The Wave Pictures • Leave the Scene Behind
Vampire Weekend • Horchata
Tom Jones • Burning Hell
Titus Andronicus • A More Perfect Union
The Tallest Man on Earth • Wild Hunt
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>Your title must be "Like a Fish in Water."
It should begin with some kind of competition.
It should have either one or both of these lines of dialogue: (1) "You guys, I'm so proud of us. We're working so well together. It's blowing my mind" or (2) "I don't know why you allow [Name] to manipulate, control, and bully you."
It should include these words: military, camel, Grandpa Sweater, A-ha, whip.
It should end with someone in tears.
If you need further inspiration, check out Tim Gunn getting angry at the losing team's spinelessness:
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>
I do resist it, but I wonder if I do so not because it's a necessity to getting the kind of flash piece I desire (but never quite do) or because I'm kind of wedded to the idea of that drawn-out process of drafting, workshopping, revising, additional workshopping, additional revising, editing, tweaking, and so forth.
I imagine the easy answer is that the necessity of having to "wait" has more to do with each individual writer's process and/or each individual piece than with an overarching, universal rule about it. And of course some writers who wait might be better off sending out right away, and those who send it out quickly might have been better off waiting.
One would think/hope that there's a rawness and edginess to the quick drafted and quick revised and quick submitted flash, something to be gained about that process that is more true to the compressed form than the process that takes weeks and months to complete. If one were to take the time to look at the two different products that result, one might be able to come up with real conclusions. But who has the time for that?
Well, today's therapy session asks you to do what I am doing, because of course that's the surefire pathway to sanity. If you do it quickly, try slowing it down; if you're like me and prefer the drawn-out way, speed it up a bit. Tragedy teaches us that for every gain there's a commensurate loss (bite the apple but lose your innocence), so life seems to be this constant balancing act. But screw this risk/reward attitude. This therapy session says see what's gained by changing the process. What do you have to lose?
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>
This "novel-in-prose poems" inspired me to begin to develop a course on the novel-in-FF/PP. I love the richness of each choice Barker makes with both language and content, in the telling of this expansive story using a compressed form. I love the novel's movement and its stillness, the forces at work both in its creation and its final form. I most of all love all that it made me feel, the way the narrator tells her tale as if there really were "nothing between us."
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
wanderlust
valedictorian
taint
sprocket
faux pas
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>
Before I talk about that aspect of writing, I would like to mention that almost every single piece that has been written and submitted has been workshopped, many of them more than once, almost all of them spending at least 40 days being critiqued and reviewed at Zoetrope Virtual Studio. Of course, the shorter pieces might spend 2-3 months being drafted, revised, redrafted, and so on; the longer pieces might spend 6 months to a year. Some writers can get it right very quickly, and I don't begrudge their ability to write a piece, submit it, and publish it in a shorter amount of time. I guess I'm just saying that I haven't reached that point yet.
So what is my point? Hmmm. I usually send each flash fiction piece to five (5) journals, unless of course a journal doesn't allow sim-subs or a journal's response time is so fast that it makes it kind of absurd to send it elsewhere without waiting for that journal's decision. I tend to send work out in chunks: September, January, and June. As soon as a piece is accepted, I send a withdrawal request out to those journals who are still considering the piece. If a piece doesn't receive an acceptance with those initial submissions, I tend to wait for the next time I send out work (one of those three months).
Oh, the point. I'm not sure if one judges one's literary-journal writing career by quantity or quality or income or personal growth or risk-taking or some combination of these or some other factors, but I like (very much) where I've been published and what I've published, and yet here is the fact: I've had to deal with a lot of rejections. If the number of submitted pieces is 400 and each one has received two (2) rejections, that's 800. The rest of the math as one increases the probable number of rejections (at five each, the number becomes 2000 rejections) gets rather depressing. It's mighty hard feeling any kind of success with that many rejections. I guess one has to take a baseball mentality, (the idea that .300 is pretty good) to put it all into perspective, but it doesn't quite work.
I'd like to say, or maybe I wouldn't like to say, that I've become habituated to the rejection note, but I haven't. I understand that it's not me who is being rejected (it's my story) and that there are many reasons for a journal to say "no." Clearly, I have a handle on rejection, or I couldn't send out work anymore, but it sometimes weighs on me, all those no's.
And so Wednesday's Flash Therapy session ends with this note. I cannot imagine too many writers who can compete with the number of rejections that I will be accumulating throughout my career as a writer of flash fiction. One of my first lessons about blogging or commenting online from a writer was this: Don't mention your rejections, stupid! Tell them where you will be or where you've been, not where you want to be but haven't been let in. But I mention it here to make this point: if someone with as much anxiety, self-doubt, neurosis, and panic can deal with this aspect of a writing career, almost anyone can find it within himself or herself to figure out what rejections mean and to do so in a way that allows one to keep writing and submitting work.
Here's what I figure: it means I'm still writing a lot. And that, I think, is something to be (very) happy about.
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>I've Still Got Something It Wantsomen
whirligig
adieu
lark
nor'easter
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>By some weird twist of fate, I created the term "hint fiction," which has, for the time being at least, gained some momentum. Inspired by Ernest Hemingway's six-word story--"For Sale: baby shoes, never worn"--Hint Fiction is a story of 25 words or fewer that suggests a larger, more complex story.
I've taken a long dive there, and from a short board. But isn't that the point? The writer has gathered a handful of words, has shaped them. How far can we go?
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>
It is a book of perfect circles and cyles, and that "tragedy" alluded to in the back cover is a charged, tricky word, because tragedy remains one of those undefined terms, as mysterious as the gods and goddesses, genetics and will, fate and destiny, the cycles of rain and drought. I've written elsewhere about tragedy (here, here, here, and here). I'm particularly drawn to tragic theoretician and critic Normand Berlin's The Secret Cause and its insight into American tragedy, "connected with a journey of escape, of going away from...restrictions...from the evil and brutality of the world, only to meet and be wounded by it" (153).
Willa and Kale perhaps came to Drought to escape the restrictions and brutality of the world left behind, and like many American tragic characters, find the very thing they hoped to elude. The world in Drought for Willa and Kale is hard and dry. There are other cycles and seasons and times alluded to in the excerpt above: "when the rains come" and "spring when the snow melts." But now, as the water level steadily declines and the perimeter shrinks, there is only this sense of fleeing, like the fish, all day long.
What I love about Di Blasi's Drought is that sense of compression, not only in the language, but in the place itself. There's something elemental and ancient about the language: sand, chalk, cliffs, valley, dirt, rain, dry, clouds, pond, hills, creek, snow, hillside, and that final "drown themselves in air." The specificity of place leads the reader to the universal; to me, that's the challenge of compression. Look at the simple loveliness here of the adjectives: "dirty, sand, chalky, low, south, soft, pickup, deep, hard, yellow, hot, still, old, wide, creek, water, thickening." Notice how the word thickening stands out, not only here, but in those final words, the way thickening has its own weight and substance, how it is part of the drowning and apart from it.
How many times have I avoided the "dialogue" story? How many times have I told other writers how such dialogue-based pieces don't work? Countless times. And look at this one. It proceeds without attribution. Man and Woman, She Said and He Said, Drunk and Poor, back and forth, rain and drought. It is desire, I'm often told, that drives narratives into existence, and here is Willa's: "I don't want to get stuck..." And there she is now, stuck. (That irony, for me, is what drives tragedies into existence).
"Not me," Kale says, three times, three the magic number of bare-bones tales, as if invoking the fairy forces to undo a curse. Three years ago. No education, no ambition, drunk&poor. Against Kale's "that's not me" are Willa's three words: "I'd leave you," and, if not that, "I'd kill you." Tragedy is about that desire to escape that leads to further imprisonment, the wanting of a world without traps only to land in one that cannot be unloosened, the wish for control of one's fate, the craving of and longing for the world as it might be, the need to assert one's will against a world that would have it otherwise.
Such is the Postmodern American Gothic world of Di Blasi's Drought. Postmodern, to me, means a work that's aware of its own creation. American because of its place, its desire for escape. Gothic as fish fleeing the thickening crowds below, as if trying to drown themselves in air.
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Groucho Marx
One of my favorite puns of all-time appears in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall." Well, actually there are two favorites. It begins:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>The Moss of His Skin
Young girls in old Arabia were often buried alive next to their dead fathers, apparently as sacrifice to the goddesses of the tribes...
--Harold Felderman, "Children of the Desert," Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Review, Fall 1958.
It was only important
to smile and hold still
to lie down beside him
and to rest awhile,
to be folded up together
as if we were silk,
to sink from the eyes of mother
and not to talk.
The black room took us
like a cave or a mouth
or an indoor belly.
I held my breath
and daddy was there,
his thumbs, his fat skull,
his teeth, his hair growing
like a field or a shawl.
I lay by the moss
of his skin until
it grew strange. My sisters
will never know that I fall
out of myself and pretend
that Allah will not see
how I hold my daddy
like an old stone tree.
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
]]>