Civic Storytelling

"I was thinking of writing it in fragments.” And why not? They (we) are all at it, and have been for ages. Essayists, novelists, critics, and creative-writing students: we say this kind of thing to each other all the time now. But ours is an era with an ambivalent attitude to such short-form writing. On the one hand, accumulated shards of poetic prose, more or less isolated on the page—maybe set off from each other by some tasteful typographic device—can seem the only proper formal response to an unformed or shattered reality. On the other hand, the choice may look like a way to obviate questions of skill and sense. What is the shape of your argument or story? Are you capable of sustaining thought beyond a paragraph or two? Have you deliberately given up consistency of voice, or do you write like this because you can’t do otherwise? The great contemporary exponents of the fragment loom too large. “I’d like it to be like Bluets.” Me too, me too.