About Metafictions
Essays as temporal landings
Three years on Medium, I’ve written over a hundred posts — all bearing witness to how I desperately wrote myself into being since the pandemic upturned my life as I knew it.
I wrote to not perish, to not slip under. The hundred posts functioned like “posts” indeed: like guideposts to lean on and mark my way, like stilts driven to shifting sands. Each post was slowly, painstakingly made while treading water. I managed to write this way — writing to mentally, creatively, intellectually survive. I was held afloat supported by the writing’s accumulating work.
To create Metafictions today on my third year on Medium, I struck down a dear old publication that had collected my posts on a cluster of themes that, to my surprise, consistently showed up in my work. To my surprise, because that publication had been a commitment to inconsistency, a rigid resistance to routine/repetition/sameness. It had collected musings on un-niching myself, or loosening myself from calcifying self-fictions that felt like niches or a grave.
The open-endedness of that publication was actually its constraint (or enclosure, even entombment). In no time, it began gathering posts about the same things in spite of its commitment to variety. In metafictional, self-referential mode, I wrote about open-endedness itself to fill…
