"Memoir of a Deer Woman" Far Cry from a "Blessing"

I have been noticing a trend in Fantasy & Science Fiction toward short story narrative in the present tense. The classic short story is written in the third person and in the past tense. Writers sometimes make a conscious choice to alter this- choosing the first person "I" voice, and/or choosing the present tense instead of the past to best tell their story. I've mentioned instances in Fantasy & Science Fiction in which these changes have worked well, such as when Carol Emshwiller published "Killer" in the October/November double issue. (see the post).

Two out of the two short stories in the March issue of F&SF are in the present tense. This is getting silly- present tense is an artistically selected deviation, not a norm. What's worse, M. Rickert's "Memoir of a Deer Woman" is so awkward in the present tense ("Her husband takes him out") that she must often write in the future tense ("He'll accept this as reasonable") and the conditional ("she would look at forever"). I'm all for trying out new ways of writing, but come on. We're not far from reading a story like this:

Susan will take her purse off the counter and walk out the door. She might forget her cell phone on the counter, and the global positioning device embedded in the phone could potentially make her show up as being at home when she is actually at the office. If a horrible disaster strikes and her husband is desperately trying to locate her, this might create problems.

That's not the kind of story I want to read. Do you see how the use of the future and conditional takes all the tension and drama out of the story?

To make matters worse, the protagonist of Rickert's story is a would-be writer with writer's block. She goes to hang out with other would-be writers with writer's block by attending a writers' group. It takes an enormous amount of magic to make a story about writing enjoyable, and "Memoir of a Deer Woman" didn't have it.

The first two-thirds of the story are from the viewpoint of the protagonist, then she drops out of the tale and the rest of the story kaleidoscopes through perspectives of her husband, random people we've never met before, and a member of the writers' group. This kind of kaleidoscopic perspective is best used for special effect in novels, not in very short stories. The tale ends through the eyes of the member of the writers' group. She is philosophizing on the nature of words, what they mean as symbols, in and of themselves. Rickert follows this philosophizing by telling us life is an "exquisite blessing." The connotation of the word "blessing" is religious. Nothing in the previous nine pages of story had religious overtones. This inappropriate use of a word in a story all about words destroyed the effect Rickert was trying to create.

The conceit of the story was fine. I liked the way the magical transformation was compared to suffering from cancer, and the idea of the words cut from the memoirs could have been cool. Rickert does an excellent job of establishing the setting in very few words.