WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE
Earlier this month, I was invited to read at Creative Colloquy's virtual literary gathering. I have several short stories in progress, but nothing ready for public consumption, so instead I went searching back through some old favorites. I eventually landed on a story called "The Observable Universe."
I wrote this story in early-2014 in the midst of my first winter in the Pacific Northwest — the darkest winter of my life. I was homesick, I was missing the sun and I was unhappy with my part-time job.
The story's setting was inspired by Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona — a place I spent a lot of time hanging around in my high school and college years — and suffused with elements borrowed from the genre of magical realism. Re-reading this story, I was struck not by the nostalgia for Flagstaff, but by the palpable sense of isolation and uncertainty about the future which characterized that first dreary winter in Tacoma.
Less than a week after I read this story at CC, I found out that I was being laid off from my job. Ironically, I'm in much the same place I was in six years ago when I sat down to write "The Observable Universe." I don't know what the future holds and I am acutely aware of how fragile our life circumstances are — how a virus 600 times smaller than the width of a human hair can throw everything into flux.
There's more on my job search below, but in the meantime, I hope you'll read the story or listen to the recording of me reading it at August's Creative Colloquy:
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