Rufi Thorpe
I began writing out of a deep, almost mystical bafflement. I did not understand what story was. I swooned over the implicit confidence of directly narrated causation. The idea that an author had figured out that a character did x because of y which occurred because of z was entirely beyond me. I lived in a buzzing hive of multiple possible meanings. Whenever someone spoke, there were their words, but then thousands of possible subtexts, which made it difficult for me to be in the moment as a child. I spent most of my time alone, with books, or watching Golden Girls on TV, eating Snackwells low-fat cookies, swollen with imagining the full lives of these old women as they bantered. In short, I became a writer mostly because I was a ridiculous sort of person, wired up to be so sensitive that I found almost all social situations excruciating, and in books I found a pre-digested world that was less alarming to me.
But of course, the older I got, the better I became at living, and now this kind of fevered confusion of multiple meanings is difficult for me to even vividly remember. Sometimes it just resurfaces for a moment, brought up by some sense memory, the smell of school rooms, construction paper, the coppery sweat of children. And then I will be placed back in that strange paralysis I often experienced as a child, where it is not clear to me who I am, or what I want, or what the word “chair” means, or why countries exist, or whether recording history is a viable pursuit, or whether people are mostly good or mostly evil, or whether time is real.