It's Next Door

Apparatus Magazine - Volume 1 Issue 4 - Hobie Anthony

Here is one of my Heat Wave stories. Flash, really.

I've since revised it a bit, but I do like this version. Take a gander. Let me know what you think - review here or on your own blog (but please let me know if you review on your blog.)

What's For Dinner?

Food Carts Portland

Ok, this isn't about flash. It's about food in a flash. Portland's real contribution to world cuisine - the food cart! They're all over. You can get Ethiopian, Thai, Indian, Mexican, Hoagies, Subs, Grinders, and even Heroes at these carts. They're incredible - just hope you don't get rained on trying to find a bench to snack on.

Bumble Bee - by Me

Published by Shape of a Box - the YouTube Literary Journal

On Fat Cats and Flash Fiction

I spend too much time thinking about Flash Fiction. I have plenty of other things to occupy my mind: employment, school work, and facebook. Yet, as I ride my bicycle at dusk and see other bikers without their lights on, I can only think of Stuart Dybek's Lights, a magnificent flash if there ever was one. I think of it as a modern archetype of the more poetic side of flash fiction.

I've been thinking about what Dybek said in the current Vestal Review about compression in prose. He's talked about this before, in Sudden Fiction, for instance. But, his Vestal Review interview got me thinking (this time.)
My Webster's says of the word -

Compression: 1. the act of process of compressing 2. the process of compressing the fuel mixture in an internal compustion engine 3. conversion (as of data) in order to reduce the space occupied or the bandwith required

I think the third definition really suits our purposes. The data is compressed. It's diamond-hard and pure. Pure. It's all of a sort. No explication. No extraneous scenes, characters, or emotions. All the extra stuff is gone, if it ever was there in the first place.

Short stories have "extra" stuff. In a sense. They are muli-layered like a wedding cake. They are wonderful. They have explication and flashbacks (sometimes.) But they are not flash, and flash are not they.

Too many writers and editors get confused on this point. They set a word-count and look for a short story to fit that word count. This cheapens the form of flash. Dybek says:

"I think the current urge to see flash fiction as a new form and genre onto (sic) itself, which then demands that it is defined by superficial notions such as word count, is far less interesting to me than seeing flash fiction as a symptom, a manifestation of an ongoing tradition that has to do with the compression in prose, the counterpoint between the lyrical and narrative, fragmentation, and the redefinitions of both story and poetry." (MaryAnne McCollister, "Interview with Stuart Dybek", Vestal Review, #34 (2009))

Dybek argues for yet another term for our short little darlings. I don't think that's necessary. That would only further confuse the matter as we all are struggling to figure out what these things are. The crux of his frustration is, to paraphrase, with the superficial notion of word count.

Indeed, when word count is the only consideration, we often are served flabby pieces which have perhaps been squeezed into a word count - much like how my fat cat squeezes his rotund self through the cat door. It's inelegant to watch, but he gets through, much like a short story forced into a word-count restriction of, say, 500 words. We all marvel, wondering how he manages to do this day in and day out, and that's the novelty. Flash should not be treated as such a novelty.

Though, I'd love to read a flash about novelties - of any sort. That's an interesting idea... maybe. ( note: pic left is not my cat - my cat only drinks PacNW microbrews.)

Anyhow,when approaching a flash fiction, I urge all you writers to keep yourselves focused. If you want a narrative flash, stick strictly to that narrative. All Story - keep it moving. If it's an emotion you want to show, show that emotion - or that complex of emotions. When showing a complex of emotions - show it as such, as a complex, not a series of emotions - compress them to show the complexity.

You're flashing, you're a strobe capturing a milisecond of something. You are compressing a thing to such a degree that it becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Strip a narrative to its core and you have a wonderful thing. Like a diamond formed from common coal, compress the object of your creative vision. Don't mess around trying to obey the tropes of standard fiction - they don't apply.

If you want to write a short story, then by god write one. Just don't squeeze it through a word-count requirement just to say that you can.

RAW

Girls and Paper and Tassels by Mary Miller

I honestly haven't read much of Mary Miller's work. I did hear her read from her collection, Big World, a month or so back. I was impressed by the hard-hitting risks Miller took in her prose. My friend Amy bought the book and loves it.

I have to say I reacted poorly to these at first. I thought there was going to be some male-bashing stuff going on. That was the baggage I brought to the text. However, I returned and found something far more complicated.

What comes through here and in the short story she read that night in Powell's is a near-confessional rawness. In this age of memoir, Miller makes a fiction which cuts to the quick with an unblinking honesty most memoirists can only dream of .

In these pieces, Miller writes in the 2nd person. Like many people, I hate 2nd person. But, she pulls it off. Consider the first two sentences of Girls:

He shows you his drawings, sketchbooks full of naked women. Women who were live at some point, who let him draw them before they became a story he would recount to you.

She starts with immediate action and attention-grabbing elements. At least my attention was grabbed by a sketchbook full of naked women and not so much by the 2nd person aspect. Then, the second sentence is largely descriptive and brings us back to "you" at the end. So, she's not banging us over the head with YOU straight away.

Considered together, we are left with a very emotionally complex picture. We have a woman who in the first instance seems skeptical and cynical. In the second flash, we have a woman who is passive. Yet, both are captive to a sense of fate. They will be with this guy no matter what, it seems. The author winks at us, telling us that the narrator is a fool, that she is deluding herself, drugging herself to take the pain that fate has brewing.

As reader, we sit and watch the wheel turn. We know this girl, we've seen her go through one bad relationship after another. We wonder why. Perhaps it's just her fate and she's just along for the ride.

So, go take a gander. I could probably write a full essay about these two shorties.

Great Flashes. I give 'em a weeks worth of crisp, sunny, fall days.

Can't Look Away

PANK Magazine / Buck, Naked by Frank Dahai

Funny, fresh, and buck naked. Buck, the main character of Frank Dahai's flash, Buck, Naked, poses nude for his wife in a small trailer while she snaps away with a polaroid camera.

I feel for Buck, his nudity perpetually caught. His vulnerability burned into the emulsion into infinity. Like a human being tortured by Greek Gods, Buck is forever exposed. Posed and re-posed. Never to find repose.

Dahai has created a million stories, an infinity of humanity pressed into the emulsion of these few words.

I give it 5 ripened Washington Apples baked into a pie.

Short Sharp Shock in the Heart

The Hamburger Story - Lauren Becker

I think Wigleaf is certainly one of my favorite journals. Not just because the editor deigned to publish me, giving me my first acceptance. But, the stories there most closely come to my definition of Flash.

I was pleased to see Lauren Becker's work appearing in Wigleaf's most current issue - if they have issues, that is. I think the editor posts stories on a rolling basis. But, I digress. I can't say I always like Becker's work, but I do find her writing compelling and worthy of note.

Thus this blog post.

Here is a Flash in flashback. I have been ruminating on the use of flashback in Flash, so I was happy to find this great use of flashback. Here, the act of flashing back is not a mere digression to explicate the present action, but the flashing back is, in fact, the present action. This meets my criteria for a tight focus - Becker stays in this ruminative mode throughout the piece.

Much like the protagonist in Tobias Wolff's A Bullet in the Brain, Becker's narrator has been shocked. Becker's 1st person narrator has been shocked by an ex-lover's book and his fictional portayal of her therein.

As to the writing, I found the staccato tempo of the piece refreshing. Short, sharp sentences marched me through the anger and turmoil the narrator is experiencing. Thankfully, Becker gives us a few compound sentences so that we can breathe through the middle of the piece.

All in all, I'd chalk this up as another success for both Becker and Wigleaf!

I give this one a Blackberry Pie with a nice strong, black cup of Stumptown joe to go with.

What Chekhov Said

A First Time for Everything by Michelle Reale | Word Riot

Michelle Reale's flash, A First Time for Everything, took a few minutes for me to get into. The majority of this piece felt like the writer was looking for something. She finds it in the last two paragraphs and I thought that everything prior could have been cut.

This is flash, a genre where we claim intense focus. However, this piece spends so much time on the mother and father that we sort of forget about the narrator and her sister - until those final graphs where the real flash occurs. The image of those girls looking through a map, longing to escape the madness imposed upon them by their parents, is really touching. This ending needs to be the beginning, these girls are where the real truth of the piece lies.

I could go into more detail, but I'm sorta tired. Happy flashing.

I give this story one fresh polish sausage from a deli on Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago.

When is Now?

SmokeLong Quarterly—Issue Twenty-Five—"Rats" by Z.Z. Boone

I liked this story quite a lot at the outset. I liked how the narrator took off with her father to hunt rats on a Saturday night, something decidedly atypical of a teenage girl. I liked how she had "nerves as sharp as shark's teeth" and easily pulled the trigger, "pop...pop...pop, just like that."

I got off track a bit in the flash forward, especially since I didn't think I was "in scene" at all, but reading a general account of what usually happens on a Friday night in the life of this young woman. I thought perhaps that every week the father laments his divorce and the way he acted "weakly."

Then, we come back to "now," a particular scene where the rats are being hunted. In this version of "now" the narrator is jumping at her father's touch and seems to hold the gun like a fearful newbie. My initial assumptions about the narrator are gone and I suddenly feel adrift, wondering who this character really is.

So, I'm just perplexed. We move from speaking about an activity generally to a flash forward into what seems be a specific instance, back to a specific evening where the narrator has changed from a confident rat-hunter to a shaky adolescent. She now is learning how to handle violent power and her father's presence as an emasculated figure.

I hate to say it, but this piece simply unraveled for me. The more I asked of it, the less it gave. The narrator goes through a change, but it seems to be a regression. Regression is interesting, but I don't know if I have enough to really see how or why she regressed.

Again, I think this piece has a lot going for it. Interesting characters, neat situation, great writing. As the interviewer in the companion article, Smoking With ZZ Boone, says, it is a multi-layered piece. However, like a many-tiered cake, this piece needs a solid support to maintain its structure.

I give this flash a lone, shiny sparkler.

The News

Atypical Research by Shelly Rae Rich - pubbed in: Flash Fiction Online

Exposition... It's one of those necessary evils in writing fiction. The reader sometimes needs "the news" to understand what's going on. Are the characters in an undersea cave? That detail might be pertinent to the action of the story.

Backstory. If a character has a reaction to a certain smell as a result of a childhood incident, that might be good for a reader to know about. We do sometimes need the news.

However, in flash fiction there is little room for it. Unless your whole flash is somehow expository, if you have taken exposition to such a level that the flash can be said to be virtually about exposition itself, then it has little place.

Ultimately, if a flash has a strong narrative focus, we need strict focus on that narrative. Again, Hemingway's, A Very Short Story, is the best example of this I know. That tale is nothing but story, plot, it's a narrative from tip to tail with any exposition limited to a sentence or two to merely set a scene.

The story, Atypical Research, which served as the prompt for this little rant is comprised of so much exposition as to lose all focus for the reader. It's a nice piece of writing, to be sure, but I'm left with little idea of these characters or what's really going on. At the end, I have a narrator in a love affair with a beautiful and quirky woman. But, there's no real treatment of the emotions the narrator has, only some cursory statements about a research project which is no longer objective.

At the end of the day, I found this piece too unfocused to qualify as flash. It felt like a nice draft for a longer short story where all of this expostion could be developed into something living and breathing.

I give this story one 7-11 burrito, with a Big Gulp chaser.

Titling

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION: EVERYBODY SAID PULL YOURSELF UP BY THE BOOTSTRAPS - kyle minor

This one ended.

I read it and it ended and I was satisfied, but not wholly satisfied. I'd met with the printed words, and I found their punctuation interesting, though at first difficult. Unusual. I liked the movement from talk of the wife/girlfriend to then propositioning the therapist. I found that humorous and fresh. But, like the narrator, I was not wholly satisfied. Until I looked up to the title.

Somehow, I'd missed the title. I was looking for a flash by Kyle Minor; when I found it, I dove in without a thought to the title. What's the big deal with titles, I thought. Yet, finding my self not-wholly-satisfied after reading Kyle Minor's flash, I found a rush of delight when I took notice of the title.

Of course, I do have a bias against therapy. Few therapists seem bold enough to require anything of their clients and even fewer clients are willing to actively participate in their recovery. I digress.

Minor's flash does seem to have a movement to it. Dare we call it a narrative? A relationship is defined and perhaps dissolved - perhaps found useless, when we take in the title, a call to dump the therapist. At the end of the day, this flash has tight focus which reflects and refracts and is wholly satisfying.

I give this one two air conditioners and a glass of cool water on a hot day.

Enjoy.

Great Review

Lydia Copeland in the Wigleaf Top 50 House!! « Sean Blog: It All Relates 2 Writing

I really dig Sean Lovelace's review of Lydia Copeland's addition to the Wigleaf Top 50. In particular, I like his additions to the definition of the form.

Read. Enjoy.

Pete and Repeat

Tomlinson Saying the Ball Was Tipped by Kyle Minor elimae

Wigleaf Top 50 Selection

I love the use of repetition in Kyle Minor's (very) little flash. The haunt of an excuse which carries through each chapter of the narrative. I don't have a clear idea of why a "tipped" ball would make any difference. I don't know much about football.

But, I do know about pleading one's case and that plea gaining no traction as one's case goes down the tubes.

I know that Minor is known for writing longer fiction and this is the first thing of his I've ever read. I regretfully missed his reading at Powell's last winter. But, I'm pleased that he seems to be adept in the Flash format.

Great read and a worthy addition to any collection.

Closed

DOGZPLOT FLASH FICTION: COME BACK TOMORROW - Tania Hershman

A Wigleaf Top 50 Selection

This is a good read. I like how Tania Hershman uses the convention of store hours to illustrate emotional (un)availability. At times I was wondering if she was trying to personify a store or other business.

Here, Hershman has picked her images and her conflict. Nothing else. She hammers these home and from that focus, the flash becomes more truthful and hopefully universal. I certainly related both to the narrator and to the person to whom the flash is aimed.

Now, why isn't this a prose poem? There's no narrative, there are no scenes and scant characters. Perhaps it's the narrator and the complexity of emotion she emits. There is a progression emotionally as well. We move from a limited openness to really no openness and a feeling of being trapped. Yet the narrator is still hopeful, or at least wishes to keep the imagined lover as an emotional hostage, ever longing and ever rebuffed.

So, please do check this one out. I give it 4.5 out of 5 Mt. Hood Strawberries.

Lots of Things Going On

3:AM Magazine » Better Things

I found Andrea Kneeland's flash, Better Things, pretty much at random. I read it. There's a lot here.

People often talk about how there's "so much going on" in flash. How did you pack so much into such a small space? They often ask.

The beauty of flash is that there is so much going on in such a small space. But it's a contained space and there is great focus on a single thing from which emanates a million different things. Stefanie Freele's Sisters does this. In Freele's micro masterpiece, we have two sisters in two different places communicating over the telephone. Simple. Elegant. But there's so much tension that it nearly tears you apart.

Here we are shown a bunch of different things: bloody van, burrito workers, and a relationship possibly in trouble. There's the coworkers finances and the confusion they cause in a relationship which is given no other context for conflict. There's a lot going on here.

But none of it seems to go anywhere.

There is a lot to like, however. I think there are some neat characters here and the scenario is creative and interesting. I'm glad I read this and that I got to peek in on these people. But, I didn't get a flash moment. No one thing seemed to resonate, but there were a lot of little things lying around which could have been woven into something larger, or concentrated for a flash. Or perhaps those were stray twigs (see illustration, above.) I'm not really sure.

Again, please comment if you agree, disagree, or are curious about where to find a killer burrito in Portland.