Monica’s Chronicle (available at www.ascher-straus.com) is an online philosophical journal and narrative grounded in observations of daily life on a single street in Rockaway, NY, where Sheila Ascher and Dennis Straus lived. Ascher added to Monica’s Chronicle every day, originally on paper and later with a microcassette tape recorder, at home or traveling, and Straus was the editor. Ascher and Straus also published two, more traditionally-structured books with Green Integer, ABC Street and Hank Forest’s Party, and there is a resonance between the books and the online Monica’s Chronicle. The authors’ description of those volumes as an “outward-looking autobiography/novel/philosophical journal” meant to “suggest a dedicated, life-long way of documenting life as fiction” applies equally and accurately to their source, Monica’s Chronicle.
The Chronicle is an endless sketchbook drawn directly from life that at the same time is meant to model another idea of fiction, opening, in the words of the authors, “a channel into the background where the lives and places of the two ABC Street volumes are always forming and re-forming.” It is possibly the only significant literary project that resembles what is Ascher’s unique voice and vision. About the process of creating the Chronicle, Ascher said, “I love this process for itself and I wonder how many others find that the outer world is (always has been) their inner life.”