a story of ghosts
by uzwi
The structure of the story, as it is engaged by the reader, should have a similar effect to that of discovering a puzzling selection of items in a container of unlabelled material from someone else’s life. The end of the story, instead of providing closure, tries to recreate the moment in which some fragments of evidence–which might not actually be evidence–flicker together to suggest the possibility of a pattern that might never have been there anyway. Glimpses of emotional meaning that shift with the light, framed by uncertain nostalgias. The sense of briefly understanding or failing to understand emotional states that you might, anyway, have invented. The aim of the writer is not to become an exhibitor of found objects, but instead to not quite succeed in curating that which might or might not have been there in the first place. There is, obviously, a politics to that. & it always produces, by definition, a story of ghosts, if not an actual ghost story.
the m john harrison blog 
“The East” – “The Asian Shore,” come to that.
Or is this a “to-do” note for new work?
Yes! Thank you.
You are very good at writing about writing. I only wonder whether there might be any danger (italics) in that.
I have the same kind of angst. An ominous, undefined “danger”, some essential mistake we all might regret if we only knew what it was. Something dark. Something a clearer, wiser head could warn us against as young writers, “Never become too good at writing about writing, my daughter, in case…” Of what? If only we knew. Too late now. The milk’s spilt.