Brian C. Short

Hi.

I write stories that deal with the liminal, the space in between one and zero, or something and nothing, the shadow-place, the ontologically transgressive. They confuse dreams and waking constantly, and subvert their own logic, and I think this sort of thing is fun. They don’t know which way is up, and that’s even more fun. They believe the journey is the journey, and that it should be amusing, at least sometimes. Light and dark, see, sometimes, sometimes…

I’m concerned with how reality works. I don’t know how it works, but I’m endlessly amused and excited by the question, and want to keep asking it in so many different ways: how does this stuff fit together? And also: why does it fit together? And finally: does it really fit together? One thing I do understand is that the answers about what is real are very different, depending on who you ask. If you’re like me, and lack a certain hard shell, and if you stand next to somebody telling you what reality is – or telling you anything at all, really – you can easily start to see things like they do, as if you really had their eyes, and you become, in this way, convinced – at least until you walk away and scratch your head, think about it, and go back on about your own business. Then it all gets so desperately relative, and so terribly muddled. This can be dangerous stuff.

This is good.

Angels are at play. Faeries teach spiders to write novels in their webs.

This is why I like to write fiction – part of the reason, at any rate – and why I like the words so much. Writing stories that resemble the “real” enough to be convincing (at least on some level), without needing to be real themselves, is playing with mind-stuff, the stuff that makes up "real" so far as anybody knows it. Narrative is mind-stuff. Images are certainly mind-stuff. And words are like a little trapeze you can swing your mind-stuff on, and flip over and back, and go this way and that, and have a lot of fun.

Stories are most directly a thing of the mind. There are few other tools or mediations involved. Narrative is a web that coheres, and words are strands catching dewdrops in the morning. I love these things.