Thirteen Ways of Looking

Author’s Note

These stories were primarily completed in 2014 on either side of an incident that occurred in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 27, when I was punched from behind and knocked unconscious, then hospitalized, after trying to help a woman who had also been assaulted in the street.

Some of these stories were written before the assault and some of them were written afterward (for example, the punch in “Thirteen Ways” was dreamed up long before the incident, but Beverly’s recognition of her attacker in “Treaty” was written later).

Sometimes it seems to me that we are writing our lives in advance, but at other times we can only ever look back. In the end, though, every word we write is autobiographical, perhaps most especially when we attempt to avoid the autobiographical.

For all its imagined moments, literature works in unimaginable ways.

These stories have their own voices, but to learn more about their provenance, including the Victim Impact Statement from that incident in Connecticut, please go to my website, colummccann.com.