Asakiyume mita

Our contexts really do infest! I'm thinking of the story--maybe I shared it before?--of the well-to-do young girl making up a story and saying, "The family was very poor. The mother was poor, and the father was poor, and the children were poor, and their maid was poor, and their gardener was poor, and their cook was poor..." --yeeeeahhh.

One invisible context that I see infesting writing is sense of [or, more often, lack of sense of] family. Many writers that I wander across grew up in nuclear families with not many siblings--they default to this sort of family situation (if they mention family at all) even when creating invented societies--whereas for many people, the experience of family is one that's rich in (or burdened with, depending on how the experience goes) cousins, grandparents, grown aunts and uncles, siblings, nieces and nephews, etc. .... Sorry to go on about this, but it was definitely a blind spot I had, myself, so it's one I think about.