Work Statement
My work is concerned with the accumulative minutiae of the lives of circumstantially “ordinary” people, as viewed existentially, meaning that when writing stories or poems or novels I am “ever-conscious,” and “above-all conscious,” of the following “problems” that affect all people: the unidirectional nature of time, the arbitrary nature of the universe, that consciousness means we must choose, that we are aware we will die while not knowing when we will die and not knowing what happens when we die, and that one unit of space cannot accommodate more than one unit of matter in one unit of time (which means that we are, all, literally, “alone”).
I explore these existential issues within mostly traditional modes of storytelling, by exploring people’s actions and thoughts and emotions while at work or in a relationship or with friends or alone, using a prose style that varies from concrete and detached and deadpan and direct to abstract and emotional and lyrical and wry.
- from Tao Lin’s 2009 “New York Foundation for the Arts” $7k fiction grant application
