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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sialia" data-source="post: 2623818" data-attributes="member: 1025">Many thanks to all of you.RangerWickett the parallels are eerie--as I was reading your story I kept thinking "now why didn't I write that?" and "now that's a reallly good way of saying that" and "I guess fiction isn't dead after all."I'm guessing the similarity in the themes of our stories are because in this case in addition to the shared pictures we have similar backstory. I don't know about yours, of course, but mine is all soaked in Katrina. (How can anyone not have longed for stories of loss, prisons, government by the rich for the rich, rape, sorrow, isolation, and the need to find ways to escape, survive, be reborn, find family, freedom and joy this month?)I've had too many weeks of reading about Katrina to write fiction. I wanted to write something real. I've never been to New Orleans (although that itself is also a story). And I don't know anyone on the Gulf Coast (unless some of you are), so none of those stories were remotely mine to tell. Boston's First Night celebration is a bit like what I've imagined Mardi Gras might be like, apart from the general sobriety and G rating. It's as close as I could get anyway.And the tragedy under the tragedy of New Orleans is that the poor have lived for decades on the brink of disaster in every city in this country, and they are failed by city, county, state, feds and their neighbors day after day after day. It's business as usual.Anyway, for a long while I've wanted to show where my stories come from--how they get built--I've often thought that what goes on behind the scenes of a story is at least as interesting as what winds up on the surface. (Why is why although I enjoyed seeing Serenity a lot this weekend, what really compells me is watching the box office tally and wondering in suspense whether Joss Whedon's personal battle to resurrect the dead will succeed. ) So this seemed like a good time to explore that. Fantasy sometimes blinds us to what we don't want to see, or just helps us escape from what we can't deal with,but also sometimes it focuses our desires upon worthwhile outcomes, or makes us think about problems sideways, in ways that change our view of the world and open possibilities.So fiction lives. Good fiction isn't a parasite on reality, but a symbiant.</blockquote>

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