Farren Stanley’s “Rawness of Remembering” collapses time within our July issue. Watch this one bloom, watch it boil down to essence:

1. The structure of this story seems to lend itself to self-consumption. Why did you choose to build it this way?

Is this how you characterize it? Do you mean that the story consumes its structure, or that the structure reflects an agenda of self-consumption? Or maybe what you mean is that the essay reduces, reduces, reduces until it disappears? Meaning is a complex construction (most obvious thing anyone has ever said)- when I think about the meaning of the concepts “family” or “partnership,” there are a constellation of seemingly-unrelated- or perhaps obviously-related, I’m not real big on nuance-experiences continually orbiting these great massive signifiers that hijack my psychic spaces. Family. Love. Abandonment. Ownership. What do I mean when I say “Father”, exactly? What does it mean to belong to another person? Maybe the more I meddle, the more the entire premise of the question collapses. Maybe that’s what you’re sensing.

2. How much of this story is “true”?

I fully expect the surviving members of the family Nyles Rudean Vinzant went on to have after he left my mother and me to contact me if they ever find this essay. Or hide from me. That is also an entirely reasonable reaction.

Also, my ex-boyfriend is pretty pissed about it.

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