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Tumultuous times, The Sixties is the time period of the new book I’m writing, so I’m winding the clock back to the era of counterculture.

From American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

• “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1965) by Joyce Carol Oates

One of Oates most famous stories, she riffs on Bob Dylan as she digs into the psyche of a teenage girl whose sexuality leads her into frightening territory.

• “The Christian Roommates,” (1964) by John Updike

At Harvard, a hippie from Oregon is paired with a straight arrow from North Dakota. Nominal Christians both, one will grow deeper in his faith and one will lose his faith. Updike plants the clue early:

People without convictions have no powers of resistance.

With humor and insight, Updike paints a universal college experience from which some grow spiritually and intellectually and others diminish.  

• “A Poetics for Bullies,” (1965) by Stanley Elkins

The Screwtape Letters meets Aristotle. The language delights even as the devil in the guise of a high school bully shares his tricks, reveals his motivation, and unmasks the naked stubbornness, pride and pain that drive him to doom. Truly brilliant.

• “The Swimmer,” (1964) by John Cheever

Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of truth?

The answer is yes, and we watch it happen. Cheever manages the tension in this story perfectly. Writers, can you drop one line into your story that that cuts to the heart?

• “Boys and Girls,” (1968) by Alice Munro

In 1968, a university counselor at Cal Berkeley told me not to go into journalism because “women don’t make it in that field.”  I believed him. In this story (memoir?), Munro explores the growing awareness of what it means to be “only a girl.”

• “A Sixties Tragedy,” by David Arthur Walters (2007), Authorsden.com

In my search for Sixties fare I stumbled upon this story with some clever lines and convoluted sentence structure (which used to pass for creative writing!)The tagline, “My best friend was killed by a rocking horse,” conjured an interesting visual, but we’re talking drugs here, not nursery furnishings. The sentence structure I struggled with, for it was sprinkled throughout the memoir, was just exactly that—clunky clauses.

• “Indianapolis (Highway 74),” By Sam Shepard, Newyorker.com

A sharply drawn encounter between former lovers who lost their connection to each other in the Sixties, and to everyone else in their lives more recently. This story is literal trip down memory lane those of us who came of age in the Sixties will appreciate.