FlashFiction.Net Has a New Flash Buddy: Matter Press!

Matter Press is a brand spankin' new venture from the same folks behind FlashFiction.Net. Here are some things that matter about the press & journal, and some things that don't.

Mission

Matter Press is a community-based, non-profit literary press that publishes an online literary journal (The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts), manages an annual short fiction and poetry chapbook contest, and supports a regular reading series. Matter Press offers internships to graduate MFA and Publishing students as submission readers, literary editors, and publication designers. Matter Press focuses on supporting emerging and established authors and artists working with condensed forms of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and visual arts.

Artistic Aesthetic (whatever that means)

Matter Press obsesses over compression as a contemporary creative form, and we are much more interested in how compression matters to you than how it matters to us. Out of a dense singularity that contained the entire universe: matter! That's what we are looking for, these particular moments of compression, out of which expand the universal. We like to think of compression not as a gimmick or a temporary notion of the times.

Matter Press: The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts

The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts is a non-profit publisher of compressed creative arts, such as micro fiction, flash fiction, prose poetry, compressed poetry & visual arts, and whatever other forms compression might take. Currently, we are collecting the "matter" of the site through solicitation, but we expect to be open for submissions in May 2011. Matter Press pays authors $50 for their accepted pieces. We publish weekly bursts of compression & decompression and make as many varied word-plays on matter as we can. 

Below is our first published piece, Sean Lovelace's "Hammock":

My friend said I had an annoying habit of comparing my life to the
lives of animals. I could have used the scientific term, kingdom, but I
deferred.

His eyes an ordinary color, seen by candlelight.

Read the rest here.

Matter Press: Blog

The Matter Press blog contains, for the most part, explorations of the compressed creative arts using the compressed form of the blog entry. It might do other things. One never knows about these things. Below is the first blog entry.

1. matter: the substance

Out of its singular mission to expand the world of compressed creative arts, Matter Press & Journal has burst into existence. Part of its ongoing mission is to explore how these (very) tiny forms can matter, not so much by defining them, but instead by putting them into action.That being said, definitions of matter abound. So, in the coming weeks, months, and hopefully years, maybe it'd be worth looking at a few. Read the rest here.

As Matter Press & The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts begin their journey, these first forays into this world will be of compressed prose by some of our favorite compressed prose writers, such as Sean Lovelace, Peter Gardner, Chad Prevost, Darlin' Neal, Stefanie Freele, Ray Vukcevich, Steve Almond, Jen Pieroni, Kim Chinquee, Ethel Rohan, and Kathy Fish.

FlashFiction.Net came into being out of the belief that these (very) tiny things matter very much in the world; these new ventures continue that mission, to find in compression what cannot be found otherwise. In The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Rusty Barnes (Night Train) writes this:

"Somewhere between the linear narrative and the post-modern fracturing of narrative, there might be a third way, dependent on its brevity as its primary descriptor" (136).

In other words, imagine the world as the glass at Adam & Eve's wedding, stepped on and shattered. Imagine linear narrative as the belief it can be put back together, postmodern fracturing as the belief it never can be whole again, and compression as the focus on one infitesimal shard of that shattered world, complete in itself and part of something infinitely greater.

For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.

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