Why have I never sent out any fiction on the Substack? I don’t know. I have no idea.
For years I have found writing fiction much more natural than writing nonfiction. When I was in my early twenties I thought I’d be some kind of journalist or essayist and I pursued that track as if there were no other options for myself as a writer, yet the minute I fully turned my attention to novels and stories I felt so much more at home, so much happier, so much more natural.
Often I tell students that there might be some utility in being less certain of your form or genre. (I would even go so far as to say you might consider conceptual art instead of fiction, poetry instead of documentary film, painting instead of musical theater, etc, as the proper vehicle to get your message across.) In some ways, writing into the narrow/infinite space of the substack has been one of the ways I’ve been lately questioning my commitment to fiction as my only real form. The self-imposed paywall, also, has had a way of making this experimentation possible.
I’ve been reading John Berger again (a master form-breaker) and thinking about poetry and the language around war, and I’ll soon synthesize that into something legible, but in the meantime I wanted to share a few very short stories that live in print and/or behind paywalls in various places like Inque, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s Quarterly for the sake of pure diversion.
A new story collection of mine called MY STALKERS will be published in 2026 (after a nonfiction work called THE MÖBIUS BOOK in 2025). None of these stories, most likely, will be in that collection, but they’re here now, just like you, in this little corner of the internet. They’re all mundane and hopefully a bit funny which is more than we can ask of the news right now.
TETHER
She often found herself walking a few paces behind him.
Though they set out from their home together with the stated intention of walking in tandem in order to visit a certain cafe or dually attend to the grocery shopping or some other errand, and though their steps kept pace with one another for the first several minutes of this journey as they discussed their days and ideas and impending social commitments, eventually a congenial silence would fall between them—the sort of congenial silence well-known to pairs who've spent many years together—and it was during this silence, she had noticed, that his gait would slightly widen and quicken, and this new, impatient gait would soon carry him a full step ahead of her, then two steps, then several. Here the gap between them would hold steady, and for a long time they would travel along their shared path at the exact same speed. It was almost as if there was there some invisible tether between the two that prevented him from going any farther ahead than those few steps. It was there he remained—several steps ahead of her—for the rest of their walk, if, that is, this walk could still be defined as something they were taking together.
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