Some years ago, I began writing short stories that emerged from within me in the shape of a being to be encountered. Many of those stories were published in literary journals and otherwise received notice in a variety of ways (readings, blogs, podcasts, discussion topics). While I intended to turn them into a collection, the process of doing so and other complexities of work and life diverted my attention. More recently, I began to wonder about what had happened to the various characters populating those stories, now some years hence. Thus, began this reimagined project, tentatively titled Recombination. I currently am working on a set of matched stories that cross over time and place. They offer insight into the intentions and actions of the earlier characters but move them forward into a present—and perhaps a future. Taken together, they are an intermittent fictional series.

This project stitches the pairs of sequenced stories together with what might be called metaphysical meanderings, reflections on time and space, on then and now. The project as a whole crosses over into new terrain of both poetry and nonfiction prose; it bends and blends genres. The stories often turn on scientific metaphors that describe and inform a state of being or emotional incandescence. In addition to those already included in this project, I have stories named “Free Radicals,” “The Uncertainty Principle,” “Cosmic Strings,” and “Naked Singularity,” an astronomical term.

My short stories are not expressly about these concepts, but I do like such rich, evocative terminology. In their proper context, the scientific words are intended to describe objective phenomena. For me they can also probe the interior—by exploring the nature of relationships and the condition of intimacy.  This I consider the essential raw material for fiction. 

One story, for example, originally had another title, “Disquiet.”  During the revising process, however, I was drawn first to the term “Double Helix” after reading a news release and then “The Human Genome Project.”  It is now paired with a story, drawing from the same characters, called “Frisson,” which seems to relate to scientific words like “fusion” or “fission” but actually refers to a sudden passing phase of excitement.  For me these titles invoke the twists and turns of the imagination, suggesting something about the tiniest, most private mysteries of what it means to be human.