Short Fictions

Afterword from In The Park of Culture:

"Why Short Fictions? "

Over the years, I've published the work collected in this volume as poems, prose poems, short short stories, and, most recently, short fictions. In truth, I've willingly published the work under whatever label a particular editor chose to assign it. This is not because I don't care about labels. The way you name a piece of writing influences the reader's expectations. I approached all of the work collected here, however, in the spirit of experimentation, disregarding the various conventions of form to see where such contraventions might lead. For this particular work, categories were beside the point. The earliest pieces were written after a period of intense interest in Baudelaire and Rimbaud, so when I sent them off to magazines for publication, I called them prose poems (not that this deterred editors from publishing them as stories or "sudden fiction," which was a popular term for a while). Later works were influenced by a variety of writers with various approaches to this short, prose-like form: the paragraphs published as poems by many contemporary poets, especially Robert Bly; the intensely poetic prose of W.S. Merwin; the very short stories of Ray Carver; Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons; Kafka's The Great Wall of China; William Carlos Williams's Kora in Hell; the ficciones of Borges; the label-avoiding, very-short, story-like work of Margaret Atwood in Murder in the Dark; the innovative short fiction of Coover, Gass, and Barthelme; and many others, too numerous to list, including the sometimes brilliant work of less famous writers published in the nation's thriving network of literary and small press journals. Beginning in the early nineties, with the advent of personal computers and the invention of Storyspace from Eastgate Systems, I started writing hypertexts, a genre-killing kind of writing designed for the digital space of the computer screen. ("Night Water Night," is a hypertext "variant," by which I mean it is one possible reading of a piece that can, in its original hypertext form, be read in multiple sequences).

For me, all of this work has come under the personal heading of "experimental," meaning I allowed myself all the freedom in the world while composing it. With the publication of this collection, however, I've had to decide what to call these pieces, if for no other reason than to give librarians a hint as to where to shelve the book. I chose short fictions because, from a practical perspective, it seems like the most accurate label. Short, for obvious reason; and fictions because to call it poetry confuses everybody and because that little "s" at the end of the word fictions distinguishes it from the short story, with that form's traditional promise of an organic relationship between a fully realized character and significant, vividly described action. Fictions suggests prose making multiple promises, language, imagery, and sound patterns all foregrounded as potential ways of meaning. I 'm calling the pieces collected here short fictions because it's a term I find essentially sensible and useful, and in the hope that the label is innocuous enough not to get in the way of the work itself.

Ed Falco

Blacksburg, Virginia