A Note on Where They Wander
I don’t usually want to explain my fiction.
Part of the point is that the story has to do its own work. Whatever I intended when I wrote it becomes less important once someone else is reading it. The reader gets to bring whatever they bring.
But, now that I’ve put so much older fiction onto Open Doors, there is one bit of housekeeping that seems worth explaining.
Some of the stories here belong to Where They Wander. Most of them don’t.
Where They Wander is a connected group of stories. They share a world, history, and various threads running between them. People and places recur. Something that happens quietly in one story might matter more in another. A character who passes through the edge of one piece may step closer to the center somewhere else.
I wrote them as stories, though, not as chapters.
That distinction matters to me. I don’t think of Where They Wander as a novel that has been chopped into pieces. Each story has its own shape and concerns. The connections accumulate rather than simply moving a single plot forward.
On the Fiction & Poetry page, all of the Where They Wander stories are grouped into their own category, so clicking that category will pull the collection together. They’re also labeled “Story 1,” “Story 2,” and so on.
Those numbers probably make the order look more important than it is.
They simply reflect the order the stories appeared in my MFA thesis. By coincidence, they also get progressively longer as the numbers go up. But, there isn’t really a required reading order. I suspect someone could read the collection backward, or jump around randomly, and get just as much out of it. Maybe something different.
The connections matter more than the sequence.
Eventually, those connections become something larger simply by being beside one another. As far as I know, that larger thing is finished.
I say “as far as I know” because I’ve learned enough about writing to be suspicious of declaring anything permanently complete. I don’t currently have another Where They Wander story waiting to be written. But, I can imagine some character or corner of that world showing up again someday and making me change my mind.
The rest of the fiction on Open Doors should be understood differently. Those stories are independent. Some inevitably share obsessions, images, questions, or even a certain emotional geography because the same person wrote them. But, there isn’t a hidden continuity to uncover. A familiar kind of character is not necessarily the same character. Similar places do not necessarily occupy the same map.
This distinction was probably clearer when these stories were scattered across old folders, graduate-school manuscripts, and whatever other places I had left them. It became less clear once I started publishing everything together.
And, maybe that is part of what I like about having them here.
Open Doors has gradually become less a place where I publish new things and more a place where I can see the things I have made sitting beside one another. Essays written years apart begin talking to each other. Fiction I had almost forgotten starts looking strangely related to fiction I thought was entirely different.
Where They Wander has literal connections.
The rest sometimes develops connections anyway.
I’m not sure the distinction is as absolute as I once would have made it. Writers return to the same rooms even when they change the furniture. We circle certain questions because apparently we have not finished asking them.
Still, for anyone reading through the fiction here, the practical answer is simple:
Where They Wander is a collection of connected stories, probably complete, readable in whatever order feels right.
Everything else gets to wander on its own.
Fiction is
A peculiar thing
Where it goes
