2008 Allbooks Review Editor’s Choice Award Winner

For the second year in a row I have won this award, once for The i Tetralogy. of course, I am elated and surprised. I had no idea that this small book of stories had such strength to it. It is a collection that spans 33 years. I learned how to write with short stories, to get to the point, to shag the fly, to say much less than much more. I found it not bitter, but ironically sweet that I am receiving awards at this autumnal stage of my life. Duff Brenna, novelist, reviewed the book at perigee-art.com so favorably that we struck up a correspondence. I forwarded “i” to him and he exploded with rave reviews, labeling me a “genius.” What meant more to me was this: “I’m edgy, but you’re over the edge and plunging. I hang on with my fingernails, but you let go and say,’Come what may!’ Fuck, I admire that….” And on.

Here I am with kudos and laurel wreaths in my lap and I muse about four decades of writing. I am trying to take the measure of these experiences, to comprehend this crazed mobius strip I’ve been on. Duff asked me what would I do next. Curiously, or maybe not so curiously, I sing my song again — all my writing has been about meaning, intent, and purpose, about grasping self. What I have before me are the bones of an allegorical fantasy written more than two decades ago. It is a fantasy of a damaged world with a creature that begins to become awakened by intelligence. It is bathed in Freudian sauce — I was in a psychoanalytic program at the time — and reflects issues of abandonment, loss, lust, instinct, repression and that whole box of Forrest Gump chocolates of the therapist’s quiver. However, again, it is all about me, as I transmute my anguish into a viable cloth. Since it is so old, I am picking about this corpse, pruning it, revitalizing it — “It’s alive! It’s alive! What i am proudest of is the range — Holocaust fiction, short stories, sci-fi fantasies. What is common to all of them is a seriousness I have always had, a philosophical cast to the way I think — to know myself at whatever cost before I plunge into the world of quarks and neutrinos.