September 20th, 2010

So Eden Mills was very good

Of course, you knew that, because it’s taken me a whole day to write this, so you’ve likely already read Kerry‘s or Mark‘s or someone’s accounts. So just to briefly recap: it was gorgeous out, the crowd was sizeable but not intimidating and full of cool people (Toronto Poetry Vendors! CoachHouse Books! Biblioasis! The New Quarterly! Etc!

The readings were stellar, the children were well behaved, and though I accidentally bought the wrong kind of hummus for our picnic, that was good too. Unfortunately, something insectal bit me during Stephen Heighton’s (excellent) reading and now I have a giant welt on the back of my thigh, but that was really the only downside.

Souvenirs (besides the welt) include a TPV copy of a Michael Lista poem and a copy of Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting, which got nominated for a Giller today! As if you weren’t already excited to go to his book launch tomorrow. See you there?

And, from the non-literary quadrant of my life, I arrived home to discover that one of my dearest friends has gotten engaged, and I am to be the maid of honour! I am honoured! Although, after googling my duties, slightly terrified. One thing I must do is help make boutenneres, which as turns out I can’t even spell. I always thought those were just flowers men put in their buttonholes…how would one “make” that? Oh dear. I promise there won’t be a lot of this sort of thing coming up on Rose-coloured, but…the issue might recur. Still, hooray for love!

August 24th, 2010

Collaborations I Have Loved

With all this talk about the “How to Be Alone” video, I have strangely been thinking about times I’ve worked with others and it’s been wonderful. I am fairly decent at being alone–it would be very hard to write stories and not be–but sometimes the solo, non-social nature of writing bugs me. Sure, it’s nice to have total control over most of what I write, me being a meglomaniac and all, but sometimes it is nice to have someone to talk to about how it’s all working out.

So I’ve always been in writing groups and workshops. It helps to get feedback on my own work, as well as to see what sorts of cool stuff others are getting up to. It helps to keep the conversation about writing going with smart people I respect. Of course, I listen carefully to editors and try to really engage with them on what they think a piece needs. When someone is willing to share some of the heavy lifting of writing, I let them–it’s still mine in the end, but sometimes being drawn out of my hot little skull to a fresh perspective from someone else’s skull is wonderfully liberating.

I’ve also gotten the opportunity to take the process of collaboration farther, to actual shared writing projects. One writing group I was in collaborated on a murder-mystery anthology. I felt this was a pretty brilliant idea, and since it didn’t quite work out, I’m hoping some other group will want to steal it–do you? What we did was, we brainstormed a character and a bit of backstory, and then a scenario in which she is found dead in her apartment building. Then each of us individually wrote a short story for one other tenant in the building, in which each person had motive and opportunity for the crime. Then we were going to collaborate on a final story, revealing the true killer, but the group disbanded before that happened. I’m still rather proud of my piece, though I have to admit that without the context of its sister stories, it doesn’t make complete sense. Still it was a really fun process–everyone went in such different directions that it was really entertaining, as well as instructive to hear the stories presented every meeting.

Somewhere around then, I was also writing a satirical romance round-robin style, with about a dozen other people. A round robin is where each person writes a paragraph adding on to what’s gone before. It’s like improv in the sense that you need to work with, not against, anything you are handed when you enter: if the write of the previous paragraph says that aliens landed, and you undermine it by saying that it was a hallucination brought on by bad ham, the forward momentum and structure of the piece is imperilled–you’ve just wasted 2 paragraphs, basically. But round-robin writing is, also like improv, best suited to silliness! Our love story was hilarious, but not anything anyone could actually print or publish or even read seriously. I also don’t think it had an ending.

An even simpler–and sillier–version of such shared stories is Little Papers (Petites Papiers), a game that I think Fred introduced me to (right, Fred?) in first-year university. This is a blind round robin–you sit in a circle, each writes one part of the story folds it over and passes it on to the next person to write the next bit. We always played with 3-6 people, but I think it would be fun even with 2. Our stories had a standard structure, as follows (how many great novels can you apply this structure to?)
Woman’s name
Man’s name
Where they meet
What she says to him
What he says to her
What happens next
Somehow the results were never not funny. I think you could also play it with less structure, just sentence-sentence-sentence, but that runs the risk of, like our round robin, never ending.

The round robin and little papers exercises are probably best suited to goof-off activities for word nerds, or classroom activities to teach kids of have fun with writing and enjoy working together. As serious fictional enterprises, maybe they won’t work so well (though I’d love to hear an example where 30 people wrote the great Canadian novel in round robin or some such). And also, these are a projects where collaboration is limited: everyone creates singly and contributes, rather than creating collectively. Creating collectively, as we know from marketing campaign brainstorms, focus group film endings and themed bridal showers, often ends in inane results, no results, or hand-to-hand combat.

So the only time I ever wrote something in full collaboration with someone–no “my-part-your-part”–was with someone I have always been comfortable throwing shoes at or biting*, my younger brother. We wrote three episodes of a sitcom together a couple years ago, mainly because we both laugh at the same stuff and have the same strong opinions on how sitcoms should be. Who knows it is actually a good idea to try to write something funny with someone with a similar sense of humour; certainly, not everyone agrees with us and perhaps it would help the universality of our show to have someone on the team who did not collapse in hysterics at our elaborate clowns-at-Starbucks setup.

It wasn’t all hilarity and delicious snack items, though–ok, it was mainly. We wrote it for no particular reason except it’s nice to have an activity sometimes; basically, to entertain ourselves. That certainly worked, though we did nearly come to blows about how to turn off track changes (on Word for Mac, apparently, you just never do). But I do think it was a good exercise in making a single unified work out of two disparate views (even if the disparity is only slight). Maybe next time I’ll work someone who is not a blood relative, even someone I wouldn’t chase with a stick. The sky is the limit.

But actually, I really liked working with my brother.

*What, like you weren’t hard on your siblings?

August 17th, 2010

Kids that I once knew

I think there might be something in writers–some writers, anyway–that serves as a reasonable counterfeit of being a really nice person. I don’t think I’m a jerk or anything (usually), but the amount of time I spend listening to other people is not something I do out of generousity: I am *fascinated* by what other people say. Almost all of them (except those doing home renovations).

Actually, maybe this has less to do with being a writer and more to do with not having a television, but anyway–it’s certainly not research. Don’t worry, I’m definitely not cribbing your words and experiences for literary reproduction, not even those of drunk people at parties who tell me their sexual woes, or people on the bus who screech into their cellphones about a knife-fight at the appliance store where they work. I would never put that stuff into a story, since it already is one. I just like the narratives. And I can’t help but think that it is, in some osmotic way, good for my writing to hear a lot of different voices, a lot of different experiences, all the time. So I am able to sell myself my own personal preference as professional development, which means that I don’t have to leave the bar and go to bed early when all my friends are bitching about their jobs. Hooray!

I think this love for narrative (and other people’s business) might explain why I enjoyed high school as much as I did–when else are you so intimately associated with people you do not know. In fact, you do know them, but it’s a form of knowing that does not come again in life: teenagers are loud, theatrical, bad dissemblers, self-absorbed, and often in close proximity to each other every day, 10 months a year, for 5 years. Sometimes 12 or 13. In my school, anyway, everyone knew everything about everyone. I wasn’t even well-connected enough to hear gossip, just overhear it, and yet I knew plenty about people I’d never spoken to except to do a French assignment in pairs.

This sounds like it could lead to snark, and occasionally it did: I was pretty judgey about the girl who cried in French class because she had just realized she wasn’t wearing her bra, and in a completely different way, judgey about those who were too devoted to the crystal-growing competitions. But I was also (no one will be surprised at this) the yearbook editor: I knew *everyone’s* name, and rather liked the idea of us all being part of one thing or at least one book. I loved slotting everyone’s face into their little boxes next to whoever came before and after in the alphabet, regardless of their affiliation. Everyone together.

That sounds lame, and, oh, it probably was, but here’s the thing: I went to a *really* good high school. It was in an area where parents had the money and the time to encourage their kids’ interests, and so did the teachers. Many people were in band, as well as the school band, which was pretty outstanding (FYI, I played flute, and was not outstanding). People acted, wrote, went to OFSA championships and did power-tumbling. And even the non-participants, the people I couldn’t coral on picture day (punished them by running happy faces in their boxes) were the stars of their own lives. I am firmly convinced that most people in my school were interesting, and almost all were very good at at least something.

I was really looking forward to finding out how it all turned out for everyone. I am *not* sure how I was planning on actuallizing that. I am still friends with my closest hs friends, but who stays in touch with random acquaintances, lab partners, and the girl who had the locker next time mine and a goth boyfriend. Aside from a brief misfire right after I graduated from university, I never lived in the area again so I couldn’t run into folks at the supermarket, and since I’m not actually *from* the wealthy suburb where I went to school, neither do my parents.

For a while, my lovingly tended narratives of my schoolmates had nothing to go on–did the bandboys take it on the road? Did university finally pose a real challenge for the science smarties? Did that girl ever find her bra? I pestered friends and acquaintances for who they’d run into in parking lots, gyms, sports bars, whatever, and asked questions like, “Did she/he look happy?”

And then came Facebook. People ask what’s the point of “friending” people you aren’t friends with in real life, and I say that’s the point! I have a lot of FB friends who I talk to in my actual life via email or phone or actually in person, and if FB suddenly limited the # of friends we could have, those guys would be the first to go! If I can talk to you elsewhere, I don’t need you on FB. But there are also plenty of FB friends on my newsfeed who just friended me because we are in the same high-school network–we have spoken since the 1990s, but I see their funny status updates, their wedding pictures, their workplaces (urgh, many people don’t post that–so annoying!) I get to continue their narratives, even though most of them probably barely remember me and would be puzzled by this post.

I eat the same thing for lunch almost every day, and if I liked you once, I’ll probably always like you unless you do something terrible like try to eat my cat. I like stories, and I always want to know what happens next. I think that’s actually a human instinct, not just a writerly one, and I suspect it’s part of what makes FB so popular.

July 9th, 2010

FYI (and FMI)

About me: I have a desk job during the day, and write short stories on my laptop at night. I am, ergo, always a stone’s throw from the interwebs, and take most of my breaks there. Thus, during an average day, I can keep reasonably on top of my Google-reader blog page, and most of the Facebook action among my friends, too (Twitter continues to thwart me, but I do try on that front, too). Even if I’m not commenting, or clicking on every link/video/possibly non-work-friendly image, rest assured, I’m usually paying attention. But–not the past two weeks. Every now and then I get an internet minute, but I am mainly using those for my own selfish purposes (ie, blog posts, photo uploads).

So, blogland, I don’t know what’s going on with you! I am sure you’ve been just fine without me, but I would like to mention anyway: if you’ve announced anything life-altering in a public forum, something like marriage, moving to Nunavut, new book out, bbq explosion, or something so incredible I can’t even imagine it–I don’t know this. To prevent awkwardness at parties, you can always drop me a little note and tell me…or let it be a big crazy surprise when I discover you’ve burned off your eyebrows. Totally your call.

June 23rd, 2010

Book clubbery

I know book clubs have a bad rap. The reason usual touted–that the clubsters like a certain sort of book and read in a certain way–doesn’t make tonnes of sense to me. Surely every reader has his or her quirks, and every banding together of readers is quirky in its own way. I have heard of men-only, women-only, and parents-only bookclub, bookclubs where only books about food or travel or by authors in translation or Canadians are read, bookclubs organized around preparation for a trip or understanding a polical movement, and bookclubs arranged so that old friends can keep in touch.

Of course, a cynical parry would be that such themes could lead to cutsyness, which would of course lead to making it more about the club than the book. Which is a danger with anything, I suppose, from a lit class to a bookstore section. But I like to think that most clubsters want–and maybe I’m biased because it’s what I want–good literary conversation.

I get lots of opportunities to talk books; I know tonnes of well-read people and almost everyone I ask, “So what are you reading?” has an interesting answer. The problem with those interesting answers is that often, they can’t go farther, because I haven’t read that book or sometimes even heard about it. My friend will talk eagerly (and usually, knowing my friends, articulately) about what s/he is reading, and all I’ll be able to respond with is, “I think I read a review of that” or “Another friend of mine liked that one, too.” I get lots of good recommendations this way, but it’s hardly a discussion.

What I want in a bookclub is a group of smart, articulate friends who have all read the *same* book, so we can engage both with the text and with each other, and hopefully come out of it knowing something more than just our own opinions. I also like the push to read outside of my usual choices–I do get lots of good recommendations, but unless there’s a pressing group engagement, I’ll often let the weirder (to me) stuff fall by the wayside.

I think that push to read widely, read quickly, or read at all, can be one big downside of a bookclub if that’s the major reason people join. I had a sad experience in a bookclub of what appeared to be non-readers. They were smart, funny, well-spoken, well-employed people who saw reading books as a sign of intellectual heavyweight status and wanted to achieve it. However, many of them didn’t actually enjoy reading, and were acutely embarrassed by this, so meetings turned into shame-filled stories about crazy work projects and moves across town. The last two books I read for the club, I was the only one to do so (I still like those people, but I am still a *teensy* bit annoyed that they shot down my choise as “too light” and then forced me to read Reading Lolita in Tehran when, as it turned out, no one else did. I don’t really regret it–Nafisi’s discussions of literature are lovely and insightful–but still…)

Anyway, my point (I do have one!) is that I am in a new book club and it is lovely and filled with nice people who read books for fun, even when there is no club around to make them, and brought lots of good food to our first meeting, last Saturday. The founder of the club is my friend Scott who was in my most successful bookclub in the past, which ended due to depression (a number of unfortunate book picks in a row made us too dispirited to continue–although I still recommend Disgrace by JM Coetzee [just brace yourself]).

This new club is the “250 pages or less” bookclub, so it’s a bit less pressure and also poses an interesting challenge to find books to meet the limit. So I get exposed to some new stuff, in addition to the interesting conversation, friendly people and steamed dumplings. Heartily recommend 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xialu Guo, if you are looking for something short and fascinating.

Anyway, bookclubs–not for everyone, but lots of fun if that is what you are into, and I am, so yay! Off to read John Steinbeck’s The Pearl.

May 19th, 2010

Pivot Farewell

Tonight is a Pivot at the Press Club reading with Jeff Latosik, Sachiko Murakami and Souvankham Thammavongsa.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010
8 p.m. at the Press Club
850 Dundas Street West
Hosted by Carey Toane
PWYC ($5 suggested)

Obviously, the readers, venue, and fab Pivot crowd would make this a worthwhile evening, but I also wanted to mention that this is mistress of ceremonies Carey Toane’s last night at the mic. She is off to thrilling new horizons and I am sure there is an exciting sucession plan in place (perhaps we will learn of this tonight??) but I am still sad.

For a year and two-thirds, Carey has booked, advertised, organized and hosted Pivot every other Wednesday and she has done a just incredible job–especially when you consider her own poetry, her Toronto Poetry Vendors project, and a day job, too! If you’ve never had the joy of attending a reading, I can tell you that all ran smoothly and joyfully, and Carey was always funny and warm onstage (and off, for that matter). I can speak from experience to say she made the readers and the audience both feel a part of something special, and she gave some good hugs.

In August 2008, when Alex Boyd, the wonderful host of IV Lounge, announced that that series would end, and that something new would replace it, I was similarly sad. These series have a way of changing and growing in wonderful ways–but things are pretty wonderful the way have been, too!

Thanks for all you’ve done, Carey–we’ll miss you!

March 4th, 2010

City of My Youth

I moved to Toronto on March 4, 2002. I moved to take a barely paid full-time job, and only-slightly-better-paid evenings and weekends job, as well as to go to school the nights I wasn’t working. I had two friends in town, an apartment where you could see the fridge from the bed, a fear of the subway system (steel wheels–so noisy!) and two goldfish named Demetrius and Lysander.

The first thing I did when I moved was go to the Spadina Road library (shout out!) and get a UTPL card. I did this yes, partially because of my love of literature but mainly because I had neither an internet connection nor a phonebook, and I needed to find a locksmith to install the lock I had bought and installed in Montreal after the Terrible Millennial Break-In, then had de-installed at great expense when I moved.

I eventually got Jason from Spadina Security. I think locksmiths, like bartenders and nurses, often deal with people who are freaking out or about to do so, and they have to have the people skills to match their technical skills. Jason was extremely nice and comforting about my move to Toronto (he told me I had an excellent lock!) Spadina Security was the first Toronto address I added to my book after I moved, and probably the nicest conversation I had that day.

You’d think that I would have been using all my scant free time to sleep, but as I remember it now, with little in the way of friends and money to entertain me, it stretched out. I wasn’t writing much in those days, and even then my tv was only sort of functional. My principal hobby was free-trial periods at gyms. It was a form of entertainment (expecially since I found that Toronto gyms often had tvs you could watch) as well as fitness, plus the trainers who showed you around were usually really friendly. Policies were looser in those days, and I got in at least a couple workouts at almost every gym in the downtown core and some beyond, including one in Rosedale that had an in-house kitten.

I walked everywhere, continuing to be both afraid of the TTC and cheap about the $2.50 fare (ah, those were the days!) “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you time is of no value,” I told a work superior in the elevator one day, when he opined that me walking 30 blocks to a store I wanted to try was not an excellent plan. There was little he could say to that, I suppose.

I went to so many libraries to do my homework, so many flowershops just to sniff things, I knew the cost of every brand of everything in the supermarket. My brother (one of the two TO friends) snuck me into his film classes to watch movies about prison breaks. Someone told me not to walk through any parks alone at night and I was SO happy when I finally made a friend in one of my night classes so that together we could cut through Queen’s Park on the way home. I was distraught (though he was more so) when he had to drop the class because misdirected arsonists had burnt down his house. I don’t know what ever happened to him–I hope he’s ok. But then I made another friend and walked home with her.

I finally got a real job, one that paid decently and was only 8 hours a day. It was a shocking amount of free time, and a shocking amount of money (if I told you, you would laugh in pity). I remember buying a pair of pretty ballet flats, utterly flimsy, made out of cardboard and vinyl, for $15, and being thrilled that, a) I could afford to waste money on something I didn’t need, and b) that I no longer needed to stand for hours at a time (ah retail) so it didn’t even matter that the shoes were cheap.

As it turns out, those cardboard shoes were wonderful and I had them for 6 years. And I learned to take the TTC to get to my new job, and then to take the TTC efficiently, and then to love the TTC with all my heart. I got an apartment with two rooms and spent days doing figure-eights between them. I made more Toronto friends! I started having people to borrow books from and bake cookies for and hug when I hadn’t seen them in a while. That was, and has never stopped being, amazing.

With my friends and also alone (because I had in fact learned to enjoy my own company) I went everywhere and talked to everyone and petted everyone’s dogs. Never forgets:

–that time Jaime, Lara and I went to the Santa Claus parade in a blizzard and got amazing spots in the crowd because of the snow. And the parade was so silly and happy and the kids didn’t care about the weather at all. And these sad free-sample distributers gave us tonnes of free tubes of pudding because they just wanted to get rid of them and I wound up with dozens only to discover I don’t like sucking pudding from a tube. And when I got home my hands were so numb I couldn’t turn my key in the lock for a few minutes.
–that time Penny and I went to see Chad’s band play and then Ron Hawkins jumped on the stage and played a song
–the night I was walking on Sunnyside Beach with Jay and then fireworks started
–the big 2004 blackout, when I was not inconvenienced one iota, but everyone was in such good moods, plus I got a day off work
–finally having my scary crazy operation at North York General and being absolutely convinced that I would die under anesthetic just like my parents’ kitten…and then I didn’t, and I spent that whole spring being thrilled just to get out of bed
–climbing 22 flights of stairs with Mark J. while carrying the Penguin anthology
–the well-dressed corpulent middle-aged man who approached me on the street late one night to say he’d just been to a fashion industry event, and did I want the samples of cosmetics that were in his goodie bag? (yes!)
–when Ben and I were on our way to sushi when we ran into a naked man…and then another…and then we realized it was Pride weekend.
–when Brandon and I were walking down the street during (a different) Pride and I said, “Hey, that women wasn’t wearing a shirt.” and Brandon hadn’t noticed.
–the untoward flirtation Kerry and I discovered at Starbucks
–when Maya made me run around and around at Circle Thai because she was bored sitting at the table (she’s three).
–the day Mark and I took the ferry to Ward’s Island for Katie’s birthday, but we went to the wrong island and had to walk all the way around and then we ran into everyone and had a big delicious picnic on the beach in the freezing cold
–the night I was reading at Strong Words and brought a bunch of friends to hear me, but the Art Bar was flooded so they gave us a different room at the Gladstone, but the room was locked, so my friends and I just stood on the stairs, with me saying, “I really do have a reading tonight, I swear.” (eventually someone came and unlocked the room and it was an amazing night)
–the first time I saw Harriet (who is currently a baby) roll over
–when a man who thought he was flirting with told me that the problem with the publishing industry is “too many Jews”

And the crazy thing is that I’ve already forgotten so much, no doubt–a hundred idle kindnesses at the grocery store and on the bus, birthday cards, snowstorms, fashion faux pas, and free cheese. But that’s, I suppose, what real life in a real place is–not having to keep perfect account of every amazing moment because, while they aren’t constant, there will be more to come.

I know a lot of my most-loved Toronto memories are not Toronto-centric–they could have happened anywhere, but they didn’t. Toronto is where I’ve lived the last 8 years, and where amazing and banal things have happened to me, and I’m so grateful. Here’s to another 8!

RR

February 27th, 2010

Oscar Derby!!

You are playing this year, aren’t you? Go over to A Place and enter your picks before you forget. I’ve even seen some of the movies this year, which makes me more of a shoe-in to win than usual. Go right now! It’s fun and it reminds you of the movies you’ve been meaning to see–what more could you ask for?

RR

February 23rd, 2010

Groups and Challenges

In Writer Guy’s review of Century as part of Canada Reads Independently, he wonders if he’s right in calling CRI a “challenge.” I’m sure it’s fine to call it whatever one likes, but I much prefer a term I’ve learned from my bookfriends on GoodReads–a “group read.” To me, that implies better what I think these projects intend: to get people agreeing to read something as a group so they can then talk about it. So fun and friendly.

“So why aren’t you participating in any of these group reads, RR?” would be a reasonable question to ask, at least lately. It’s true–I love book conversations and though I’m not the fastest reader, I’m fast enough to read a book purely for the sake of participating in a conversation. I used to quite often. But I can’t quite get committed lately. Maybe it was the demanding, structured reading in grad school that’s put me off. Maybe it was a few book-club related incidents–a club-wide insistance on reading “challenging” books that weren’t “too easy” or “light”…which ended with me miserably hauling myself through a couple books that no one else liked, or indeed, bothered to read.

I think these sorts of group reads a project like Kerry’s, or in fact Canada Reads itself, seems very fun indeed–as warm an invitation to conversation as one could hope for. I love the idea of a group of people focusing their reading so they can share it. All I can say is I really hope to get it together for next year.

Meantime, I’m trying one of the less-structured options of group reads, one where participants don’t read the same book but engage in the same kind of reading and then share thoughts on that. One that appeals (because I was already sort of doing it privately) is a retro-reading challenge. Rereading has been a hot topic on The Literary Type lately, and now over at Free-range Reading, Mark suggests the Retro Reading Challenge. Ok, fine, it’s got the word “challenge” in it, but it still seems pretty fun and friendly to me:

“So here’s the idea, which I’m calling the Retro Reading Challenge, and I hope you all will play along. The idea is to pick a book that you read and adored years and years ago, then reread it now and write a review of it to capture your impressions. Did you still love it? Did you see flaws (or strengths) that you missed the first time? Did you have an “Oh God, what the hell was I thinking?” moment?”

I might not quite be able to comply with all the rules–the book needs to have been something I read only once, at least 15 years ago–but I *might* have Mostly Harmless only once, in my early teens–it wasn’t in the giant omnibus that I owned as a kid, since it didn’t come out until 1992. And it’s way darker than the others, so it’s conceivable it wasn’t on my reread list. And it fits in nicely with my don’t judge Eoin Kolfer too harshly project, which has been going on since fall (I’m halfway through *So Long and Thanks for All the Fish* right now, if you’re curious) and will end when I read *And Another Thing* and try not to hate it for not being written by Douglas Adams.

SO! Rambling aborted, I will read *Mostly Harmless* and review it as part of the Retro Reading project. Yes. This is my plan. Baby steps.

RR

January 30th, 2010

Talking Stories

Last night at dinner, my friend Scott explained to someone, “Becky writes short stories–short stories are to the point, but you don’t always know what the point *is*.” Such a good summation of the strengths and weaknesses of stories.

This morning I read Andrew Hood saying in Canadian Notes and Queries that “What the short story can do better than any form is romance the effects of life without having to belabour the causes.” He went on to quote Clark Blaise’s comment that, “[short story writers] are not in the business of establishing any of the whys… The story traces what lingers after the whirlwind, after the fracture. Or before it. We’re not in the business of establishing the reasons…why things happen. They’ve already happened.”

Today is, I feel, a good day for stories!
RR