Introduction

Introduction

Anais Nin once said, “we write so that me may experience life twice. Once in the moment, and again in the memory.” As a younger writer than I am now, I wasn’t quite sure how to relate to that statement, but it has been several years since I have written many of the poems and stories in this volume and I had largely forgotten many of them until I stumbled across a collection of notebooks from my early days of college. Once I started flipping through them, people, places, and other ephemera of times past began to leave their impression on me once again. Old phone numbers of people who are now again merry strangers, girls, boys, notes, lists long forgotten. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the places from which these words came have no other way of being communicated. I never really thought of myself as much of a writer, I always fancied more the idea of being a painter, so I have included some drawings and such as illustrations, but as an artist these days, one finds themselves wear many hats and I now feel as comfortable calling myself a writer as one can without making a full time profession out of it.

Many of these stories were intended to be longer full-length works of fiction, that merely floated around the back burner of my mind, until I found in Borges and Kafka the virtues of providing merely a glimpse into a more expansive world rather than an entire garish display. One is a visitor more than a citizen, getting the best out of their visit and not getting dragged into pages of excessive description. An idea I have found most appealing, was to write stories that one could read in the amount of time it takes to listen to a pop song, much as Alfred Hitchcock suggested making a film that was in harmony with the capacity of the human bladder.

Consider this modest anthology merely a documentation of emotional memories

The great romantic painter, Eugene Delacroix, wrote to Victor Hugo that, “had he decided to become a painter instead of a writer, he would have outshone the artists of their century.” His forays into painting and drawing, as cursory as they are when compared to his literature, do betray a massively creative energy that could not be contained, nor restricted to one outlet. I do not intend to compare myself to Victor Hugo, but there is something to the art and craft of writing that puts one in a world entirely different from that of the visual or sonic arts. And endows one with what Anais Nin or Virginia Woolf would agree amounts to a second, slightly more romantic life of memories, fantasies, shocks of brilliance and impressions as a refuge from the one we continuously find ourselves in.

-Spencer Hutchinson,

Friday September 4, 2009