matchbook

The stories posted here are part of a larger work to appear in the spring, The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014). The seventy-three stories that make up the final manuscript originally emerged through a series of triggers, including the 2007 gift of Sarah Manguso’s Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney’s, 2007), and the later discovery, through Manguso, of the works of American writer Lydia Davis. I was, and still am, amazed by the daring, brevity and sheer density of their writing.

 

I was in Edmonton during the 2007-8 academic year as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and suddenly found myself in a foreign territory, freed from constraints I didn’t even realize I’d had. I could be different, and my writing was suddenly free to experiment. As I began to settle in this new space, I began explorations on a number of fronts: the sentences of the prose poem, the expansive canvas that was creative non-fiction, and the composition of short, self-contained prose works that didn’t really belong with anything other than themselves. This latter process was the beginnings of a manuscript that would eventually take five years to complete, as I quietly struggled to increase the density and force of my prose into the smallest space possible. My constraint for the project was simple enough: to compose a grouping of untitled stories that could exist together as a suite, that were each a paragraph or less in length, and with lines so tight that one could bounce a quarter off any of them. Some stories took months or even years to complete, and many were edited, rewritten and finally abandoned. Some stories were nearly perfect early on, but still required a long period of tweaking. I wanted to boil down the core of the story. I wanted to not be in a hurry.

 

I wanted a collection that explored a wide canvas; stories that, together, gave a portrait of how we exist in the world. I wanted stories that showed how we think, and how a few of us live. I wanted stories that came from any and all angles, and some of the pieces in the collection reference American film, Monty Python, dislocation, Canadian politics and history, small essays and anecdotes, and stories so personal they must have happened, at least to someone. A half dozen or so were even originally composed to Twitter, the best of a series of late-night missives.

 

The results are unlike anything I’d attempted before, and have opened up a whole new series of possibilities. I’m already two years into a subsequent manuscript of short, short stories, quietly shaping sentences, disparate threads and incomplete thoughts into the densest sculptures possible. For example: I’ve been two years attempting to discover the short phrase required to complete a short story that connects Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk to Big Bird and the wonders of Sesame Street. The story currently sits at one hundred and thirteen words in length. It is just a matter of time.