The stories I write rainbow toward magical realism, which I think I most appreciate in literature, but sometimes an idea I have is based on a fragment of memory, a feeling or event which once was tangible or palpable, and, as an experience in real life, it maybe feels too pure to not document as having happened to me, whoever I am according to what I perceive as my life. I feel I should occasionally remind myself that I’m actively participating in that life, in what it does or doesn’t mean, in what experiences have or are shaping an identity I’m constantly coming to terms with, and how all of it could potentially be preserved through writing—and the only reason to preserve it would be to assume it has meaning, and, if not, attribute meaning to it. Or, it could be, all fiction is potentially autobiographical, as thinking, thought itself, is experience. This story is what I remember thinking while the story happened to me, and also what I thought while writing it, two simultaneous events which occurred years apart from one another.

--from the "Critical Thought: Explaining" that accompanies Eric Beeny's "Explaining Our Presence," published today in matchbook.