The Mystical History of the CIA.

My writerly goals for the next few years are manifold. Primarily, I want to publish, not just short stories (as I have been doing consistently the last several years), but book-length works. I also have an idea that has been haunting me, an idea I can’t figure out. You’ll see the begining themes of it in my writing sample “Genghis Khan Teaches a Robot to Love”. This is my project proposal: I’ve been thinking of it as “the mystical history of the CIA”. I imagine it as the novel that could have result from a collaboration between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and John le Carre. A story that imagines our world as more like the one the Greeks believed themselves to inhabit: a world filled with interventionist gods, meddling demigods, inexplicable tragedy and unimaginable tenderness all rolled into interlocking narratives. What would be the work of an espionage agency in a world like that? It would reimagine everything from the Culper Spy Ring to Alger Hiss, from the Bay of Pigs to the PATRIOT Act. It would be informed by both Howard Zinn and Aimee Bender. It would join together the implacable narrative chaos of Gravity’s Rainbow and the sensitivity of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. At the moment, I have no idea how to write that, but I believe the interdisciplinary nature of the UCR MFA is certainly going to help because the project will require an interdisciplinary mode of thinking.

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