I had a great time this week­end as a par­tic­i­pant in Philadel­phia Sto­ries Push To Pub­lish Work­shop. As part of a pan­el on “Sub­mit­ting Your Short Sto­ry,” I found myself say­ing, “I total­ly grant the pos­si­bil­i­ty that a sto­ry I sent out sucks, and I do give rejec­tions and com­ments the pow­er (even­tu­al­ly) to let me know such a thing. But I would nev­er grant them the pow­er to deter­mine whether I’m a writer or not. No one gets to decide that but me.” 

In read­ing a nov­el, I find myself pick­ing out the essen­tial words or images that lead to mean­ing, like the images of daisies, eggs, eyes, in-car­na­tions in Fitzgerald’s Great Gats­by. Or maybe it’s the men Dorothy finds in Oz I direct my atten­tion to. She is sur­round­ed by them, even Toto, all but the Witch and Glin­da. In read­ing Kim Chinquee’s work, noth­ing can be ignored, and even the tini­est pat­tern, the tini­est devi­a­tion mat­ters in large ways. 

It’s hap­pened. Read­ing flash fic­tion reminds me of why I love writ­ing poet­ry. As I am strug­gling to accom­plish my check list of con­flict, plot, lan­guage, a strong end­ing, res­o­lu­tion, when­ev­er I write a flash piece, the poet in me keeps me hon­est. Poet­ics is weaved into each sto­ry. Sher­rie Flick, in par­tic­u­lar, uses a poet­ic style that devours me. Each sen­tence is elec­tric. Her chap­book “I Call This Flirt­ing” is filled with deeply cap­ti­vat­ing sto­ries that are awe­some, in the actu­al mean­ing awe-inspir­ing. Poet­ic.

Fear­less prose in the tini­est space.

How do they gen­er­ate so many sto­ries? I thought, “What if I actu­al­ly did start writ­ing a series and the well ran dry?” That then led to the thought, “What if my well runs dry peri­od?” Comics, nov­els, poems—what would I do if I woke up and couldn’t think of a sin­gle cre­ative thought? 

I found this essay writ­ten dur­ing my MFA. I think it was writ­ten at a time when I began to think of each sen­tence as its own sto­ry. That thought process came while read­ing Ian McEwan’s Sat­ur­day. Maybe it’s inter­est­ing. Maybe not.

I was first intro­duced to Ron Carlson’s writ­ing I an intro­duc­tion to writ­ing class dur­ing the ear­ly years of my under­grad. The pro­fes­sor used his sto­ries “Big­foot Stole My Wife” and “I am Big­foot” as exam­ples for the frame nar­ra­tive tech­nique and for the mono­logue sto­ry. She nev­er men­tioned “I am Big­foot” as a Flash Fic­tion piece, but it sure fits. The short, hilar­i­ous, defense Big­foot gives cap­ti­vat­ed the class and led to one ques­tion we nev­er thought we’d have to ask our­selves: Can we trust Big­foot?

Well, it hap­pened. I came across some­thing in The New York­er I love. It came from an adver­tise­ment from Lin­coln Finan­cial Group

I entered a flash fic­tion course think­ing I knew what flash fic­tion was. Wrong. See, I thought flash fic­tion meant short, short sto­ries. A ful­ly real­ized short sto­ry that just hap­pened to be small in size but not in stature.

I’m new to the world of flash fic­tion. I’ll glad­ly admit it usu­al­ly takes me upwards of 50,000 words to tell a sto­ry. Why? I like com­pli­cat­ed plots with numer­ous char­ac­ters. But I have to admit that there is some­thing about flash fic­tion that intrigues me. A bet­ter way to put it might be that flash fic­tion chal­lenges me in a way than nov­el-length does not—brevity.