After more than 25 years of dabbling with Fauna, I find it difficult to reduce to a few words what this creative writing project is all about. My first thought is that your relationship with Fauna should not be defined or limited by my authorial interpretation. What I mean is that I want you to be free to experience this one-of-a-kind "wanthology" on your own, and form your unique opinion of it. Or perhaps I should say, form your unique opinion of her.Yes, Fauna personified is female, the name of the Roman goddess of the animals, among other things. That leads to the most commonly known denotation of Fauna, as Webster's puts it, "the animals characteristic of a region..." Does that mean that Fauna is primarily about animals, or the goddess of the animals? Well... yes, the animals of the imaginary lands of Vaporfornia and Ja Ja Listo, but it's more than that.Fauna began as a creative writing assignment at the Escuela de Escritores SOGEM (the SOGEM School for Writers) in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, around 1994. I was a young North American primate who had moved to Mexico to study translation and interpretation at a fauniversity there, and who ended up surviving by teaching English to some native coatis, cocker spañiels, and she-coyotes.After a translatress that I knew convinced me that the Master's program was unnecessary, I dropped out and enrolled at the SOGEM. I especially enjoyed the Taller de Narrativa, or Narrative Workshop; the Taller de Poesía, or Poetry Workshop; and Lectura Comentada, or Reading With Commentary. Each week in Narrativa we were to write a new story, and bring it to the class in the form of photocopies for everyone. Now, looking back, I don't believe I actually wrote much, but rather scratched a little here and there. My greatest success was a review I wrote about Pedro Páramo for Lectura Comentada, which when I read it out loud to the class generated a hearty round of applause.There were different topics that we wrote, or scratched, about; for example there was suspense, there was romance, and then one week there was an assignment to write a short story about animals. That was the beginning of Fauna. I got the idea to write in English and Spanish from Juan Hernandez Senter (Centaur?), who had been my professor of translation in a class I took at California State University, Long Beach. He had a book signing at the SOGEM on a visit of his to Guadalajara, and I bought a couple of his bilingual books of poems. I thought the bilingual nature of his books, the translation equivalents and so on, to be quite bland. In short, I thought I could do better.I began to brainstorm in English and Spanish, mostly titles of short stories, and characters, and some potential plots for the stories. But I did not have a short story to present to the class the following week. When I finally had some pages to photocopy, it may have even been the next semester, I believe. But everyone thought the humor evident in my writings was contagious, and gave me very positive reviews of what I had so far.Now Fauna is the result of years of creation and evolution. I would describe Fauna as a kind of mixture of creative writing, translation, narrative and poetry, ostensibly about animals. In the beginning, as I attempted to write multiple short stories at the same time, what came out were shape poems and concrete poetry. So there is a heavy dose of forms and shapes along my quest of the elusive short story. But wait, was there a short story hidden, buried in the 296 pages of my writings? Or more than one story? That is for you to determine. Good luck! ¡Buena suerte!