FlashFiction.Net

"My narrators, I suppose, don't at all mind living surrounded by mystery—in fact, they like that." ~ Lydia Davis, excerpted from an interview with Sarah Manguso for The Believer

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Lydia Davis can do it all—write devastating short fiction (see Break it Down), write a killer novel (see End of the Story), translate Proust. For me, she is a writer who is at once thrilling, confounding, and unfailingly interesting. And it just so happens that my favorite works from her oeuvre are her flash fictions. In fact, Davis was the first author who sparked my interest in the form: one afternoon, as a lonely college student living in the suburbs of Florida, I picked up a copy of Almost No Memory and instantaneously felt as though I had been transported to another landscape, someplace simultaneously peculiar and alienating and magical. I've since spent hours marveling over her masterpieces in miniature, and Davis's great talent for taking the seemingly minor detail, the seemingly minor moment, and enlarging it into something profound, like a scientist who knows just the right way to adjust the microscope.

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After reading a Lydia Davis flash, I often feel as though I have been imprinted with an impression of singular power. Take, for example, "The Outing," which describes an argument that occurs in the woods: "…a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt…" The story is told in a single sentence and can be read in its entirety at Conjunctions, but even in this excerpt, we can see Davis giving the reader a spot-on impression of the pattern of connections and disconnections that define human interactions, and what it feels like to be lost in the wilderness of a struggling relationship. Davis is also masterful at blending the conceptual with the visceral, of rendering the abstract in achingly concrete terms, of conjuring moments of insight that evoke powerful waves of recognition. In "Fear," she writes of a woman who cries out, "Emergency, emergency," then notes that "…nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has not been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families too, to quiet us." Such passages might seem simple and straightforward on the surface, but for me, moments like this in Davis's work have always caused me to close the book, shut my eyes, and think, Me too.

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As someone who spends most of her time toiling away on longer works, I keep returning to flash, as both a reader and a writer, for these blistering moments of insight, for the singular impression, for the hope that one day, I will craft a story from single sentence that will transport the reader to another landscape entirely.

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Recommended Reading, or a few of Lydia Davis's Greatest Flash Fiction Hits:

"Almost No Memory"
"Samuel Johnson Is Indignant"
"Varieties of Disturbance"
These stories available online at Conjunctions here and here.

Interview with Lydia Davis in The Believer, in which she spends some time talking about flash fiction.

About the Author

Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her MFA at Emerson College. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the 2009 Julia Peterkin Award, and the 2009-2010 Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review, American Short Fiction, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV: Best of the Small Presses, among others. Laura’s first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, October 2009), is the winner of the Dzanc Prize and was recently selected by Barnes & Noble for their Discover Great New Writers Program. To learn more about Laura, please visit www.lauravandenberg.com.