just because you cant see it...

i cant decide if it is because we, the people who write, are so caught up in our own lives, or if it has something to do with the irregular way life seems to happen lately, dotting time with strange instances and too much rape and pain for the world to breathe healthily again. i'm not certain if it is a trend, or a permanent ocurance, and i sure as hell cant figure out if it is happening all over the globe, or just in the tiny whore-house that is the charles royal building at my particular university.

but the truth, mapped out in so many fonts on too many pages to read in an hour, is that fiction has faded into a fifth genre. if the first is poetry, and the second is drama, and the third is fiction and the fourth is essay, then the fifth is that slurry line between fiction and essay, a fraction of writing, if you will, where the inexperienced writer writes about him or herself and tells a life story, plays with form, and labels it as fiction when it is actually memoir.

everything has become memoir. of all of the fiction submissions to the welter literary journal, only two are actually fiction and not memoir, one of which is mine.


where has fiction gone? has the imagination finally given in and admitted that it cant keep up with how screwed up life really is? or are all of the characters on vacation? living in a place where storys are written about fluffy kitty cats and unicorns? maybe theyre waiting like the romanticists did for the world to turn itself upright again and for the rain to stop falling up. gravity has to take over again and set things right.


in the mean time, do we let them go on thinking that memoir is fiction? perhaps they just dont see the difference, or cant believe what has happened to them. it must have happened to this character that has assigned itself a first person omniscient point of view with which to tell a true story in disguise as fiction.


at least there are submissions. amd im not complaining, im just happy to be around to see it happen. the genre that was not a genre 15 years ago, that is only now being accepted by the literary big wigs, is taking over like it owns the joint, building a work out room in the old nursery and tearing out the flower beds that old aunt eudora took so much pride in. It plans to open up some windows and air out the rooms, finally get rid of the smell of cigar smoke from grandpa earnest and uncle charles. but the carpet hasnt changed, and no one will ever knock down the giant oak in the front yard or dry up virginia's lake.