Noticed the obvious outpouring of poetic reaction of late–and especially today–and decided to recategorize my dabblings into another category of POETRY rather than STORIES. Tedious, but I have found that categorization is one of the blessings of the mind of mankind. Or, more likely of woman-kind.
Though it’s my poems that have been published rather than any of the many short stories I’ve written over the years, I found myself taking 53 posts from the 148 originally marked as “stories” to place into this new category. The ones that remained are not all stories–some starts, many one-liners and paragraphs, some serialization of whole stories, but it was a shock to me that I had actually written so many poems. Most of them are just quick thoughts, like today’s, and have never really been edited once much less over and over the way I do with the fiction.
And like with the stories, I can’t place myself as the author in many of them and wonder where in my mind they had lived before sneaking out onto the keyboard and from thence out into internet space. Some, more so than with story, are obvious relatives to the moments or people I knew. Most aren’t.
One good thing that came of this–or maybe a couple–is that I notice a trend of poetry leading to some of the best stories I’ve written. For another, I seem to have some great openings of stories that I’ve long since forgotten and found only by going through this little exercise of recategorization. Maybe this will all spur on the forces just as the classes or meetings or readings have struck the match before this.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology