1. I ask myself about being in this space with its title ‘necessary’ and its title ‘fiction’.

2. Yet here I am, and despite doubts, under those banners.

3. Some years ago I thought, I am a poet because I cannot write anything longer than a page. I couldn’t imagine the kind of attention that would require (the qualities of such an attention). I couldn’t imagine finding something that could hold my attention that long. I.e., a ‘subject’.

4. Most of all, I probably doubted the ability of what I wrote to hold anyone else’s interest that long.

5. I still doubt that, but my doubt is tempered by my awareness of my own ability to read things that are actually not that interesting, even quite long things. They become interesting because of their length and to some extent because I am interested in finding out what I don’t like, and why.

6. Often these things become very dear to me: their difficulty (the qualities of difference that repelled me in the first place) is precious.

7. All this as a detour from the first sense, in which I entered the scene confessing to you my unsure suitability for it. Nevertheless, ecce ego.

8. Lo it transpired that I wrote things longer than a page, for seven years in a row. How is that for an accident? It wasn’t. I had to do it; someone else compelled me. At least for a while. Now I do it à volonté. Let’s not say I fell into it, but maybe that I was traveling a while without a map—I knew when I crossed a border but not which border it was. Still learning the language.

9. Although in general I cannot get out from under the fragmentary or truncated form, maybe because my first training was in image rather than narrative? Maybe because that is just how my brain functions. Maybe because I read too many things at once, spoil myself with internet-articles-books-magazines-books-books-internet-books-internet, and cannot concentrate. Maybe because my education was lacking and I cannot read Latin? Maybe because some part of me still wants to rebel against the length the page makes happen, or because within that space I still have difficulty moving.

10. It’s hard to tell, even in person, when my tongue is in my cheek. Most of the time, is the answer. Another reason I like the fragment, also the short or odd (“that’s not syntactic!“—she said to me) sentence: it plays around. It holds something back (it’s too serious? or else it’s not Serious enough). The fragment, for me, is a dry, withholding thing that can bloom unannounced into shards of light. (For example .)

11. Someone called me a ‘tease’ once for not revealing all my cards.

12. The fragment doesn’t mind that, though. It has cards of its own. For this reason (as well as because to some extent, as documents, these fill in the other fragments of their makers’/owners’ lives and oeuvres) I’m drawn to things like diaries, used calendars, piles of junk, discarded objects, lost photographs. And also, probably unsurprisingly, to other people’s fragmentary writing.

13. When immersed in the act of writing what I know is the necessity of the next sentence, sometimes the next word. If I can get there, if I can get there…. Often the fragment in its draft form marks my desire for a movement I can’t yet complete (practice, skill, discipline, education being ongoing processes).

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This month I will post here about these things: necessity, fragments, fiction (and writing more generally). I would be glad of your company.