Editorial: Fiction
issue #20
by Michael Bryson
September 2, 2007
It is Sunday night. The house is quiet.
The cat has stopped howling to go out. Nine days ago, I was married. My
wife is outside reading the newspaper. Her children, seven and three
years of age, are with their father. The house is quiet.
It has been one of those summers. One
that will be remembered for a long time. Like those summers of
childhood, which seemed to stretch forever. This summer did not stretch
forever, but it was rich with events, dense with planning, full of hope
and anxiety, love and stress. Like one of those teenage summers, when
change seems perpetual and life full of sharp edges, providing both pain
and insight, knowledge and something that we believed resembled truth.
As we age, of course, we realize how
rare those summers are, how special those moments. Recreating,
reimagining those moments is part of the gift literature gives to us. We
enter the special moments of the lives of others. We are reawakened to
possibilities of spirit. We are connected to mysteries of emotion and
our deepest selves.
The other thing that has been happening
this summer is my wife introduced me (through the Internet) to a
four-year-old boy she knows. He has been battling cancer, and only a few
short months ago seemed to be approaching death at an alarming speed. In
recent weeks, he has made a remarkable recovery and now seems to
reapproaching his old life. It has been a shocking journey to witness
from afar. In particular, it was been a stark reminder of the day-to-day
nature of existence: each moment containing the elements of eternity and
each day strung together into an odd-shaped continuum.
These are the building blocks of
narrative, which we are all familiar with. These are the tools of
writers. One thing follows another, or else it doesn't. Cause, effect,
disruption. Characters bounce off each other like pool balls. Children
push their way into the future, because where else is there to go?
The stories in this issue address these
issues, as all good stories do. They are puzzling and surprising, funny
and curious.
They are:
What?
by John Lowry
Scimitar
by Alexandra Leggat
The Faces of
Rock
by Daniel Wilcox
To Boil An Egg
by Stephanie Yorke
I hope that these stories remind you,
in some small way, of a special summer.
Michael Bryson is the
editor of TDR.
|
