Listen to the Author's Statement. (In .mp3) 

In the 1996 all-fiction issue of The New Yorker, editor Bill Buford proclaims that we are in the era of the narrative. According to him, postmodernism is dead along with its attendant experimental forms including magic realism and metafiction.

Yet at nearly the same time of this announcement, John Barth releases his first collection of short work in nearly 20 years, a collection which breaks the story frame at every opportunity, a collection self-conscious in its intent to write about the act of writing, a collection that must be called metafictional.

Two years after editor Buford's pronouncement finds dozens of hypertext fictions sites populating the internet with more arriving every day. All this in defiance of the assertion that forms of postmodernism are dead.

I, personally, am not satisfied producing stories limited to the codes of realism. Such codes, to paraphrase Patricia Waugh, use everyday language to endorse and sustain certain societal and cultural power structures through a continuous process of naturalization where forms of oppression are constructed in apparently innocent representations. Metafiction reveals the internal workings of fiction that generally operate transparently.

My story, If We Even Did Anything, experiments with form and content to make explicit writing as a process and a conscious act, to focus on language as a tool of construction. The story draws on the work that Robert Coover has been doing in hypertext fiction, thus each story section is linked forward and backward if you wish. Choice becomes part of the reading process.

Please let me know what you think of the story. You can use this email link to contact me.