Essays, stories, thoughts.
Sunday Scrawl #4: Hopekeeper If I’d known what joy waited for me in my age, I would never have been so flippant with my life in my youth. My audience gathers around the fire, thirty or so of our cavern’s children, mostly between the ages of three and sixteen, with a few adults nearby to keep order. I’m seated on a roughly-hewn wooden chair—luxury—while the kids sit on hide blankets, carefully…
Sunday Scrawl #3: An Ode to Office Orchard Lost Disclaimer: I just wanted to write something like Office Space meets The Odyssey. I’ve never worked somewhere like this, wouldn’t want to, and don’t think it would be ethical to. So you’re the newest member of the team—welcome to work! Officially, I’m here to teach each acronym and perk Pontificate our policies, procedure, process, rules To fill your…
Sunday Scrawl #2: Mimicry The knock comes at 3:31 AM, the metal bunker door reverberating with two sharp raps, and I shake myself from slumber and check the monitor. Tammi’s face. But then, it’s always Tammi’s face. I unmute the connection. “The summer after graduation,” I say. “The time we ended up at Pete’s place after a night out and played charades. The night Meghan got trashed and tried to…
Sunday Scrawl #1: Learning Not to Know When my parents sat me down in the living room the night before I was supposed to leave for college, I thought they were going to tell me they were getting a divorce. At the time, it was the most terrifying upheaval I could imagine. Instead, they told me that the Nintendo Game Boy that I’d gotten for my sixth birthday first released two hundred and nine years…
Space to Play I remember childhood as the slow advance of a great laboring Seriousness. When I was in middle school, an awareness began to settle on me that great beings known as “colleges” watched from afar; by high school I understood that I ought to order my life to be pleasing to them. Nobody was entirely sure what, specifically, we ought to be doing, so orthodoxy was the subject of…
Care Doesn’t Scale I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply rewarding and she really cared about the kids, and this way the…
‘Small Village’ of Supposedly-Deceased Intellectuals Found Alive, Thriving at Caribbean Resort Gabriel Martinez, a 35-year-old confectioner living in the Cayman Islands, thought he was posting a simple promotional photo when he snapped a picture of his ‘cocoa-banana-surprise’ and posted it to Instagram last week. Instead, he ignited a scandal still blazing its way through the publishing world when…
The Controversial Aftermath of the 777Linguine Interview Longtime fans of popular EDM “angststep” artist 777Linguine are “shocked” and “betrayed” after his polarizing statements yesterday that his latest album, NOMORETEARS2CRY, was written and recorded in a time of “profound mental peace”. “My first two albums came from a really unhealthy place,” 777Linguine said in an interview with MetroKnowEm.…
Not As Giants Love Short story, ~2000 words A week ago, when I asked you if you still loved me, I thought the most painful thing you could’ve said was no. I don’t know if you remember, but when you said “Of course I still love you” and asked if I still loved you , I started to step forward as I said that I did. I thought it was the moment of reunion. I thought I was about to hold you again. I…
You Are Not Incompressible can be summarised as: walking, walking, walking, bit of fighting with orcs, walking, walking, walking, anguish, walking, walking, walking, bit more fighting with orcs, walking, walking, walking. —Goodreads review of “The Lord of the Rings” Im returning my switch bc of this garbage ****. It looks and feels like a hobbyist made it and someone slapped a zelda logo on top.…
Stone Hands Reaching I’m told the statue is right in front of me, so I reach out and find myself touching a stone forearm. It’s cold, of course, and it’s coarser than skin, but tracing along the arms is enough to bring back memories of being comforted, of being held, when I was a kid. They say it’s a good likeness, like I’d care. It can’t be that good of a likeness. She wasn’t made of stone. When…
Easy Questions, Part 2: Delusional Desires in Fiction In Part 1 , I examined a few common tropes in stories and suggested that some stories might explore certain questions not because those questions are interesting, but because engaging with those questions allows the story to avoid grappling with other, more challenging questions. This part focuses on delusional desires in fiction, building off…
Maybe your desires are delusional The vast majority of my desires are not the reasonable desires that I had once believed them to be. They’re actually completely delusional desires dressed up in shoddy “reasonable desire” costumes, and I’ve just been pretending not to notice. How do you recognize a delusional desire? You’ll have what seems like a totally innocuous desire, like “I want to publish a…
I want to love fiction I want to love fiction. I want to love both reading and writing fiction. I want to obsess over the craft of fiction, to pore over characterization and structure, to create stories that radiate color and humanity and hope. I want fiction to be a tool for awakening the best of the human spirit, for it to make us more alive, more fully ourselves. I wish that the last page of…
Easy Questions, Part 1: Introduction What if our stories explore questions not because those questions are interesting, but because those questions are easier to respond to than the alternatives? Trope : The Chosen One What’s the shallow, wish-fulfillment version of this trope? What if you were special and unique and the universe clearly told you what you should do with your life? How might…
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Quicksilver and Clay Like everyone else, I walk around the world in a body made of quicksilver and clay. The pieces of my body—my sense of humor, my beliefs, my opinions and artistic sensibilities and worldviews, everything—combine to present a cohesive self to be publicly displayed. There are two ways that a piece of me can be formed. The boring way is when, over months or years of effort, I work…
Against Confidence I hope I never make a habit of writing stuff that makes me feel confident. If my writing makes me feel confident, it probably has a title like “Look At My Cleverly Constructed Argument/Insight” (subtitle: “Also Look At My Pretty Words”). If I release writing like this into the wild, the best-case scenario is that it is universally recognized as a masterpiece, I am laden with so…
The Firefly Artist Note: it’s a metaphor. I’m not calling for mass firefly imprisonment. Two hours after dusk, a crowd gathered by the dozens, by the hundreds, to see the firefly artist’s yearly performance. They spread out blankets in the clearing, sharing snacks by the light of flashlights and lanterns, filling the chilly night air with laughter and anticipation. The firefly artist arrived in a…
“Progress” The following tables are my (opinionated, minimally researched) answers to questions about a curated version of Wikipedia’s list of most-visited websites (see Notes for details). I invite you to follow along, issue your own snap judgments, and come to your own conclusions. My answers are quite negative, but considering the patterns I have observed in my behavior when I am happy and…
Word Rot Unless you are extraordinarily unfortunate, every problem you ever face will have been faced in some form by someone who came before you. That person may have already shared the story of that challenge, and that story might have melded with other tales to form collective wisdom, and a few distillations of that wisdom may already have become full-fledged clichés. We send our newly minted…