In the Village and Other Stories

Flower discusses about Elizabeth Bishop's long story collection "In the Village & Other Stories." Giving up the idea of a story collection completely, Bishop decided to include "In the Village" in her next poetry collection, Questions of Travel (1965). Yet such was her uncertainty about its genre that she omitted it when Question of Travel was reprinted in her Collected Poems of 1969. Years later this decision had a bizarre consequence. Readers of the Library of America edition, Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, will have a hard time finding "In the Village." It is not included as one of her stories, nor as a personal essay or reminiscence, nor is it indexed as a story or a poem, nor is it listed anywhere under its own title. But it is there, of course, back among the Nova Scotia poems in Questions of Travel where Bishop placed it in 1965.