Our Story Begins.
I’ve always liked that phrase.
Maybe that's what I should have used as the title for this bull-log (as some people pronounce it, the same way they say "nucular"), instead of the rather precious acronym it has now. But then, one usually gets the better idea only after another thought has been set in stone. Or pixilated across a screen, as the case may be.
Besides, Tobias Wolff beat me to it – to using "Our Story Begins" as a title, that is.
It's the name of Wolff's latest book, a collection of new and previously published short stories. Wolff is perhaps better known for his memoir "This Boy’s Life," because of the film version starring Robert de Niro and Leonardo diCaprio, but short stories are what he does the best.
"Our Story Begins" is also the name of the first Tobias Wolff story I ever happened across, in the pages of an Esquire magazine. It was the early to mid-1980s, and this was the magazine's first attempt at what it called the "Summer Fiction Issue." It included pieces by a number of writers whose work I knew, and a few by writers I'd never heard of before. James Salter was one, Tobias Wolff another.
And I still remember the impact "Our Story Begins" had on me that first time I read it – the simplicity and directness of the language laying a number of different pieces of an experience; how the stories we tell can simultaneously reveal and conceal; the unexplainable, almost subterranean thrill as the pieces of the story suddenly snapped into place, in a way that was inevitable yet startling, satisfying and sad.
It's a marvelous story – and something I would encourage you to seek out and read.
Just as I want to encourage you to cast a glance at this offering from time to time. I have no real agenda, no philosophy I wish to espouse – no real idea if there will be an entry after this first one, if I may be completely honest.
All I do know is that this space will be where I plan to share the things I might happen across in the course of a day or a life, and that can find no other place in the World save for this electronic existence.
After all, sharing is what all these bull-logs all over the Internet are all about.
So.
Our Story Begins.
Let's see what happens.
