-solo-: Edited Edition (Wayne Jefferson) – Paperback

I am the author of a collections of short stories called solospaceman. I wrote them in a format that I named the Alpha and Omega. It allows the title to be the first element in the story as well as its last element. Why? There are a multitude of reasons, which help to explain “why” that phenomena happens. Consider, for example, in my opinion, writing in a first and last format is Mnemonic or a device which assists the reader in remembering what he has read. Whereas most of the time a Mnemonic is a word, repetition of a word, or a list of words, which help us to remember things such as plans, important information, or specific events, in solospaceman stories Mnemonic endings bring us back to the very beginning of a story so that we can self-reflect on it as well as remember it.

In fact, when the reader consciously relies on his own individual mental reasoning to interpret a story that I have written (self-reflects), it allows him to examine what he finds relevant in the story. Thus, he makes connections to the story that are based on his real life experiences with what I have written. That in turn generates proficient readers who are capable of re-organizing my stories into meaningful reading experiences.

Similarly,  the Alpha and Omega learning style allows my reader to self-reflect on the solospaceman story that she read by asking her to interpret it in her own way. That is, immediately after the majority of my stories, readers are asked to… Please place your drawing and/or your interpretation of this story here! The key word in that polite request is interpretation. It means to clarify, explain, or translate something ambiguous… in terms of its dictionary definition.

However, in solospaceman stories, when the reader is asked to interpret a solospaceman story by following my instructions to… Please place your drawing and/or your interpretation of this story here!…  her interpretation provides her with another way to self-reflect in that it gives her a prompt to reexaime the particular story I wrote that she read. That allows her not only to become a better reader, but also a better writer if she chose to write a response to one of my stories.  So, for the above reasons, I invite you to read one of my short stories then self-reflect on it by writing a response to it or choosing a response to it that you feel most comfortable in creating.