Stephanie, from swale and swamp

The cats that live at Hemingway’s house in Key West have extra toes.  I had one of these Hemingway cats as well, and for this reason I decided that literature was cool.

My house is on the same street as a Coast Guard station, eighty-six miles from Hemingway’s house, on an island nestled between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.  People there say conch with a “k”, not with a “ch”.  I spent most of my childhood watching movies, playing baseball, and terrorizing iguanas with my cousins.  It was also ok because they would eat the neighbor’s hibiscus flowers.  She used to give us money for it.   The hardest day I remember was when my finger was crushed by a safe door and the doctor said I wasn’t allowed to fish for six weeks.  I have lost skill in all of these activities except movie watching.  At that, I am a professional.

I used to read Dashiell Hammett and now I read Virginia Woolf.  I would like to go back to Hammett for a while.

Here at Stanford I study English Literature and sulk a lot.



The question of a “new story” makes me uncomfortable.  There are so many parts to contend with, so many places to be confused by the meanings of these words.  My instinct is to say no, there are no new stories: the details have simply been reordered in matters of form and interest.  But with that I am limiting “story” to its bare bones, perhaps ones that are about loss, revelation, or man vs. whatever.  Plot, theme, and story are not the same things.  I’m not sure of where the lines that differentiate them lay.  Regardless of these feelings, there is always a new way to tell a story, and that seems to me much more exciting than the story itself.

I am more enchanted by the way something is said than what is actually said.  This may come from the study of poetry or an increased interest in voice and style.  I am sure that there are new voices to discover.  Most recently, in my experience as a reader rather than a writer, I found it in So Long, See You Tomorrow.