Al T has published articles and feature-length journalism, placed poetry in Bloom, and recently received the annual Gloria Kendal Whelen Prize in Writing, as well as a Millen Award for Fiction. Reference West Press has collected two of his short fictions for the Hawthorne Society, and (while looking for a publisher for his first full-length volume of short stories) he's working with Mark Anthony Jarman on a creative M.A. thesis (novel).

Macrocosm

The other morning, after I managed to start up my computer, I noticed this file

named ``ReadFirs.doc.'' (A friend had e-mailed me a whole bunch of files a while

back.) Hmmm, I rubbed my face. I sat and stared. Then, I thought to myself-- hey!-

maybe the answer, my friend, is not blowing in the wind. The answer is not part of

some vast cosmic oneness. But instead, it's been hiding in the firs, in the forest's

trees! Yes, I thought, the answer's not in the whole. The answer's in the firs, in

reading the individual firs, in the trees not the forest. In the parts, the details, the

microcosms-- not the whole. And as sunlight slanted through my window, revealing

suspended dust motes, glinting off my computer screen, it occurred to me that, hey!

maybe oneness has been overrated. Maybe unity holds less energy. Maybe the sum

of the parts is greater than the whole. I thought of quantum mechanics, of the bits that

make up atoms-- photons and muons and quarks, zipping and dipping and loose. And

how, when these bits join together, energy gets released. Hey!-- the parts must then

hold more energy, individually, than the whole, so of course, compared to the whole

forest, the individual firs must also hold more--

And then, I thought to myself, I gotta stop drinking before lunch.

Al T lives and writes in Fredericton, New Brunswick