Among the Living and Other Stories

I�ve been writing short stories since I was in junior high school, when I regularly annoyed my creative writing teacher with preposterous, windy tales that had little or nothing to do with his assignments. He would often read his students� work in class, but when he came to mine he�d say, �I can�t read this. It�s too long.� Occasionally, he would give in to my demand for equal time, and grimace through my humorous, verbose takes on what was ailing mankind.

Since then, quite a lot has changed. I still write short stories, but, with another three decades of anguish under my belt, my knowledge of the world has broadened. I�ve gained perspective and made countless mistakes. In the process, I�ve learned to be more tolerant, and more accepting of others. For instance, now, instead of hating politicians, I feel sorry for them � not because their jobs are hard, but because lying makes them into something pitiful and grotesque.

I�ve also learned to write. More specifically, I�ve learned that, regardless of its length, for a story to be successful, what you leave out is every bit as important as what you put in. A true sign of maturity in any writer, I think, is when he recognizes the intelligence of his readers, and stops trying to tell them everything. It�s challenging enough to say even one thing clearly, and to highlight it in such a way that it is meaningful without being intrusive. Hammering away at a reader with irrelevant material is not only cruel, it exposes the writer for the lazy, self-centered person he really is.

With this in mind, the eight stories in my debut collection, Among the Living, are lean, but high in nutritional value. Kevin Sampsell, a writer and reviewer from Portland, Oregon, had this to say: �Here�s a mad little treasure of down-and-out tales told with a buoyant voice, one that seems to be on the verge of being really pissed off while always keeping his humor.� Thank you, Kevin. According to my publisher, John Berbrich, the chapbook contains �eight crooked short stories of serious alienation.� This is also true. Tim Scannell, a widely read Small Press reviewer, said: �. . . [Michaelian�s] sentences, always friendly in tone and chockablock with wry references to contemporary human behavior, are witty and often disconcerting. . . . Edging up deftly on Walter Whitman�s cataloguing here � moving with agility toward Samuel Beckett�s The Unnamable. Recommended.�

Of course, you can�t believe everything you read. All I ask is that you believe some of it. With any luck, the stories will take care of the rest. If they don�t � well, don�t hold it against me. I�m a writer, remember. Exaggeration is my business.