SOURCE: Vauthier, Simone. “Lost and Found: The Narrative and the Descriptive Modes in Michael Wilding's ‘What It Was Like, Sometimes.’” Journal of the Short Story in English 12 (spring 1989): 63–76.

In the following essay, Vauthier discusses Wilding's use of temporality in “What It Was Like, Sometimes.”

In The Short Story Embassy, A Novel, Michael Wilding has one of his writer-characters say “the novel structures what has happened to us; with the short story we sketch out our future actions”—only to find out at the end that the novel he is writing has become a short story, since “its events are predictions” (51 and 123). But in “What it was like, sometimes,” author Wilding plays both with his character's “statement of poetics” and the ‘convention’ that would restrict the short story to a limited span of time, a single episode or even scene. The story is grounded in the novelistic attempt to...