Thank you, your comment means a great deal to me. Maybe I should have said I’m a dabbler at fiction compared to the people I know who work quite hard at it. I just can’t sustain any real attention to it because stories so seldom occur to me. I think some people are just natural storytellers and know which details to leave in and out or how to develop a listener’s feelings for the subject. You can learn anything (given enough time and effort and especially desire), but I would have to work pretty hard at fiction. I can get lucky occasionally and fall upon a good way to present a story, but the only stories I tell well are the ones I’ve rehearsed over and over.

I have such admiration for novelists and short story writers that I’d never think of saying I’m one of them! —D

Thank you. For me, all writing is a sort of conversation. I can never read long without wanting to write. It was the same way watching sports on television when I was young—I’d watch five minutes and then run outside. I probably should study other poems, stories, or essays longer before I try writing something myself, but I’m not a good listener. I have to participate. I’m grateful I have a job that compels me to read carefully and restrains me somewhat. Sometimes I wish I could just read and appreciate literature and shut-up altogether, but I’ve figured out that’s impossible now. It means a great deal to me that anyone is willing to read my experiments, so thank you, thank you. —D

I’m was a little surprised to write it. I generally don’t DO fiction and leave it for people who are much more able, but I was inspired by a series of stories in Sudden Fiction International, which one of my classes is reading. The first line came to me, and then the rest sort of unreeled. And it felt pretty whole when I finished it for the first time…though I’m not crazy about the first line.

A teacher in graduate school once urged me not to imitate myself, and lately I’ve been trying to lift off the tracks a little. Thanks for indulging me in my experiments. —D