June 5, 2012.

One of the things I remember from Sage Hill 2009 was one of my instructors telling us that as writers, we wouldn't go out all the time. Sometimes, we would skip the party or the movie to stay at home and write. More than often, when we were working on a project and were in the middle of writing, this would be the case. He wasn't warning us, but rather stating facts that I think we could all relate to already.

Lately, this is how I've been feeling. Working on many different short stories, with lots of ideas flowing. Maybe it's the new environment, the summer weather, or being distanced from school. I'm not sure, but I'm enjoying it. New directions in short stories include not being so attached to what I planned to write in the past, and instead going with what I'm feeling like writing right now.

I got some great books in the mail today... Grid by Brenda Schmidt, The Path to Ardoe by John Lent. I also got the new issue of the Fiddlehead with an amazing short story by Yasuko Thanh called, "Helen and Frank." I think I need to order Thanh's collection of short stories, Floating like the Dead. I can't stop thinking about this story, and how it operates, slowly but deliberately. It moves in steps, sometimes retracing itself in order to push forward. I think it's an amazing example of a fragmented narrative juxtaposing past and present events. Thanh also won the journey prize with the title story "Floating like the Dead," which is based on a real-life island for Chinese lepers in the early 1900s. The story is really surreal and disturbing. It seems a lot of great writing has been coming out of UVic in the past few years!

I'm also halfway through Joanna Skibsrud's short story collection, This Will Be Difficult To Explain. In an interview in the back of the book, Skibsrud says the collection is united by "the desire to push past--and overcome, when possible--the 'limits' of perception, communication, and understanding."

I think the first story in the collection, "The Electric Man" shows these themes the best so far. The story is about learning to read, or interpret, the world. In this story, there is so much misreading of events and people, mistaking of identities, hiding identities, miscommunication, and trying to find what is "true." Rather than emphasizing plot over style and appearing like a condensed novel (as some of Skibsrud's stories do), "The Electric Man" requires the reader to enact the same "pushing past" of the limits of perception as the protagonist. So far, I find "The Electric Man" Skibsrud's most difficult story as well as the most rewarding story in the collection.