![Sending off old man Farrago [free fiction AND nonfiction]](http://www.cogsandneurons.com/wp-content/themes/arras-theme/library/timthumb.php?src=http://www.cogsandneurons.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/_1218283020-3.jpg&w=630&h=250&zc=1 "Sending off old man Farrago [free fiction AND nonfiction]")
Sad days are upon us. Old man Farrago is making his final bow–the final issue of Farrago’s Wainscot is upon us.
The Farrago team have been exceedingly good to me. They are responsible for my first published stories and my first go at editing. Darin Bradley and his team are excellent people. I’m sad to see the zine go.
It therefore makes me very happy to be involved in Farrago’s final send-off. I’ve got two pieces up in this final issue. One’s a short story titled Ephemera, and the other is my first piece of nonfiction, called “Telling stories in the wake of post-modernism.”
By a certain irony, Ephemera is one of my most aggressively postmodern stories, and the essay is much more interested in finding a way past some of the roadblocks I see postmodernism throwing up in storytelling without retreating into the naivety of modernism.
Hopefully some people will like the story. Its experimental and postmodern and all that Farrago stuff, so I imagine the audience will be limited, but hopefully it will find a few people to love it. I’m actually much more interested in reaction to the essay, as I suspect it will be rather antithetical some people I know. Still it comes out of discussions at the old Broken Circles blog (which involved Darin Bradley, Paul Jessup, Mark Teppo, Ekaterina Sedia and several others) so it is near and dear to my heart.
God, I miss Broken Circles. It was brief, but very fun.
I really enjoyed Ephemera, it had me confused and enthralled at the same time, which doesn’t often happen!
I can’t admit to having followed some parts of the essay, mainly because I’m not very well read. But the Hypertext section reminded me of those fantasy books I used to read when I was a child where you read a section and then decide what the character does next by skipping to the relevant page. Can’t remember what they were called though (or if they were any good)…
They were called “Choose Your Own Adventure” by Steve Jackson and someone Livingstone. They were both awful and awesome at the same time. Probably significantly less good today than they were then. Still, the idea behind them is pretty sound I think. It could be adapted for more literary purposes. I actually have a half-finished novel based loosely on the idea. Maybe one day I’ll finish the bugger…