Confessions and Memoirs

Introduction

This book is mostly about me—my life, my thoughts, my world. Some of it is fiction that I’ve written, but even those pieces are really about who I am even if they are put into other people’s stories.

These pieces have been culled from my Web site, having been written over a period of twelve years. My more abstract observations are included in another book I’m compiling at the same time: Coffee Dreams. They all began as a single volume, but it got to be too big (600 pages) and it seemed to me to be too eclectic for any one reader.

This collection assumes that the reader knows me personally, and might forgive my dwelling on myself perhaps too much.

It starts where I started in life, or at least it starts with the person who gave me my start. The earliest pieces in the book were not necessarily written earliest but are about my earlier experiences. A lot of the rest are just my responses to my life. As I began one of these essays:

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“I almost always write about me. Sometimes I think it’s too egocentric, that I should look around more, think about others, the condition of the world, what’s beautiful and what’s ugly, and write about that, at least some of the time. The problem I’ve found with that is that it always comes out stilted, or judgmental, or naive. All I know is what goes on inside my head. No matter what’s happening out there, what filters into my awareness is mostly determined by the state of my mind. It’s presumptuous to think that I can speak of what others do, or what they are.”

The fictional stories that are sprinkled through this book “just happened” at different times, perhaps inspired by events or dreams or conversations with others. I don’t know why they turned into fiction instead of essays.

Donald Skiff – January 1, 2006