Morning Child and Other Stories

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The stories in this collection were published between 1970 and 2003, and thus represent a considerable chunk, perhaps a majority share, of not only my career but my life. Thirty-three years is a long time, longer than many unfortunate people even get to be alive, and, looking back across those three decades to the skinny, hungry, ambitious young kid in his early twenties who wrote the earliest of these stories, I sometimes wonder if we’re really the same person after all, if we really share anything except a tenuous continuity of memory, a belief that he was me that is based more on faith than evidence. Certainly when some critic asks me what was in my mind when I came up with a certain trope in one of those old stories, or what some bit of symbolism really means, why I chose some word or image instead of another, or sometimes even just what the specific inspiration for a story was, often I just can’t tell him—I’m not that kid anymore, really, just someone who remembers having been him. You’d have to go back in a time-machine and ask the kid himself. He could tell you—he had an elaborately worked-out reason for every image and word-choice. But I no longer can.

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