“Stories upon stories. Sometime I’m just going to do a story in a story in a story in a story…” -Darcie Little Badger, speaking at the Urbana Free Library on March 12, 2025

                My partner and I just got back from our local library.
                I could skip that part, start with the “idea.” But it’s interwoven lives and places that are alive inside this “idea.”
                We went for a long walk, spring opening warm as we chatted about the work we want to do and the challenges woven through it. Then to the library to hear Darcie Little Badger talk about her wonderful books. (On Saturday we finished Elatsoe). In the library’s auditorium we ran into friends, and acquaintances who might become friends, and other folks with whom I actually have tense relationships, and all of it felt living.
                One of the things that makes me heartsick with fiction is the way a story arc can anoint a main character. Can collapse complexity into the specification narration of what the Chosen One sees, says, and wants. We joke about that, right? About people with “main character energy,” who make it clear that everyone else is a side character at best. And one of the things I love about fiction—one of the gifts Little Badger reminds me about—is the way storytelling can recognize stories as already woven together. Todays with years ago, and your morning with my morning somewhere else, and our shared moment, now, and so many tomorrows. Darcie Little Badger’s book and her talk, and my conversation with a friend, and the walk my partner and I took among opening flowers, and winter’s brown leaves, and a library where for a moment a scattering of us sit together, laughing, listening.