How to use this Page

It's long been time for this site to get a facelift.  Well, now it has one.  I've not only changed some of the formatting and colors (yes, I'm fond of purples; it's my site, it will have lots of purple!), but also taken advantage of Blogger's new Pages feature, familiar to anybody who's used Wordpress.  The pages are listed up there beneath the site header.

The About and Fiction pages are self-explanatory, but the Selections page probably needs a few words of introduction.

For a couple years now, I've wanted to put together a collection of the nonfiction I've written over the last seven years or so (since a piece of mine about George Saunders appeared in English Journal in May 2003), but I've struggled to come up with a book-length manuscript that is more than just a collection of miscellanea.  I could easily put together a collection just of my writings on science fiction, or film, or general book reviews, or extended essays on writers such as J.M. Coetzee ... but what most excites me is the idea of mixing all of those together and finding some of the connections, echoes, and reverberations.

Thus, the Selections page, which I'm giving the title I've always had for the nonfiction manuscript: Other Choices. One way to read this blog is chronologically. Another way is thematically. Another way is randomly. Each will produce a somewhat different experience, especially if the reader only encounters a few of the hundreds of thousands of words that have been posted here. If I believe in anything it is the power of a reader's creative choice, a reader's freedom and agency, and I try to exercise that in my readings of other people's texts, so I hope to encourage it in the readers of my own. What is invisible, what is unsaid may be as important as what is visible and enunciated. Choices, by definition, imply other choices.

The Selections page is not complete, and will probably never been finished, because I'm not sure what "finished" would be. I'm going to keep playing with what is there, creating various groups of my writings, editing the ones that are there. I hope eventually to put some of the posts together as a single page to encourage folks to read a few at once and find connections that way (and also to give myself some ability to edit and clarify the texts), but for now they're just links to the original posts.

I expect to continue fiddling not only with the Selections page, but also the colors and fonts for the whole site over the next few weeks as I try it out on different computers to see how it all looks. Please don't be alarmed...