About Found Stories
Welcome to my blog! I’ve always loved to write, and I’m getting back to that dream by starting this blog. Also, I’m inherently interested in talking about myself and my friends and my life. And I know I’ll have at least four devoted readers.
When I started this blog, I had the grand plan to feature little things I like to call “found stories,” basically bits of poems or stories that I pull out of context and put together to make something new, like a collage made out of words or a literary mashup a la Girl Talk. The idea of Found Stories is based on a poetic form called the “found poem” – taking text (anything from prose to recipes to instruction manuals) and turning it into poetry. For a great example of this form, check out Mornings Like This: Found Poems by Annie Dillard. I came up with the idea when I was taking a short story workshop with this professor who I thought to be high-brow and very “postmodern.”1 Without any sort of inspiration to write a real story, I figured this was a good way to b.s. a good grade out of the class.2 It worked, but it also led me to reflect on beautiful words and how they could say things about my life and my spiritual journey. When I planned to use found stories to establish a theme for my stories, I wasn’t thinking of the time commitment involved – hours upon hours of reading, note-taking, and arranging.
Instead, the stories told on this blog will be shared as they occur to me (as they are found, if you will…see what I did there?). But I do want to share the first found story that I ever compiled because I feel like it also tells some of my story. So I’ll post it, eventually.
The stories I’m telling about my life, my friends, and my family are all as true as I can remember.
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1. Now I suspect that it’s much more likely that he just didn’t give a shit.
2. One dude in the class brought a large manila envelope, and instead of pulling out copies of his short story, he distributed a random item to each person (I remember there was a coaster from a bar, a napkin with a lipstick smear on it, a hotel key card, and some other random crap). When it was time to workshop this “story,” he said we were to create the story from the items he gave us. The prof ate it up (see footnote #1).
