Can you tell I’m done with school? Yes, I graduated a couple of weeks ago with an M.A. in English, having completed a collection of short stories “Heating Up the Fog” as a thesis. You, my reader, can see some of it on my web site www.tiphane.org/guy/portfolio
but only my friends (or a publisher) can get a complete copy. Actually serious requests will be served gracefully with a paper version. I still think I could publish the collection as a book, but since I have submitted a few here and there, I will wait for the rejection letters before I do so.

I liked the process of writing each story separately, then putting them all together as a collection. The final revisions were the most difficult, as when one is close to having completed several levels of a house of cards and someone slams the door behind. Fortunately we have computers to preserve our work. At the beginning it felt like submitting essays to a teacher, when the student makes sure to put his copy underneath someone else before leaving class, avoiding the quick judgment of the teacher which the student assumes will be negative. But then with the right kind of reviewer you don’t get really bad feedback, or at least not as bad as what goes on in your head.

Well, something happened during graduation week: they gave me the “thesis award!” This really meant a great deal to me. The first forty-some years of my life have been spent thinking I was a fraud: someone would, sooner or later, discover that I really didn’t know anything. Friends gave positive feedback, more positive than I gave myself of course, but I thought it was because they were friends. But then something happened last Fall, when I completed “Dispersed Are We,” something very strange: I had it in my hands one day and I thought, “this is my Opus Magna,” something I had great satisfaction with. And now, this. Judgment from my teachers, and public recognition.

Now the party is over, the relatives have gone home. What will I do with the rest of my life? How can I improve my writing? What other “cool things” do I want to try? There’s teaching in Africa, there’s cycling around the world. Waiting for an answer in my mind, I keep myself busy with little things here and there. Soon I will complete the recording of my stories so that my blind friends can listen to them (I hope my reading is a little better than the computer’s). I may take classes this summer, try a writing group.

I just finished reading “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro (spelling?), which I picked up at Kepler’s from their author readings. I didn’t know what to expect, but at the end I was very pleased by it. There aren’t very many books that keep me going. I often drop the book down the side of the bed and never pick it up again. It’s as if there were a hump somehwere in the middle of the book: you read and read, but how can you look forward to the resolution until you are on the other side of the hump? The hump is problematic, I think. Anyway, this book didn’t have a big, insurmountable hump. I liked its treatment of the relationships between the characters in their limited world. I couldn’t put them in boxes, really. That’s how I would like my characters to be, I think.