When One Wants To Write,

We Know That Attention Acts As A Lightning Rod. Merely By Concentrating On Something One Causes Endless Analogies To Collect Around It, Even Penetrate The Boundaries Of The Subject Itself: An Experience That We Call Coincidence, Serendipity – The Terminology Is Extensive. My Experience Has Been That In These Circular Travels What Is Really Significant Surrounds A Central Absence, An Absence That, Paradoxically, Is The Text Being Written Or To Be Written.

But What Is Memory If Not The Language Of Feeling, A Dictionary Of Faces And Days And Smells Which Repeat Themselves Like The Verbs And Adjectives In A Speech, Sneaking In Behind The Thing Itself,into The Pure Present, Making Us Sad Or Teaching Us Vicariously.

In Quoting Others, We Cite Ourselves.

Skill Alone Cannot Teach Or Produce A Great Short Story, Which Condenses The Obsession Of The Creature; It Is A Hallucinatory Presence Manifest From The First Sentence To Fascinate The Reader, To Make Him Lose Contact With The Dull Reality That Surrounds Him, Submerging Him In Another That Is More Intense And Compelling.

A Short Story Relies On Those Values That Make Poetry And Jazz What They Are: Tension, Rhythms, Inner Beat, Into Unforeseen Within Foreseen Parameters