Discovering Writing: The Ground Beneath The Writer’s Feet

Abstract

Fiction provides ample opportunity to detail accounts making a seemingly microscopic experience pivotal to the development of character and theme. The short stories in the present writer’s debut collection The Heart of Need and Other Stories, published by the UST Publishing House, examine the multivalent experiences of characters, the personal and/or interstitial spaces they inhabit, their unsettling realizations and the meaning they ascribe to them. The characters eventually turn inward to process their drives, motives, feelings, decisions, and actions leading them to a significant moment of self-discovery. The publication of his first story The Heart of Need in TOMAS, the literary journal of UST, has likewise inspired the writer/researcher to write short stories. Emphasizing the harmonious correspondence between craft and content, he develops a poetics/poeisis that elucidates his writing philosophy and narrative theory, situating the writer’s critical position in the current political and literary climate and discusses extensively the writing process.