As I write, I am my first audience. My body registers imagined encounters in flutters and surges that don’t lie, even as they are no guarantee that readers will feel the same. Not feeling those things, though, is a strong indication that readers won’t either. I set down a sentence as if someone else has made it, and test it. I open its river of possibilities and try not to dam it with strict directives. A voice not my own is often a good start. I follow its sound as it moves forward retroactively, spooling out a justifying world. And that’s the risky part: selecting character behavior and matters of situation while also holding onto telling details of emerging context.

Writing is a constant testing for reliable connotations. Reliable to whom? How would I know what others will be likely to know? I multiply myself, as in a murmuration of starlings. All turning at once in a new direction with no hesitation, no waiting for cues. Each bird rising into a shared impulse to belong.

If there is a world on the slippery side of solipsism, my way of finding it may be echoed in others. And if there is no world held in common, then my measuring of the Other is still required if I am to know myself. I range in my own cloud of sound and light, seeking a better use of enabling uncertainties.

Daryl Scroggins

has taught creative writing and literature at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of North Texas, and the Writer’s Garret, in Dallas. He now lives in Marfa, Texas. He is the author of This Is Not the Way We Came In, a collection of flash fiction and a flash novel (Ravenna Press), Winter Investments: Stories (Trilobite Press), and Prairie Shapes: A Flash Novel (winner of the 2004 Robert J. DeMott Prose Contest). His poems, short stories, and creative nonfictions have appeared in magazines and anthologies across the country, including Blink Ink, Cutbank, Eastern Iowa Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Star 82 Review, and Third Wednesday, among others.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Suitcase Full of Clay: An Ekphrastic e-Collection in MacQueen’s Quinterly, aka MacQ (Issue 18, April 2023)

⚡ Roadshow, microfiction by Daryl Scroggins in MacQ (Issue 15, September 2022); one of three pieces by Scroggins selected as Finalists in “The Question of Questions” Ekphrastic Writing Challenge

⚡ Spring, microfiction by Scroggins in MacQ (Issue 12, March 2022)

⚡ Writer Boy, microfiction in MacQ (Issue 4, July 2020); nominated by MacQ for Best Microfiction 2021

⚡ Field Trips, flash fiction by Scroggins in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019)

⚡ New to School, microfiction in Eclectica (Jan/Feb 2018)

⚡ Two Fictions: “Almost Baptized” and “Against the Current” in New Flash Fiction Review (Issue 10, January 2018)

⚡ Eight Stories: A Mini-Chapbook by Daryl Scroggins at Web del Sol