I’ve spent the spring adapting stories I began writing almost a decade ago into a novel. The stories all had to do somehow with a character I called Julia Davenport. It’s been quite an interesting task converting short stories into long prose. Six tales were completed by 2005, and another four or five fitful starts came after that. I figured I could finish these starts over the spring and then turn it all into a book that would effectively amount to a series of vignettes about life here in the early part of this new century.
Julia was the connecting piece through all of the stories I wrote. However, each piece was composed in a different voice with a somewhat unique narrator and a weird perspective on life and love. In many ways, although I wasn’t overtly aware of it at the time, this approach to creating fiction is now a common methodology for contemporary storytellers.
Point of view is a key element in all storytelling. The standard way of doing things is Continue reading
He discovers two bananas, soft to the eye, still stem connected, blacking. He thinks about the heat they must be giving off along with their smell. These fermenting fruits can only partially be seen under a flattened, plastic half-and-half bottle lying on its side and an old pack of birthday invitations with a “Where’s Waldo?” motif, never used. An empty clay flowerpot growing a bit of dark green mold is on the corner of the sideboard. He wonders what might have happened if he had just kept everything clean on his own. That sideboard