Fiction Becomes Visual By Becoming Verbal

For Me, The Short Story Is Not A Character Sketch, A Mouse Trap, An Epiphany, A Slice Of Suburban Life. It Is The Flowering Of A Symbol Center. It Is A Poem Grafted Onto Sturdier Stock.

I Cannot Walk Under The Wires. The Sparrows Scatter Like Handfuls Of Gravel. Really, Wires Are Voices In Thin Strips. They Are Words Wound In Cables. Bars Of Connection.

When Reviewers Take The Trouble To Compliment A Writer On Her Style, It Is Usually Because She Has Made It Easy For Them To Slide From One Sentence To Another Like An Otter Down A Slope.

How Do We Know, Then, When A Code's Been Cracked?when We Are Right?when Do We Know If We Have Even Received A Message? Why, Naturally, When, Upon One Set Of Substitutions, Sense Emerges Like The Outline Under A Rubbing; When A Single Tentative Construal Leads To Several; When All The Sullen Letters Of The Code Cry Team! After Yea! Has Been, By Several Hands, Uncovered.

We Have Scarcely Gotten Home ... When Our Children's Sneezes Greet Us, Skinned Knees Bleed After Waiting All Day To Do So. There Is The Bellyache And The Burned-out Basement Bulb, The Stalled Car And The Incontinent Cat. The Windows Frost, The Toilets Sweat, The Body Of Our Spouse Is One Cold Shoulder And The Darkness Of Our Bedroom Is Soon Full Of The Fallen Shadows Of Our Failures.