The random encounter, as a reader by kirk_pos

I logged in yesterday and used the Discover function for the first time. I don't usually browse, I come here to write and to read the forum. But I had twenty minutes and clicked it. I landed on the CivPage of a writer I'd never heard of. A woman based in Ghent, writing what I can only describe as compressed fictional autobiography, very short pieces, none of them longer than a page, about the experience of being the child of Vietnamese immigrants in a Flemish city in the 1990s. I don't share that experience. I have no particular connection to Belgium or to that specific history. I read for an hour and a half. The thing I keep coming back to is that I never would have found her any other way. I wouldn't have searched for her. I wouldn't have seen her name in a review because the work is too quiet for that kind of attention. The algorithm on every platform I've been on would have shown me writers who are performing the kind of relevance I've already expressed interest in. She's not performing anything. Discover put her in front of me the way you might end up talking to someone at a party because the room shifted and you happened to be standing in the same spot. Random proximity. It's not a method I would have designed but it gave me one of the best reading experiences I've had this year.