transformations

I guess what I’m most interested in is the way people change.

That’s what I like to read, what I like to write.

I’m currently reading Karen Gettert Shoemaker’s short story collection, Night Sounds. She talks about friendships, about how we enter into them knowing they will change us.

I think not only about people, but about our hobbies that shape us: the absences we create that we used to fill, the absences we used to have that we learn to fill. What we do to stave off grief or loneliness.

The jobs we hold, how they create biases or destroy them.

We are constantly evolving, not only because of things that happen to us, but because of things we make happen and things that happen to people we love. We react to situations, learn to cope, to move on. 

We are educated by hard knocks, trial by fire.

We can transform from who we were into something almost new. But really we are not new, we are duller or shinier. These memories accumulate into parts of us that make the whole of us. We learn to reinvent ourselves when we need to. We are shedding old skins as we learn to live a different way.

That’s what the novel I just wrote was about. And that’s what my next one will be, too, but with a different story. I have a suspicion that’s what all my stories will be about. Because I can’t think of anything more hopeful than people changing.