"i am a writer, a writer of fictions...

"and i've written pages upon pages
trying to rid you from my bones..."*

i think the fiction writer is a person who can imagine the worst, the unthinkable, and also the most sweet & fragile good--and does.

while i was in the poetry program at UW i shared an office with a girl in the fiction department. one day she was really upset; her problem wasn't something that had happened, but something that she had imagined happening. {insert my aggressive eye roll here.} sometimes it's just too painful, she said.

in spite of myself, i think i understand better where she was coming from. back then i didn't have kids and despite the true horrors i had experienced by age twenty-two, my vision of the unthinkable was yet more benign than it is now.

i'm not sure what to say about poets relative to this discovery. it's a very different approach to dealing with subjects of comparable magnitude. poetry is something about tinkering with very small toys; they're too small to hold and too small to see properly until you put them all together just right. at that moment they grow until they fill the room.

why this diversion: my morning writing has been fiction lately; not because i'm any good at it, but because it's fun and i think it's good practice. instead of dealing with large subjects with small tools, fiction is trying to organize many moving parts, most of which don't belong there; you have to sift and sort and all the while the conveyor belt is relentlessly moving toward you.

i think my time is already up. Ally just came in and sat on the couch next to my computer.
-but mom, i'm a writer too
-oh, you are? what do you write?
-but i have to write my grandpa's naaaame

gr ANDPA TOM

so. until later...

*the engine driver, the decemberists