked if he'd send me some notes, because I still hadn't had a chance to wander around the book fair. He kindly agreed, and reports that moderator Andrew Scott did a great job leading the discussion. "Christopher Coake, the author of the collection We're in Trouble, spoke as a writer drawn to narrative by the storytellers of his childhood: Stephen King, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg," Dark writes:

"[Former Story Prize finalist] Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter spoke of ways to impart to young students drawn to digital media respect and affinity for the form of the story. She also advocated encouraging students to write inter-related stories that add up to create a cohesive collection. Dan Chaon, author of the National Book Award finalist Among the Missing, called this a golden age in short story writing, with more quality stories and collections being written and published than perhaps any other time.

In response to an observation by another panelist that people who worked wanted to go home, kick off their shoes, and tune in to Law and Order, Chaon pointed out that much of the fiction of earlier times, when the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's published a lot of stories, was the literary equivalent of television shows. In many respects, short fiction has been liberated from having to entertain in that way, and has made it in some ways a better art form."

"Cressida Leyshon demonstrated how earnest and passionate The New Yorker editors are about publishing quality short fiction and what an odd position they're in," Dark adds. "She said she wished there were other magazines more directly competitive with The New Yorker in terms of publishing fiction, so there'd be more places for writers to publish and less of an obsession with The New Yorker, which can't be all things to all people."

As M. David Hornbuckle discovered, however, not every panel can be scintillating:

"[Thursday] morning, I attended two panel discussions that were highly academic and dull—as dry as dirt, despite topics that sounded (to me, at the time) promising. I won't even bother to go into detail about them, except to say that in the second one, the readers didn't even bother to stand at the podium to read their boring essays, and, in fact, at least two of them read whilst propping their faces up with their free arm, as if they were boring even to themselves. One guy also read from a laptop. If you ever thought that might be a cool idea, think again."

Things got much better from there: Hornbuckle went on to have a great time at readings by authors like Jeff Johnson, Jennifer Egan, and Diane Williams. And that was just the first day...