A Year of fiction

In the recent past, I have devoted most of my time to poetry and personal essays. By happenstance, I began to pay attention to works of fiction I wrote but never had time to finish for publication. That’s why I’ve decided to take a break from poetry writing in 2024 and to do my best to avoid readings. In fact, I was recently asked by the San Antonio Public Library System to do a Black History Month reading this coming February, but I accepted under the condition the reading will focus on fiction and not poetry. It’s not that I’m invited to a great deal of readings here in San Antonio where I live, but this is a poetry town with readings and at times multiple reading taking place daily. It is seldom that you see readings advertised here featuring prose writers. But fiction takes a lot of time and effort—I’ve been to poetry readings and listened to poets confession the poems she or he was about to read was written in the hours leading up to the reading. That’s why it’ll be good for me to disappear from the scene, because when I reemerge there’s a chance that I’ll be holding some rather fat and juicy manuscripts.

(Of Various Kinds)