Welcome…

NEW! Micro-Episodic Fiction Series:

Like a note of music that combines with another and with others to become a symphony, our times manifest through confluence, past bleeding into the present and the present shaping the future.

In my Micro-Episodic Fiction Series, each post will equal a note and each note will bleed into the next that combined will host a future note. By the end, symphonic notes will emerge and bleed into a larger story. Micro-Episodic Fiction…note by note.

Writer’s Statement – Stephen J. Bergstrom

Frank Pierson, honored by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences for his Oscar-winning Dog Day Afternoon and who served as President of the Writer’s Guild in 1981-1983, made an observation that continues to ring true but that, more than ever, appears elusive;

“We are languishing in a period without much direction and no shared body of ideas about what we and our society are all about. Now, as never before, we need people who have stories to tell that make sense and order out of the daily avalanche of sensation, news, events; the function of the artist in society is to reveal the order of the universe, to trace the grand design that others cannot see. That is what story is.”

Today, we have novels and graphic novels, comics, short stories, poems, film, art, video games, TV, web series, comedy clubs, talk shows, Facebook, Twitter, alternate media, mainstream media, Internet, tablets, smart phones, GPS, email, text messaging, podcasts, YouTube, streaming video…

But does that avalanche of delivery mechanisms, assist us to make sense, as Pierson noted, of our times? Or to the contrary, do those resources infatuate and cajole us to accept temporary fixes and lesser stories, to turn away from that which confronts us daily?

Where is the grand design? Where is the order of the universe? Where is the storyteller that sees those things, the things that others cannot? Where is the writer that gets behind the veil?

If you’re painting a big picture, you need a large canvas. What if we think of the avalanche of delivery systems as a singular, large canvas? What if a video game gives us part of the picture? A novel, another. A web-series, still another. A film, something more.

Now, you get me. Now you hear me. Flip through my site. I’m painting a large picture.