Hi all,

I’m in Syracuse this weekend, teaching my brilliant third-year students, in the same room where I had classes all those years ago with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger and Hayden Carruth - a very deep experience.

Here’s a little glimpse into my odd mind: I was standing at the counter in the mail room, making coffee, and it occurred to me that these were the same exact counters that were here when I was a student, and that meant that Raymond Carver had stood at, and touched, that very same countertop.

And that made me strangely happy.

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Happy Sunday, everybody, .

First, I recently had a great time on a podcast called The Screenwriting Life – links are here:

Episode on Apple Podcasts

Episode on TSL Website

Many thanks to the TSL team, for making it so fun and easy.

I thought we’d try something a little different this week. I’m close to getting permissions for stories by Grace Paley, Dawn Powell, Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, and others, but, in the absence of those permissions, thought we might read an essay this week.

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Hi everyone,

Today - a bit of an exclusive for you dear paying subscribers - I want to share a new Afterword I’ve written for the first-ever German version of my 2005 illustrated novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. The German edition will be published on October 10, by Luchterhand Literaturverlag, in a translation by my phenomenal German translator, Frank Heibert (who has also translated this afterword for that edition).

Thanks for reading, and for being here in Story Club.

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Dear Story Club,

First, I just wanted to say how sorry I was to hear that we lost the great Alice Munro this week.  Her stories and their tremendous compassion will live on for a very long time, offering that particular brand of consolation that great stories provide those of us who love them. 

I never met her, only knew and loved her through her work, an example of which we’ll get to soon, I hope.

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Speaking of which…

You may notice that I seem to be delaying starting a new story discussion.  I am.  I’m not sure why.  But I think it’s because I’m at a critical point in this piece I’m working on and am feeling a little protective of…my brain.  I almost never feel that analysis of someone else’s story might mess with my process, but I must be feeling this now, based on my procrastination. 

So, I hope you’ll indulge me as I continue to procrastinate, by talking a little more today about a particular aspect of process.

One of the first things I learned about teaching the high-level writers we get at Syracuse is that a bit of honest craft-based confession, even if its self-incriminating, is always appreciated. 

So, I want to talk about one way I tend to get stuck.

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I want us to get back to work on stories soon, but first I thought I’d follow-up a little on last Sunday’s post about seeing problems in a work-in-progress as opportunities for a book to find its full expression.

These moments aren’t always grand, and, in my experience, you seldom know why, exactly, you end up choosing the “solution” that you do. 

Sometimes it’s just a matter of liking a certain thing better than another.

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Last week, I posted some photos and thoughts from my D.C. trip.  In the comments, a couple of you asked if I might say more about something I mentioned, which was:

**

So, I talked through some of the main problems I ran into while writing the book, and how, instead of going, “Ack, problems, I quit!” I tried to say, “Ah ha, problems, that means things are getting interesting.”

I often think of Houdini in this context. If he came out wearing, say, a light windbreaker, and said he would now endeavor to get out of it - nobody’s fascinated. But if he’s got on a straitjacket and padlock and lets us throw him into the Hudson River - then we’re talking.

When a writer has a problem, the reader feels it, and then, when the writer identifies and addresses that problem - this feels like originality and innovation.

**

So, I thought I’d try, in the following post, to explicate this thought a little more.

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Some of you will recall that, back on April 12th, I was lucky enough to have had the acclaimed literary nonprofit WordTheatre® perform several of my stories here in Los Angeles.

With their kind permission, you can now can access those performances via this link. (When prompted, enter the password "WT2024.")

This video will be available until June 1.

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Many thanks to Cedering Fox and everyone at WordTheatre®, for that beautiful evening and for their generosity in letting me share this with you.

I’d urge you to catch one of their performances if you can, in London, NYC, or Los Angeles, and consider supporting them by becoming a member. You’ll be amazed at the level of intensity and the very evident dedication to the art of the short story.

More information on WordTheatre® and a schedule of their upcoming events is here.

For my part, it was quite something to hear my work interpreted by such talented artists - it made me understand my own work better. I can feel that evening working on, and through, me, in my current work…quite a gift.

Here’s the cast list for the April 12th performance:

Saxophone Interludes: Logan Richardson.

“Sticks,” read by Christopher Gorham.

“Sparrow,” read by Alex Borstein.

“My Chivalric Fiasco,” read by Justin Chien.

INTERMISSION

“Victory Lap,” read by Kimmy Shields, Eli Brown, and Jason Butler Harner.

Again, many thanks to WordTheatre®, all the actors, and everyone who came out to the show.

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I’m just (and I mean just) off a late flight back from D.C., so I hope you won’t mind a bit of a travelogue post, heavy on photos.

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Hi all,

So, yesterday (Wednesday) I flew down to New Orleans for a week-long visit with my parents, and I’m writing you from their house in Slidell.

One of the many things I love about being down here (where my two sisters also live) is the access to old photos I’d either never seen or had forgotten about, that have the effect of pulling back the curtains and revealing that 1) we forget most of the things we’ve ever done and the various people we’ve been over the years and 2) nothing is permanent, at all, au contraire.

For example, here’s a Forgotten Me, from 1974, standing in front of a groovy poster and a stack of speakers that I’d also forgotten about, playing a guitar that had all but slipped out of my mind even though, at the time (I now recall), it was very precious to me:

On Sunday, behind the paywall, we’ll get started on a new story – one of my all-time favorites, about that diciest of topics: class. 

Well, maybe it’s about that.  It’s about….a lot of things. 

As you’ll see.  😊

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I want to thank Maria Popova over at The Marginalian for this generous mention of a (speaking of the passage of time) old (2007) essay of mine, “The Braindead Megaphone,” and for the abundant wit, intelligence, and compassion she manifests in all of her writings. We’ve never met in person, I don’t think, but I sense a kindred spirit.  What an abundant place The Marginalian is – always something amazing in there.

And now for our main business:

A few weeks back I was sent a John Barth essay I’d never seen before, called, “Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not.” It’s a really original, relaxed, frank discussion of all of the things we obsess about here in Story Club.  (I was especially taken with what he has to say about story shapes and the middles of stories.) 

I thought I’d share it here, so we could discuss. Reading it, I had a couple of real “aha!” moments. There are many paths to the mansion/ways of conceptualizing the ineffable, and this essay just sings with the authority of mastery.

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I tracked the essay back to a book called Creating Fiction: Instructions and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs, which (it turned out) was edited by an old pal of mine, Julie Checkoway, who kindly granted me permission to pass the essay along to all of you. 

Julie, who is also the author of The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of the Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory, and the director of the documentary Waiting for Hockney, provided a little background on the essay:

“I solicited that from (Barth)” she wrote, “because he taught that concept in our workshop at Hopkins. The whole idea of the ‘incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a more complexified equilibrium’ has always stayed with me with regard to short stories (at least most western ones?) and even with regard to crafting narrative nonfiction books for general audiences. I absolutely used it while making my documentary and also writing The Three-Year Swim Club.  One of the ways I broke it down for students, after introducing the verbose Barthian version, was that “stories catch characters at the point at which their habitual way(s) of being in the world are about to meet their greatest challenge and (perhaps) give way.” I also used the notion of the three-legged table.  A three-legged table is an unstable homeostatic system, just waiting to fall. Almost anything will tip it, and when it falls to the floor, it always comes to a more complexified and stable equilibrium. It just has to. That image—of a character with three legs instead of four, has always worked for me.”

So, thanks, Julie.

Join us behind the paywall on Sunday, for that new story….I think it’s a good one and will do something amazing to your mind.

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I thought we might spend one more session on our exercise of last Sunday.

The goal of that exercise was to improve our ability to discern (and trust) our micro-reactions to a given text (including our own). 

The more choices the writer makes during revision, the more she gets of herself into the text (that’s my theory, anyway).  The resulting quality of presence is what appeals to a reader and is, in fact, why we read: to feel another soul proximate to ours, and sense that that soul is not so very different from ours.

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This week I’d like us to try a new exercise.

As you all know, around here, we do a lot of asking things like, “On what basis do we revise?”

That is, we’ve written a sentence, and there it sits, and now we have to decide how to change it, if at all, and what sentence might want to follow it.

The whole process of writing a story or novel might be seen as doing just that, over and over.

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Hi Everyone,

Over the past week I’ve been going through the hundreds of response emails to my post of last Sunday, on Gaza, and I want to you thank you all. Here’s what’s been amazing about this: every single one of the letters, even the ones from folks who vehemently disagreed with me, were civil, kind, articulate, and generous.  I’m not kidding: there was not one scrap of vitriol or incivility in the lot.  Those who disagreed with me provided valuable references and moving personal stories, and I have learned so much from this whole process (although it has also made me a nervous, anxious wreck, or I guess you could say, even more of one.)

I want to thank you all, from the heart, for your generosity, your good faith.  If I offended anyone, or overlooked any viewpoint, I sincerely apologize.  This process has renewed my faith in our ability to talk about these critical things – not just here at Story Club, but in general.

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A couple of weeks ago, in response to a question from a member who asked why I’d posted about Ukraine but not, so far, about the Middle East, I replied that – well, that she had a point.  But it had seemed to me that there hadn’t been much divergence about Ukraine, but that the situation in the Middle East was evolving and divisive, and I didn’t want to risk sending Story Club into the downward spiral of “political” talk.  I felt that all of us were finding our news and expressing our opinions and having our debates elsewhere; essentially, Story Club wasn’t the best place for it, and I didn’t want to risk what we’d all built together.

But now I find myself somewhat hoisted on my own petard – I’ve been struggling to write these last few posts (and to write in general, actually), because my mind is on Gaza.  And I am not liking this feeling of avoiding the topic.  I’m not on social media and haven’t been giving any interviews lately, to protect my work time, and so this is the one place …

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Hi Everyone,

I’ve been writing up a storm here in Corralitos and thought we might take the day off from our usual Q&A format. I just got a batch of photos from the workshop for the Lincoln in the Bardo opera and am going to share some of them below…such an inspiring weekend that very much woke up in me a sense of 1) art is real and alive and essential and 2) it can be done. There’s the outer life (what’s happening in the world) and the inner life (the baseline state from which we make sense of the outer life) and this little Cincinnati immersion was beneficial to both lives, it felt like. If nothing else, to see powerful people interacting in a positive and hopeful way was a beautiful antidote to so much of what is going on in the public/political sphere.

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Hi everyone and, as always, thanks for being here.

First, I wanted to provide this updated version of the list of unknown-but-wonderful short stories that you all compiled. I put in the missing stories, per your emails. Any omissions or format errors are on me; I was working, ineptly, in the file that Mary G. so generously put together.

But still: this is a pretty amazing document, and I thank you all for it.

Story List Pdf

316KB ∙ PDF file

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Now, on to our question for the week: a follow-up from Corinna Luyken after our discussion of last Thursday.

Q.

George,

Speaking of hope… I keep thinking about the “Sparrow" story from your most recent collection,  Liberation Day,  and how it has a surprising tenderness (it is similar to Gappers in that respect)— which sneaks up on the reader at the very end.

“Sparrow” feels like a great example of what you were discussing in a recent Story Club post(s),  Why We do This— in which you talk about specificity, and respect as a byproduct of increased specificity.  

It strikes me that in “Sparrow", the defining characteristic of the main character seems, at first, to be her complete lack of specificity.  This, in turn, leads to a noticeable lack of respect in the way she is described by the narrator/townspeople— “She always seemed to be reading directly from a book on how to be most common”, “she didn’t have, as the expression goes, much to recommend her”, and “she was...experienced by most people as a slightly puzzling blankness.”  

And yet— the main character in “Sparrow" is, herself, described by the narrator with precision.  The story begins, “She was small and slight and her eyes were dark beads on either side of a beaklike nose.  She moved quickly, head down, as if, we sometimes joked, scanning for seeds. She had a way of seeming to dart from place to place.  She had a way, too, of saying the most predictable things. When a truck went off the road in front of the little store where she worked, she said, ‘That’s too bad. I hope no one was hurt.’  When it started to rain, weather drizzling or pouring, she’d say 'It’s raining cats and dogs.’  When someone said the sandwich she was eating looked good, she’d say ‘It's a good sandwich.’ “ 

At first these precise descriptions of Sparrow are descriptions of the (many) ways in which she seems to be (tediously, boringly) common—  in her language, spirit, and life.  But as the story progresses, something shifts.  And by the end, the readers’ sense of Sparrow as a person, as well as the interestingness of her life, has deepened.  The story ends with a tenderness that feels a lot like respect, and the weight of this shift is almost entirely in the last paragraph, and in particular that very last sentence.  It’s a beauty.  And because of it, the story has lingered with me long after reading it.

Which makes me want to ask you, not just about writing for a younger audience (and resolution and hope) but also about the connection between specificity, tenderness, and respect.

Both "The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip" and “Sparrow" begin with a judgmental worldview and build, slowly, toward something that is more generous.   For me, as a reader, that aura of tenderness and generosity feels hopeful— in the best possible way.

Which is interesting, because though we talked about hope quite a bit in our last conversation…you are not necessarily described as a “hopeful” writer.  And yet, I find hope in your writing… and I find both “Gappers" and “Sparrow” to be stories of hope.   

As I mentioned last week, I've been thinking a lot about hope as it pertains to the ending of a story.  And I think a truly hopeful ending is a very, very difficult thing to do.  

What about you?  Is this something you think much about when you are in the midst of writing?  Is it something you try NOT to think about?  

And when you have written hopeful stories, did you find yourself stumbling into that hopefulness, or (“Gappers" aside) was it ever something you set out to do with intention? More specifically, with “Sparrow", did you have a vision for that final paragraph and sentence early on, or did it take you by surprise?

Corinna

A.

Thank you, Corinna Luyken, for this follow-up. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness and generosity of these insights.

As I mentioned somewhere in the comments last week, at this point in my life, I think a “hopeful” story is a “truthful” one; one that honestly takes into account what it has put into motion. This isn’t necessarily going to be an "uplifting” story, but it might be felt as hopeful because it, let’s say, reasserts basic sanity.

The reader feels: Yes, that which I found being raised in my mind is also that which the writer felt being raised in the mind of the writer, and then the writer did his best to acknowledge that thing.

I’ve sometimes used this example: if you and I and some friends were in a cabin somewhere and suddenly heard a pack of wolves outside, it would be good - a relief, a step toward that “basic sanity,” if someone were to say, “Guys, I’m pretty sure there’s a wolf pack out there.” Whereas, if we all just clammed up - that’s denial. And denial is, I feel, one of the most negative things a person (or artist) can do.

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I think, for example, of the stories in Tadeusz Borowski’s monumental collection This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman. They’re all set inside a concentration camp, and are based on Borowski’s personal experiences. And they are bleak. But they are so good, and tight, and honest, that, somehow, they seem to affirm…something. We might catch just a glimpse of decency in one of them, which then affirms that decency exists, even in that hellish place. At the very least, Borowski is not falsifying anywhere in the book. And his clear gaze, his willingness to say, again and again, “Thus it was,” strikes me as hopeful.

For me, “Thus it was,” is a hopeful statement. It’s also a trusting statement - it says that if the writer shares with us how things were, in a new and truthful way, we will know what to do with that new truth.

This idea allows us, maybe, to sidestep the old “happy” vs. “sad” ending dichotomy. We get to just keep our eye on “truth.” And I’m not talking here, really, about Big Universal Truth, but the truth of the story - it’s “inter-truthfulness,” we might say - how well it knows what it is.

The writer’s task, then, is to ensure that her story is honest/has integrity in this way - that it catches the bowling pins it has put in the air.

Now, what does this idea of a story honestly taking itself into account feel like, as we’re writing that story? (Like so many things in writing, we can’t, unfortunately, just “decide” to do it, or “vow” to do it - the “craft” is to, somehow, “get ourselves to do it.”)

Maybe I can shed some light on this by talking about how “Sparrow” got written.

Here’s what happened, approximately:

I dreamed a few lines, in that language.  (I’d been reading Gertrude Stein and she had, I think, rubbed off one me.)

This “waking with a story idea” happens to me sometimes, and usually I just go back to sleep, knowing that the world probably doesn’t need a story in which I become a snowplow and speak in a British accent as I have a long argument with Moses of Biblical fame, except Moses is a Toyota Prius who is also, sort of, my cousin, Rex.

But every so often something tells me I’d better get up and write those lines down. 

This dream came during the pandemic, in the middle of a long, cold winter, in our old house in Oneonta/Delhi NY. What made me get up was how strong and insistent that voice was - it was easy to “do” and was, in fact, so impossible not to do, that the voice in my head was keeping me awake.

So, I got up, went to the kitchen table, wrote those first few lines, and then more lines kept coming. It was going pretty well, and then it sort of peaked - that initial energy wore out.  In that lull, as sometimes happens, I saw (or “pre-saw”/anticipated) the shape of the story; this boring woman, who had, by then, fallen for this guy, was going, of course, to get dumped on. 

The tone of the story had already foretold this ending.

And suddenly, I had the urge to go back to bed.  I didn’t want to write that story, because it felt like such a foregone conclusion.  (I’d set her up to be crushed and now I was going to just…crush her?) Those early minutes had been spent in a state of discovery but this, now, felt like something different.

But I still had that voice working pretty well in my head and so, as I recall it, I just intuitively made a slight adjustment, a sort of mid-course correction, that was a form of aversion, really; it was almost as if I said to myself, “OK, but what if it doesn’t end badly?  Is there a way we might, without falsifying, get to that place?” 

And the story started to move, as if all in its own, in a new direction. 

Practically speaking, I became aware that my story had a narrator, who wasn’t, necessarily me; I asked myself: “Wait, who is this speaking? Who’s telling this story?”  It had been me (who else?) but now I gave myself a sort of visceral permission to let it be someone else. 

And then I found myself in a state of slight opposition to whoever that narrator was.

Who was it?

Well, the voice sounded like a collective “we,” I noticed.  (“We imagined that Randy thought about her the way we did,” for example.)  Who was this “we?” It sounded like the voice of a community - the small town in which this woman lived.

And this, in turn, made room for that “we” to be wrong – too sure of itself/themselves.  I could “turn against” the narrator(s) of the story; they became characters, separate from me, the author. And therefore, the events of the story could start outrunning that collective narrator’s understanding of things - surprising “them,” in effect.

And that’s what happened. (That’s what this slight mental adjustment allowed to happen.)

So, to me, yes: the story’s got a hopeful ending. It says, basically (as they used to say over at the New York Lottery): “Hey, you never know.”

That is: we human beings tend to judge too soon.

We get some partial information on a situation and our mind starts running forward, projecting. We think we know what’s happening. We’ve seen it before! We’re so wise!

But, when we judge something or someone, that’s a very limited (and limiting) process. The universe is bigger and more ornery than we can ever really account for. And judging (even thought its necessary in every moment of the day, and we can hardly not do it) presumes that we know more than we really can know. 

So, in the end, I see “Sparrow” as making a sort of sideways case for mercy, really; for patience, tolerance, for holding off on judgements, especially negative ones, for as long as we can.

The narrator(s) of that story look at Sparrow and go, “Oh, we know you, and we know how the world treats people like you. How sad.”

And the story says, “Are you sure?  Seems like you kind of don’t know.”

In that sense, it’s also a story about storytelling – about how our early, crude, inaccurate view of a thing can get refined over time, and when the refinement happens, it feels like….well, like love, or increased tenderness, or a greater degree of presence/abiding. 

That’s what the writer (me) went through, and its what the characters go through (that community narrator is a little chastened by the end) and it’s what I hope the reader goes through, too - the reader identifies, at the outset, a little too trustingly in that collective “we” narrator, and feels, by the end, that she was initially misled - she corrects her assessment of that collective “we” narrator, just as I did.

So the whole deal is an enactment of that arc we follow so many times in real life: from sure/judgmental/superior/aloof, to unsure/open/equal to/more fully engaged.

The reader, by the end of the story, might look back at the reader she was back at the beginning, and feel, a little, like: “Aw, too harsh.”

I think a lot of stories work this way - “The Deacon,” by Mary Gordon comes to mind, as does Alice Munro’s “Dance of the Happy Shades.”

Of course, we also sometimes go in the opposite direction - from tolerance to judgement, and that can be a story too - I think of Chekhov’s “Enemies,” maybe, which is the story of a man who, in a single night, acquires a prejudice against a certain type of person that abides for the rest of his life.

My guess is, you can come up with more examples of both types of story, dear readers.

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As for the ending: I remember just arriving at that last paragraph and finding that, you know, the table had been set - and I felt an urge to turn back toward that mother. It was a surprise to me, that change in her, but also one that, it seemed, my subconscious had been steering me toward all along, via that “specificity” you mention: I’d made two specific lovers and a specific mother for Randy, and put her through some specific stages vis-a-vis her opinion of Randy’s relationship with Gloria/ “Sparrow.”

So, when I turned my mind to her, there at the end, I knew just where she was.

The specificity (as it tends to do) had narrowed the path of the story; there were only so many options available to me now, given what had come before.

This is often how endings feel to me. What I’ve already committed to - what I’ve revised (I hope) into undeniability - has ruled out millions of other options and brought it all down to a handful of variables.

We’re often in a particular room, with certain people, and even certain objects that might want to get used (that’s not the case here but it often is). Certain issues remain hanging over the story or, as is the case here, the reader (I feel) is looking over at me for some final (subtle!) disposition. “How am I meant to understand this?” she might be imagined to be asking.

And my instinct was to turn to that mother and say, “Well, what do you think?”

As usual, I’ve made the process sound simpler and more intentional than it really was, but I wrote a whole first draft that night and all of the above was in there – the early certainty, the realization that the narrator wasn’t me, the reversal, the wedding at the end, all of that.

What surprised me about the story – what often surprises me about stories that I manage to finish – is that the story was articulating a truth, or a position, that I recognized from real life but had never seen clearly before – something I believed but didn’t know I believed.

In “Sparrow,” this had to do with the idea that love is…well, it’s kind of insane, really. 

If Flawed Person 1 has a certain set of weird traits, and Flawed Person 2 has a different set of weird traits, and if those sets of weird traits turn out to be complementary – if one FP wants what the other has to offer, and vice versa – well, that’s LOVE. 

That’s what love always is.

That’s all it can ever be: the union of two flawed people whose “flaws” (quirks, needs, desires) turn out to be complementary. 

It’s not some sort of rational exchange of value; it’s more like two bent-up puzzle pieces from two different puzzles finding one another and, to the mutual satisfaction of both….they fit.

The outside world can look at a relationship and say, “Wow, those two are odd and strange and weird and, to me, anyway, unlovable/troubled/to be pitied or scorned, and therefore that will never last,” but that doesn’t matter one bit to the two people who are, it seems to them, perfect for one another, and having the time of their lives.

Writing “Sparrow” taught me about that notion, or, really, reminded me of it, and because I wrote it so quickly (that first draft, anyway) I was made more than usually aware of the details of the process – specifically, of how my own boredom led me to consider an alternative arc for the story. 

My habitual story-arc is something like: the world crushes the meek.  But my boredom was saying, “Hey, George, you do know, right, that that’s just your habitual stance, right?  The world is bigger than your habitual way of thinking about it.  It certainly sometimes crushes the meek, but does it always? Is there any way that you might make a little room for something unexpected to happen, as it so often does in the real world?”

And I guess, that (that right there) was craft – making the little mental adjustment, there at the kitchen table in the dead of winter, that allowed something new(ish) to happen in a fictional world that was starting to become a bit overdetermined.

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Last Sunday, as you’ll recall, I offered this prompt:

Write 200 words from a point-of-view of a character who believes in something that you yourself believe in.  Make the reader believe it too.  We want to be inside the character’s head, possibly using (constrained within) his or her diction. (This doesn’t necessarily have to be your diction.)

Put that character somewhere – anywhere you choose.  But somewhere actual.  Have him or her moving, at least nominally, through that space.

Today I want to offer a second prompt, that will, I hope, complicate and build on that first one.

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Still recovering from that wonderful D.C. trip and playing some catch-up on all sorts of things I let slide. (Also waiting for the hurricane to hit us in SoCal. Ugh.)

Today I thought we’d do an exercise that I haven’t tried before. 

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Let’s talk a little about clarity today; especially clarity in physical description.

And let’s talk about it on two different levels.

Sometimes, the job is to describe something physically so that we can, in a minute, use it.  We are making a world for the character to move through, in other words.

So, the first level concerns whether the reader can see/picture/imagine a physical reality we are offering. 

Today, let’s try an exercise I just thought up, which may or may not work.

Let’s treat it as a collective experiment. :)

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Hi everyone,

So, I’m up here in Corralitos doing a two-week solo writing retreat that my wife, Paula, and I have just mutually decided to trim back to one week, because we’re both too lonely apart. 

But starting something new has made me notice a few things, that I thought I’d share with you.

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Hi everyone,

I’m up in Corralitos, trying to reclaim our house here from the elements, and don’t have another story ready to go at the moment.

So, I thought what we might try, on the approximate 1.5-year anniversary of Story Club, is to revisit something we did at the very beginning: introduce ourselves. (There are many more of you now.)

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