Juvenilia

This is my first kick at this can. With not a fancy hell-of-a-lot to report about my comings and goings and doings and thinkings--and with not a heap of interest in any of all that anyway--I thought I'd nudge this thing into motion with some ready made content.

What'll follow is the juvenilia that I had the wet-earned temerity to foist on people my own age in positions to bind or staple their coevals crap (some of which was pretty good--pretty readable and pretty performable) to sell to their friends and, in some cases, the parents of their friends. These are not good writings, and I'm way pleased that they're not good. Reading over the pieces that I'll make available to you (whoever you are), I can remember the writing of them. I can remember how certain I was about everything that spilled out of my cup whenever I deigned to tip it over. I'm not being falsely modest when I say that I don't know if I've improved as a writer from this first story (the one just around the bend, a story written nearly ten years ago) to the ones I'm right now trying to foist on a whole slew more binding people. What's changed is the certainty. I've got so much less of that animating confidence that drove me to write these (probably shitty) early stories. I'm the first one to admit that I'm no technician when it comes to prose, and I've got very little to say about the goddamn art of the whole business. What I am is self-conscious as all get out. And this insecurity slows me down, cools my heels, and maybe let's me temper and suss out the technique or art from whatever stupid thing I'm at. To think that these stories I'm offering up here happened without that creeping self-hate is a little befuddling. And maybe that's what makes these Muppet Babies so interesting to me. I can't say whether they'll be of any interest to you (whoever you are).

Brother's Sad Because His Skull's Become Too Tight is the first story that I ever had "published." It appeared in Soliloquies 6, released Spring 2003--Soliloquies being one of the two (maybe more now) vehicles for the creative writing students at Concordia. I would have been newly twenty when I wrote this. I realize now, reading the fucker over somewhat quickly tonight, that I brought this bucket up from the same well that I hoisted the first story in my collection, Pardon Our Monsters. The practice described in the story is called trepanation, by the way, and I think I probably heard of it first in the movie Ghost Busters.