Fiction Shows The External Effects Of Internal

But He Stays By The Window, Remembering That Life. They Had Laughed. They Had Leaned On Each Other And Laughed Until The Tears Had Come, While Everything Else—the Cold And Where He'd Go In It—was Outside, For A While Anyway.

If We're Lucky, Writer And Reader Alike, We'll Finish The Last Line Or Two Of A Short Story And Then Just Sit For A Minute, Quietly. Ideally, We'll Ponder What We've Just Written Or Read; Maybe Our Hearts Or Intellects Will Have Been Moved Off The Peg Just A Little From Where They Were Before. Our Body Temperature Will Have Gone Up, Or Down, By A Degree. Then, Breathing Evenly And Steadily Once More, We'll Collect Ourselves, Writers And Readers Alike, Get Up, "created Of Warm Blood And Nerves" As A Chekhov Character Puts It, And Go On To The Next Thing: Life. Always Life.

And What Did You Want? To Call Myself Beloved, To Feel Myself Beloved On The Earth.

The Fiction Im Most Interested In Has Lines Of Reference To The Real World.

It's Possible, In A Poem Or Short Story, To Write About Commonplace Things And Objects Using Commonplace But Precise Language, And To Endow Those Things—a Chair, A Window Curtain, A Fork, A Stone, A Woman's Earring—with Immense, Even Startling Power.