Introduction and Thoughts

I was born inside the greying monolith that is Chong Shan Hospital and delivered into the arms of teary-eyed Betty and Steve, neither of whom had any idea what they were in for. I like to think that the lights flickered when I announced myself with that wet, brittle yawp. Two younger brothers were added to the mix in the years thereafter (Andrew, who has always had a penchant for the theatrical, kept my mother in the delivery room for a day and change—Max, never the one to be upstaged, spent a week in an incubator, granting his worried onlookers only the occasional twitch). Its major characters cast, my childhood passed in typical family-of-five fashion: it was a montage of broken toys, backseat bickering, and family photos that entailed way too many takes. I attended Taipei American School until the eighth grade, at which point I was sent packing to the gothic spires and snarky, old-moneyed culture of the Taft School in Connecticut. Through a series of curious, fortunate events, I now find myself here, where I’m double majoring in English Creative Writing and Philosophy/Religious Studies, which is a joint major between the two departments. My favorite writings tend to be short stories--Kafka's "Metamorphosis," Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," and Murakami's "Super Frog Saves Tokyo," being some of the titles that top out my list. I have few hobbies aside from lounging, arguing, and reading.

As to whether or not it is possible to write a "new story" today:

Tolstoy once made the claim that there are and have always been only two stories--a stranger comes to town or a man leaves town on a journey. Initially, I bristled at what I saw as a gross reduction of literature and his disqualifying me, a creative writer, from ever writing something new. Yet the more I thought about it, I came to two realizations:

1) His two stories did seem to account for everything that I had ever read. Even works of modernism or postmodernism like "The Crying of Lot 49" or "To The Lighthouse," which are turned inward and concern themselves with meandering, philosophical discourse rather than action-based plot, can be loosely separated into Tolstoy's two stories--either some external element (Tolstoy's "stranger") agitates the placidity of the narrator's story-world or the narrator/protagonist (Tolstoy's "man") moves from placidity to the unfamiliar/chaotic beyond.

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2) That just because this was true didn't mean that no new stories might be written. What Tolstoy describes are narrative arcs--a prescribed point A and point B. Yet, as any mathematician worth his salt might tell you, there are infinite number of paths that a writer might take between these two points, each colored by the individual writer's temperament, style, and subjectivity. Moreover, given that stories derive, to a certain degree, their meaning in the engagement of the reader (that is to say, a story is effectively reworked by each individual reader's understanding of it) there are constantly new stories being made of old narratives. 

(One of my favorite pictures--this is Hemingway kicking a beer can)