I've never been a big short story writer. Sometimes a little story comes to mind and is just that. But my fictive mind tends to naturally pace for the novel, creating stories in terms of long arcs of events and character. I sometimes think that one of my real failings as a writer is my own privileging of the epic: everything seems to become sprawling, with implication after implication, idea and coloration mounting until a it's all become a novel or at least a series of interlocking stories. Despite this, here you have a short story collection.
I concieved of GENRE, loosely unified as exploration of genres or types, in Winter 1997. Enrolled in a creative writing course taught by Mark Dintenfass, whose own novels are remarkably undervalued and worth the reading, at Lawrence University. I had been thinking about how to create a unified short story collection, always with an eye to publication, as a way of using Dintenfass's class to produce lasting works of fiction -- and GENRE is what I came up with.
I spent a good deal of time, after Winter 1997, continuing to write stories for GENRE. I had more ideas than I seemed able to finish pieces to my satisfaction. The Last Gospel, produced as a novella-length work for Dintenfass's class and originally intended as a part of GENRE, ultimately became a senior honors project and a novel on its own. But GENRE sat on the shelves -- or in hard drive -- generally neglected and relegated to the back of my mind where so many unfinished works have taken up residence to haunt me.
"Crop Circles: An Insider Report" was first published online, as the 29th Apollonian Bacchanalia column on persiancaesar.com, on 23 October 02. I'd done a good deal of thinking about crop circles since my early adolescence in the late 1980s and the 1990s, but the idea of doing a fictional exposé came partially as a response to the very successful movie Signs, which has some genuinely creepy moments and some genuinely artistic moments but really descends into a trite War of the Worlds scenario, full of bad decisions if not inexplicable behavior. It seemed as if the movie crash-landed when it attempted to provide definitive answers to what these "signs" represented, and such answers could almost only disappoint. The whole notion of semiotics, prompted by the title and richly evocative in the context of crop circles, seemed lost in the film. This short story came out of these observations on where Signs went wrong, combined with years and years of sporadic thought on the crop circle phenomenon itself -- and my own suspicion that these images looked like language and might benefit from computer-assisted linguistic analysis. I'm sure this idea has occurred to others as well, particularly someone in a major governmental agency, though whether financing or inclination would allow for such investigation depends on one's own belief or lack thereof in conspiratorial literature.
I should footnote this narrative by admitting that I had intended the piece, from the genesis of its idea as a formalized story, to be circulated anonymously by e-mail as a sort of expirement, thinking the story's conspiratorial thinking and topicality (given Signs's success) might well spread it around the world as one of those otherwise obnoxious e-mail forwards. The writing was supposed to be quick, and most of the story was drafted on (Sunday) 4 August and (Monday) 5 August 2002. I then paused, letting the story sit for some time, its ending lacking. The story was finally concluded on (Tuesday) 22 October 2002, and I indeed arranged to have it circulated by e-mail -- though I've no way of tracking its progress and it never returned to me from someone in an obscure location or was picked up by the media, so I suppose my expirement was about as scientific as a blind man conducting an expirement with light, no means having been provided to so much as observe the expirement, let alone judge the success or failure of a hypothesis. Which amuses me.
"Late Night Dialogue, 1993" was first published online, as the 31st Apollonian Bacchanalia column on persiancaesar.com, on 31 October 02. Even though I wrote it independently, I passed it on to Sia Figiel, who said I'd done a remarkable job personalizing these characters. Rereading the story, it still gives me pleasure, which is always a nice thing. I actually did see the show on the Discovery channel in question, and the story came easily, dovetailing with contemplations of power and the American presidency that were already ongoing in my mind.
"Going Home" was written on Tuesday and Wednesday, 12-13 November 2002. I submitted it to my gratuate creative writing class taught by Sia Figiel, which produced astounding praise. I've consistently been amazed at the extent to which the more confrontational pieces I write (especially at academic conferences) winds up getting praised instead of attacked, which is can be remarkably reassuring about the intelligence and secret dispositions of audiences. I recall that one girl in class wrote poetically in response about how I was obviously a staggering genius, which unfortunately was not accompanied by a name or phone number but which was charming nonetheless -- although I was a bit concerned that there was a bit of pen-paralyzing mystification at work on her part. The good people at the bimonthly online literary magazine A Common Sense (at www.acommonsense.com) had been soliciting my work, and so I offered this short story to them, typically testing the editorial limits. The story was published in the 1 December 2002 edition and reprinted for the 1 February 2003, one-year anniversary edition. Unfortunately to my mind, it was published both times in the politcally-concerned section of the magazine, which wasn't really the point.
I don't have much to say on its content beyond this. It has a text of footnotes, existing solely in my mind, far longer than the piece itself. I'm generally rather concerned about accessibility, and of course the entire piece is perfectly accessible to me, but I really enjoy the mélange of pop culture and high literature, contemporary and ancient history, as well as the complex web of inter-related themes woven into the piece, which ultimately has more to do with language or learning and human longing than with politics. But I've said too much already.