Echoes of a Future Truth
Echoes of a Future Truth is a novel-length story in three parts. The project began seven years ago. I was teaching creative writing to San Jose kids to support my masters work in counseling psychology, and this story began during a shared exercise with a talented 13 year old who went from hating writing to let’s write a book in a couple months time. Recognizing he was ready, I described how a long story grows from a single idea and gave him a prompt to find his seed-idea. He began to write, inventing his world. With nothing else to do for 90 minutes, I wrote alongside of him and was surprised to be inventing a compelling world of my own.
Abrasion is a story about the last human being set thousands of years from now. It was written to stand alone, with no thought for further exploration of the world. Isolation also began as a unique project, but drew naturally from a similar place inside of me and so developed into an important meditation on the themes of the first story, ultimately taking its place as a prequel to Abrasion. Compared to the character-driven, contemplative qualities of the first two stories, Resistance might be described as a slow-burning farce. This third story follows the present-day technicians who scramble to re-imagine human need and human provision before abandoning the last human being to her fate.
Abrasion … a selection from the first chapter
Isolation … a selection from the prologue
Resistance … a selection from the prologue
Woodcut by Spyros Vasilliou, circa 1945