I found the stories opening up to me

From the last pages of A Swim in the Pond, by George Saunders

When I started this book, as I said at the beginning, with the realization of how important teaching these stories had been to me over the last twenty years.  My intention was to get down on paper some of what I'd learned from them--to preserve those insights, I guess I'd say. As 1worked with the stories, I found something else happening. Freed from the schedule of the semester, forced to specificity by the essay form. I found the stories opening up to me and challenging me in ways they never had before. They are, it turns out, even more wonderful than than I believed all those year -- more complexly made, more mysterious.  And they threw my own work into relief: I see what the Russians did that I have, so far, failed to do.

It's been daunting and lovely to find that my chosen form contains so much potential and that I'm still so far from fulfilling it.

It's also made me feel this: these Russians did what they did so beautifully, there's no need for me, or anyone, to keep doing it.

Which is another way of saying that part of my job (par of your job) is to find new paths for the story form to go down; to make stories that are as powerful as these Russian stories but that, in their voice and form and concerns, are new, meaning that they respond to the things history has given us to know about life on earth in the years since these Russians were here.

These stories, as we've seen, work in a particular way. Ours will need to work differently, not only to distinguish them from the older works but so that they will speak to our time as freshly as these Russian stories spoke to theirs.