Recent­ly, in a guest blog at Ethel Rohan’s Straight From The Heart In My Hip (which for some rea­son my serv­er won’t let me link to), I talked about flash as a machine of com­pres­sion, an idea I got after read­ing Dou­glas Glover’s essay on nov­el struc­ture, in which he refers to the nov­el as “a machine of desire.” For me, here are ways that flash machin­ery might work. 

As a fol­low-up to Shaula Evans’s ask­ing “What is flash fic­tion?” Deb­o­rah Walk­er pro­vides an answer: I write the short-sto­ry kind of flash, but after read­ing some of the con­test sto­ries I’d like to attempt the vignette type. ? But what I try with all my sto­ries, no mat­ter what length, is to get the […]

The writer Shaula Evans recent­ly began a dis­cus­sion on flash fic­tion in her Zoetrope Vir­tu­al Writer’s Stu­dio room it takes a vil­lage to raise a writer. Here’s how she began that dis­cus­sion: I’ve been read­ing up on flash fic­tion over the hol­i­days. There seems to be zero con­sen­sus about what flash is. Cool! That’s excit­ing! […]

In 1991, the Iowa Review (reprint­ed in Mod­ern Amer­i­can Poet­ry) asked Robert Hass, “Why a prose poem, and what is a prose poem?” Here’s his answer: I haven’t arrived for myself at any very sat­is­fac­to­ry for­mu­la­tion of what a prose poem is. Cer­tain­ly it has some­thing to do with condensation…I don’t know how to define […]

Think of movie end­ings with­out the desire that pre­ced­ed them. Dorothy goes home. Luke Sky­walk­er gets a medal. Some­one kiss­es Michael Corleone’s ring. Imag­ine we have no idea what these moments mean to the char­ac­ter. We can guess, of course. It must be nice to get home. A medal cer­e­mo­ny seems cool. Look, Michael has […]

I’m not sure if this moment is real or imagined—of find­ing, in my mother’s clos­et, the Kid­die City receipt for the presents San­ta brought me. In the (real or pre­tend) mem­o­ry, I’m thrilled to dis­cov­er it, to think that they cre­at­ed this world for me, that (for the briefest of moments) I was at the […]

Per­haps the ele­ment of craft most over­looked is that of writ­ing, that tal­ent some writ­ers have that allows them to write more than the rest of us, to put in the time need­ed to get good, bet­ter, and (pos­si­bly) great. 

My prob­lem (well one of many) is an inabil­i­ty to tol­er­ate uncertainty–and of course the world’s full of uncer­tain­ty, so life is, to put it mild­ly, a bit of an adven­ture. Uncer­tain­ty cre­ates anx­i­ety and anx­i­ety cre­ates the desire to relieve it, and the way to do that is to make the thing cre­at­ing the anx­i­ety end as soon as pos­si­ble. And that desire (for things to end quick­ly) might not be a great char­ac­ter­is­tic for a lover, but, as one might guess, it’s a pret­ty darn good one for the writer of flash fic­tion.

Today, FlashFiction.Net took a road trip to Ethel Rohan’s amaz­ing blog: “Straight From The Heart In My Hip.” Here’s the open­ing para­graph: In “Notes on Nov­el Struc­ture” from Words Over­flown By Stars: Cre­ative Writ­ing Instruc­tion and Insight from the Ver­mont Col­lege of Fine Arts MFA Pro­gram, Dou­glas Glover refers to the nov­el as “a machine […]

In no par­tic­u­lar order, here’s a list of forty-two cool songs from 2009. Enjoy.