Scarborough, Maine, April 2024.

I taught English in France in 2019, and over the holiday break I decided to commit time to writing fiction in the public library in Orléans. Besides a memorable duck dinner with a roommate’s family on Christmas Day, I didn’t have any obligations. I went every day for about about two weeks, buying cheap espressos at the stand by the tram hub, often on both ends of the sessions writing. It was peaceful, though I was never alone at the huge tables in the library’s vaulted reading room. I’d write by hand, then take the tram home and type out the text on my laptop—eventually it came to some 80 pages of penciled writing.

When I got back, I edited some of it down and created a Tumblr for “serialized fiction.” Actually, the practice was to edit something down and publish it as an excerpt, one section at a time. I called it Dog Mountain Journals. For now, I’m calling it Visiting a House to reflect the dry simplicity and opaqueness of the character, who is un-named and un-gendered, and the single-mindedness of the prose’s task: to describe perception of a house from many angles. Sometimes I can barely read this, sometimes I’m hungry for its precision. Certainly it’s not entertainment! I haven’t let it go, and I’m going to edit down some of it—again a piece at a time—and publish it at visitingahouse.tumblr.com.

My friend Jacob Hallerström in Sweden read my first excerpts as they came out, and he offered to publish one in L’amour – La Mort, a literary magazine from Sweden he co-edits.

Excerpt from Visiting a House: Philosophical Fiction

11.

The next day I walked outside before drinking any coffee, which is very rare. I think this is a good sign.

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