FlashFiction.Net

David Wroblewski came to Rosemont College to talk to the graduate publishing, literature, and creative writing students and faculty about the book, the book tour, writing, and what's next. He was generous, insightful, thoughtful, and all-together terrific.

Three times (I think) in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Wroblewski writes a chapter from the point-of-view of Almondine, one of the Sawtelle's dogs. I especially loved these chapters, maybe because they felt so much like the very best kind of flash fiction. When I asked him about those chapters, he talked about the challenge of writing from the point-of-view of a character who does not use language to understand/translate the world. Here's the beginning of one of the Almondine chapters:

To her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew how to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hoisted on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away.

Through Almondine, I feel the deepest sense of heartbreak, separation, and profound loss. Her chapters are the shortest among very long ones, and so it is no wonder that I'm brought to think about the power of "flash fiction" and how I might think differently about seeing it appear here, in a novel approaching 600 pages.

Here's my thought about it: Almondine experiences the world through the senses, without that "coding" that goes on in the human brain.There's an immediacy and "felt sense" to her world. Also, by writing her chapters in (close) third person, Wroblewski can avoid that feeling of dog as "narrator" of her story, because dogs cannot narrate their own stories. There is nothing human about Almondine. There is instead here experience of the world as it is (really) rather than through language (an approximation of the the real).

Flash fiction has that same potential, to focus on the experience of a character with the immediacy and felt-sense of someone "without the language to ask" for that translation from the sensual to the physical, the words that seem (at times) not up to the task of grasping all that we ask them to.