tell me what you saw on your way to nowhere

Even though I was sorta ‘meh’ about Donald Ray Pollock’s collection Knockemstiff, I’ve become fixated on the idea of an interconnected collection of short stories. In Pollock’s collection, events from stories influence the world of others, usually in subtle or even trivial ways, but there is a sense of unity and cohesion that I really admire. It allows readers to see the same characters through multiple sets of eyes, see events from multiple perspectives, see the ripples of events years on. It gives a sense that you were reading a book about a place, not just a series of discrete stories set in the same town.

It’s a bit early, but I’ve been tumbling around ideas for a potential master’s thesis (grad school is, after all, only a year away), and I’ve been thinking about the possibility of doing my own collection like Pollock’s. The subject matter, themes, and characters will of course be drastically different from Pollock’s book, but I really like the idea of several of my characters inhabiting the same world, or even the same town. Perhaps there is room enough in one town for Shore from All Our Imaginary Friends Are Dead, Philip from The Mermaids in the Basement, Preseley from Flowing Toward Winter, and Page from the new short story. I love the idea of them all being from the same town, a town in which strange things can and do happen.