In forty-seven short stories and flash fiction tales, KJ Hannah Greenberg tilts at the notion of storytelling. She uses a variety of starting points to make discoveries about writing. Her resulting narratives are a mix of idealistic and realistic parts.
Despite the fact that bodily movements, gestures, and facial expressions transfer data, words remain humanity’s most potent engine. Writing is a powerful force. More exactly, given the premature demise of the tooth fairy, the annihilation of fire breathing wyrms, and the expiration of additional sorts of positive operant conditionings, i.e., of cultural devices that strengthen prescribed interpretations of normative meaning, as well as given the complexity of conflicting value systems in our media-telescoped world, it’s increasingly difficult to make people care whether make-believe accounts hit an ethical bullseye or not.
Inevitably, fashioning fiction is regarded as a staid path, even boring. Allegedly, authors sit at keyboards and crank out characters, plots, conflicts, and dialogues, while amalgamating literary tricks meant to entertain faceless audiences. In truth, most fictioneers refrain from sententious compositions, and elect, instead, to drive full throttle into mixed metaphors about gelatinous beasts’ underbellies, or to trip the light fantastic through weird assemblages of ideas. In spite of all that, no measure of mental equanimity ever empowered wordies to vacation in neighboring star systems, to murder westerns’ heroes, or to elect to wear gothic garments to job interviews.
It’s not so much that creators prevaricate as it is that gelid prose does nothing for our readers. Whether writers dissimulate intentions via attaps or hide them among high society parties’ table ornaments, writers don’t necessarily try to make writing lucid.
That is, often, when rejecting an objectivist stance for understanding human goings-on, writers similarly discard an experiential one. The stability afforded meaning from a concrete topos endures as epistemically inadequate; real-world grounding for discourse often leads to referential entropy (The Mad Hatter was on to more than drugs—that smart puppy grasped the gist of rhetoric.)
So, scripters consciously create linguistic distinctions featuring weird groupings of thoughts. Casual remarks can’t elevate humanity above hate, but raising audiences’ consciousness can. Thus, except for petulant wordsmiths possessed of lengthy involvements with specific publishers, writers can apply verbal obfuscation, to invite emotional disagreement, and to include hapless contemporaries, eldritch space travelers, and persons struggling to get through to the next day in their art. The stories contained in The Center of the Universe make an effort to achieve these ends.
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