Alan Rice

 When I was little, my grandfather would get to the punch line of a joke he was telling - or attempting to tell - and it would usually sail over my head. Not realizing that the story was supposed to be funny, I'd invariably ask something along the lines of, "So what happened then?" and Grandpa would say, "Well, I went away just then." I can't remember a single one of his jokes, but I remember that. 

An essay by Virginia Woolf from "Moments of Being" describes the moment when her father no longer wanted to go out fishing with young Virginia and her brother, Toby. It was not a great crisis, not any life-changing event, but as she describes it, one of those moments that she pockets away, like glancing in at a window, stores it in her memory so that she can use it some day. So many of the things we see, inconsequential little events, may have meanings that escape us. Or we just happen to go away, and never find out the ending. 

My writing tends to be like that. There may be a perfectly logical explanation, but I don't know what it is that I need to capture. I can only put down what I see and leave the speculation to my readers. Is the girl that Robert sees a ghost? Or does he just have an overactive imagination? How did the leering stranger know Eddie's name? Or Carl's? What will become of those two beautiful children, Joanie and Ethan? I don't know. I went away just then. 

Writing fiction is an avocation that I've come back to. I grew up in a suburb in Connecticut and went to Earlham College (a Quaker school in Indiana, if you don't know). I majored in theatre and literature, folk music and anti-war protests, and a lot of other things that probably hadn't better become public. Got an MA in dramatic arts from UConn, got married, got divorced, became an alcoholic, and got sober. Not in that order. For the past twenty years or so I've been teaching high school English, which was always my true calling. Now that I'm retired - partly - I can go back and explore some of those odd little moments that make me wonder if there might be a story there.