While not technically a celebration of pervy exhibitionism, Flash Fiction Day can still be a grand opportunity to expose yourself...to good writing. If you’re in the mood to produce, David Gaffney has some tips up at The Guardian on how to write flash fiction. Though I have to admit, Gaffney sounds more like a short story writer writing in extra-condensed form than a true flash fiction writer. Oh yes: there is a difference.
This is not to say his advice is bad or not useful. Condensing sentences to their essential components is a valiant and essential practice. But I think flash fiction (which I’m defining as any piece of fiction under 1,000 words) doesn’t have to consider plot as an adjustment of traditional notions, such as Gaffney’s advice to “Start in the middle” and to “Make sure the ending isn't at the end.” One of the things I adore about flash fiction is that it can provide the kind of space and attention so that "what happens" is more attuned to the effects on the reader than the characters. If you want to feel that for yourself, check out this barrage of Lydia Davis stories, courtesy ofConjunctions.
For me, flash fiction isn’t just about concision and brevity; it's about allowing for a kind of stillness. It’s there on one page, maybe two. There’s no pressure to rush through it to find out what happens next. Good flash fiction can have such careful, loaded sentences that they can stop you in your tracks. It can allow for a kind of complexity that isn’t about sentences being difficult but about sentences that transform how we think. Economy can give rise to mystery, to tensions underneath and between words.
J. Gabriel Boylen, in a review for Bookforum of George Prochnik’s In Pursuit of Silence notes that “the peak of brain activity, of thinking, comes in the tiny pauses between sounds, when we simultaneously process the previous sound and anticipate the next. When noise never abates, brain activity tends to flatline.” Flash fiction, for me, can allow for this kind of stillness, for a kind of quiet filled with transformative activity.
image: undercheese101.deviantart.com
Ah, flash fiction—or, if you prefer, micro-fiction, short-shorts, prose poems. Or, if you're a little skeptical of the whole genre, "writing exercises." The practice has existed longer than our short-term cultural memory reaches back, and it has spawned publications, websites and brands, like Smithmagazine's Six-Word Memoir. And as of right now, this svelte form has been given its own day. May 16 (or "16 May," in deference to our friends across the pond) is National Flash-Fiction Day. Don't worry, you didn't forget. You didn't know about it because this is the first year for the UK-based event.
Here's what the organizers have to say about this new holiday: “[I]n recent years, with the growth of the internet, more people reading on e-Readers and mobile phones, and the sheer pace of life, the very short story has taken on a life of its own. And we now think this is a life worth celebrating.”
No reason not to dedicate a day to these little nuggets, some of which can be quite inspired. Hell, compared with Twitter, flash fiction can come off like War and Peace. But herein lies the danger of championing flash fiction as a genre. There's much to be said for writing an evocative, arresting short scene, but giving readers a reason to remain interested in your words—dare I say, committed to them—requires a bit more endurance and, frankly, talent.
To me, there's a big difference between being a good writer and a good storyteller. Good writers know how to string together words properly. It is the storyteller that synthesizes the many moving parts of a long-form story or novel and brings into focus areas of our own lives that we didn't realize were out of focus. Great micro-fiction might spark some such sensation, but it doesn't last long enough to ignite.
It is de rigueur to bemoan the lack of time we have in this culture of instant gratification and info-ADD. While I would never dream of thwarting another person's creative release, I do think we should classify these short offerings as a component of a serious storyteller's tool kit, albeit an important component. If we are to rally behind these groupings of a few hundred words, let's encourage them to be used as building blocks that can be incorporated into something larger, more sturdy and lasting: a story we can get lost in and be challenged by.
Yeah, yeah, I know, the definition of a “short story” is up for grabs and plenty of people will want to call me out for being cursory. There are plenty of flash fictions that tell stories in which dramatic tension is introduced and resolved. They can be creative, fun and sometimes even memorable. But think of it like this: Would you rather spend the rest of your life eating nothing but cotton candy or three square meals per day?
So on this micro-auspicious day, go out and flash yourself silly (but don't blame me if you get arrested). And on May 17, get back to work.
Image: nationalflashfictionday.co.uk
Launched twelve years ago, the Caine Prize celebrates short fiction from Africa. And judging by 2002 Caine winner Binyavanga Wainaina's scathing satirical article "How to Write About Africa," it's about time. In collaboration with The New Inquiry and a horde of like-minded bloggers, I’ll be writing about this year's five finalists—and linking to each story so you can read it yourself.
Part 3: Malawi's Mavericks
Stanley Kenani’s "Love on Trial" [PDF] is the story of Charles, a gay man caught in flagrante delicto, and Mr. Kachingwe, the man who caught him. In a “kingdom lost for want of a nail” sort of way, the subsequent trial ends up angering donor nations and reducing the country—and Mr. Kachingwe himself—to penury. Kenani, who's already been a Caine Prize finalist (for a story from the same book that features "Love on Trial") is from Malawi but resides in Switzerland and publishes in South Africa. There’s evidence of his multiculturalism in the increasingly large scale of events told here. And the irony of a rumor hobbling the people reveling in its scandal is brilliantly enacted on every level.
Malawi is repeatedly described here as a “God-fearing nation,” a notion Charles dismisses calmly and immediately: “Only an individual can be regarded as God-fearing, but the collection of fourteen million individuals that make up Malawi cannot be termed God-fearing.” According to its 2008 census, 82.7% of Malawians are Christian, while a full 13% are Muslim, and 4.3% are of another religion none at all. At the same time, Malawi has been ranked ninth in the world for prevalence of HIV/AIDS, a fact that holds greater currency for the characters in Kenani’s story.
This is a story that implicates its individual readers in its telling. Charles repeatedly explains that his homosexuality is unexceptional, and refuses to consider it scandalous. If there is any Malawian law forbidding it, he says, or “designed to suppress freedom, then it is a stupid law that must be scrapped.” There is no reason, Charles implies, that his audience should pay any attention to the particulars of his life, except when his dignity is challenged: Nyenyezi, the daughter of the President of Malawi, suggests that Charles’s orientation is a psychological problem, which she could resolve with her love just as her father could resolve his legal problems. We might read this failed courtship as a substitute for the successful and wholly veiled relationship between Charles and his lover, but the vignette is still a story that damns its readers for caring about its tawdry details.
And what of the larger story? Kenani has declared that he wants to inspire other Malawians “to dream big, to have the continent and the world in mind while telling our stories, the stories that make us Malawian.” What does this story say about Malawi? Consider the proverb Mr. Kachingwe’s friend tells him at the story’s end: no matter how great a change may be, whether of a city or an entire country, it is all due to the action, or inaction, of individuals—in this case an alcoholic and HIV-infected man named Mr. Kachingwe, and a single-minded, calm, gay law student named Charles who insists on honor, love, and truth without judgment.
Here's the story as a PDF: Stanley Kenani's 'Love on Trial'
Check back for a list of the other bloggers also contributing to the discussion on this story.
image credit: Stanley Kenani, storymojaafrica.co.ke
I have been an admirer of Brian Evenson’s prose ever since I drooled over the stories in his first collection, Altmann’s Tongue—one of the top influences in forming my literary aesthetic, and one of the most crucial collections to come out in the last twenty years. His new collection,Windeye, just out from Coffee House Press, continues the same dark, titillating work I first fell in love with.
In very economical ways, and in a very short space, Evenson creates great rifts of uncertainty for his characters and for the reader. In “Angel of Death,” the narrator, wandering a desolate landscape with a group of eight others, is given the task of writing down the names of those who die along the way. But even this concrete task is complicated—made slippery—by larger forces just underneath the tangible world:
The difficulty comes in knowing what is real and what is not. There is no agreement on this. What I am nearly sure is real are bursts and jolts and the smell of singed hair, but others recall none of these effects, recall other things entirely. And how we came to slip from one dim world and its dim deeds to the place where we are now, none of us are in any position to say. And why we are together, this too I do not know.
What I admire most about Evenson is his ability to arrest me in an extreme state of vulnerability. Whether the narrative is in first- or third-person, it never intrudes to provide concrete orientation. I am as lost, as consumed by disorientation, as the characters. In a cinematic sense, it's as if there is no widescreen shot, no panoramic lens, with which to get a sense of any outside environment. I'm pulled into in this great, unresolved tension that becomes the general atmosphere in which the events of the stories take place. Which is horrifying. And delightfully so.
There is also great physicality in Evenson’s vivid descriptions. His landscapes, while mostly spare, contain specificities of texture that make them come alive. Great attention is paid to the scratches and marks of violence upon bodies. These exquisite details are made all the more terrifying for being the only details to really trust.
If you happen to be in New York, I recommend experiencing Evenson firsthand. He’ll be reading with Dylan Hicks and Ben Lerner at the KGB Bar this Sunday, May 20, and at The Center for Fiction on Monday, May 21. I can assure you: horror might await the characters in these stories, but what's even more delightful is the horror that awaits the reader.
image: coffeehousepress.org
Launched twelve years ago, the Caine Prize celebrates short fiction from Africa. And judging by 2002 Caine winner Binyavanga Wainaina's scathing satirical article "How to Write About Africa," it's about time. In collaboration with The New Inquiry and a horde of like-minded bloggers, I’ll be writing about this year's five finalists—and linking to each story so you can read it yourself.
Part 2: Kenya’s Zones
“The Zone” is the locus of Billy Kahora’s "Urban Zoning” [PDF], this year's Caine Prize finalist from Kenya. The story is actually set in Nairobi, a city in Africa known both for its commercial clout and its astonishing nature preserves. And so we see here both commerce and nature, the one inverted and the other subverted as we watch the protagonist Kandle navigate the Zone.
What is the Zone? It is a state achieved after seventy-two hours of drinking. It is a “calm, breathless place”; it is a place both externally achieved through alcoholism and insomnia, and internally achieved by directing one’s mind towards pleasant thoughts. It is an area of strangeness, where the months of the calendar become colored in a synesthetic spasm of Kandle’s mind, and an area of danger, where Kandle’s friends have all succumbed to risky impulses.
I’m reminded of another Zone that takes hours and days to get to, and boasts strange sights for those who make it there: the one in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. Tarkovsky amped up the Zone’s vivid colors by painting the leaves of the trees. Why do the film's subjects all struggle to get to the Zone? Because it contains a room that grants its visitors' wishes.
And in the same vein Kandle’s fantasies are fulfilled in his Nairobian Zone: he gets a leave from his work as a banker and so gets money for free; he succeeds in overcoming his deep-rooted aversion to close contact in order to fool everyone around him. The end of the story pulls away from the vividness of Kandle’s Zone to the larger (and stranger) terrain of Kenya proper, and the story ends with two men:
[B]oth laughed from deep within their bellies, that laughter of Kenyan men that comes from a special knowledge. The laughter was a language in itself, used to climb from a national quiet desperation.
If alcohol and little sleep helped Kandle achieve an unusual inner state, so laughter helps the men both make the emotional trip away from the ugly reality of Nairobi’s streets toward a happier place, contained entirely within their minds. Kandle isn’t the first one to have discovered the trick of urban zoning, but he seems to have been the wiliest. The Zone is everywhere, even as the Zone is fleeting. What remains? Kenya, in all its varicolored reality.
Here's the story as a PDF: Billy Kahora’s "Urban Zoning”
Below I'll post a list of the other bloggers also contributing to the discussion on this story.
- zunguzungu
- Stephen Derwent Partington
- The Reading Life
- Backslash Scott
- Ikhide
- Loomnie
- ndinda
- City of Lions
- Practically Marzipan
- bookshy
- Cashed In
- aaahfooey
- The Mumpsimus
- Soulfool
image credit: africa-expert.com
Since it came out earlier this month, Louise Krug's meta-memoir Louise: Amended has generated some glowing reviews—and some heated comments. Clearly, Louise's story of brain trauma, partial paralysis, and redefining beauty has touched a few nerves. Last week, Buzz Poole talked with Louise about the work: the books that kept her inspired, the perils of reading one's own reviews, and what she's working on now.
Read More
Launched twelve years ago, the Caine Prize celebrates short fiction from Africa. And judging by 2002 Caine winner Binyavanga Wainaina's scathing satirical article "How to Write About Africa," it's about time. In collaboration with The New Inquiry and a horde of like-minded bloggers, I’ll be writing about this year's five finalists—and linking to each story so you can read it yourself.
Part 1: Nigeria’s Possibilities
This was how the world was and there was no reason to think it could be otherwise. But the war came and the bombs started falling, shattering things out of their imprisonment in boxes and jumbling them without logic into a protean mishmash. Without warning, everything became possible.
Rotimi Babatunde’s “Bombay’s Republic” [PDF] is nominally a war-veteran story, but the story is more about the nature of belief. The eponymous narrator arrives on a ship to Ceylon, where he is trained to fight the Japanese. He learns that the native Ceylonese believe he and the other Africans have tails. When he finds his nationality the target of another, worse misconception, however, his reaction is physical; he feels “queasy and [has] to steady his rising urge to puke. That people would imagine he was a cannibal was something he had not thought was possible.”
But the story's carefully engineered revelations are not limited to those of our protagonist. We're forced to realize that the war he fights was quite real—brought to a close with the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But this war has not even merited a footnote in our mental history-books. “This is not the Forgotten Front,” Bombay’s platoon leader declares, “and we are not the Forgotten Army. Nobody has ever heard of us so they can’t even begin forgetting about us.”
Bombay returns to his country and home with this enlarged universe of possibilities in his head, and with newly opened eyes he establishes a country of his own. He does not return home to restore order and continue an interrupted story (like Homer's Odysseus) or to reassert authority and direct a story to its proper end (like Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway); he returns to live out a completely new story of his own—a story which is logical to Bombay, but not to his perplexed compatriots.
I suppose I've lied. This isn’t a story about the nature of belief, but a story about stories, and the power they hold over us. Why has this war, which has been narrated repeatedly in books and film, become a “forgotten” war? Why does the author, Rotimi Babatunde, have his narrator focus not on death or religion but on what can possibly be believed? Why does this story open and close with a man who has commandeered a jailhouse in which he voluntarily imprisons himself?
The chair of judging for this year's Caine Prize, Bernardine Evaristo, called for "stories about Africa that enlarge our concept of the continent beyond the familiar images that dominate the media: War-torn Africa, Starving Africa, Corrupt Africa—in short: The Tragic Continent." Does this story succeed in that sense? Does it expand my mental image of what the continent contains? Does it show that Africa is complicated and that Africa is real?
To all those questions, I have to say I believe so, yes, I believe this.
Here's the story as a PDF: Rotimi Babatunde's "Bombay’s Republic."
Below is a list of the other bloggers also contributing to the discussion. Check back for updates.
image credit: The Forgotten War, wsj.net
The geography of subway maps is constantly changing.
Just like the evolution of words. (Thanks for inventing pop music, George Eliot.)
Even the tried and true obituary occasionally gets a chance to get creative.
The same goes for fuddy duddy old textbooks, who are raised into cities.
Can the same be done to used books during this digital renaissance?
We could say that it'll only get worse, but where's the fun in that?
Afterall, you have to fight for your right to stay optimistic.
It's the kind of sentiment that most mothers everywhere would encourage.
Image source: Liu Wei
I don't know whether Maurice Sendak ever explicitly said that imagination should never be limited by false notions of absurdity or risk, but as a kid sprawled out on the floor reading and rereading his books, especially In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are, this is what he taught me. The internet does tell me he said the following: “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”
I had enough unsentimental adults orbiting my childhood that one of them very well could have told me this. It would have gone over my head at age six or seven. But when you watch a drunk make an ass of himself, hear the laughter elicited by a joke that shouldn’t have been told, or through thin walls hear moans of pleasure that you are years off from appreciating, what you do come to understand, though you cannot yet articulate it, is that life ain't all Green Eggs and Ham.
I’m grateful for coming to this realization early on, thanks to the lovingly irreverent family and family friends who shaped me and allowed me to appreciate Sendak’s stories in all their naked, doughy, beastly glory. As these books make clear, adults can be jerks, escape beats confinement, and "Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!" (The latter was quoted by Art Spiegelman in a 1993 New Yorker strip.) They speak to a truth that the child me did not realize I’d been lied to about yet. I wasn’t old enough to go out anywhere further than the yard, and in truth I never actually wanted to run away. But losing myself in my thoughts and delusions, I could see that this was normal and healthy, something that shouldn't be thought of as a waste of time but a crucial part of being alive.
Like most adults, I still daydream like a kid, though I sometimes wish those mental escapes did not end so abruptly thanks to some adult obligation. But that bullshit is a real part of life, the same as trying to imagine it away. Maurice Sendak’s best work exists in that space between the two worlds, an alchemy of the real and imaginary, which is why it resonates with so many of us.
Image: collider.com
Ernest Hemingway clocking Wallace Stevens. Verlaine shooting Rimbaud. Norman Mailer head-butting Gore Vidal. There’s nothing like reading about writers for whom words just aren’t enough. Even Thought Catalog, the ever-narcissistic barometer of our still-young decade, has begged for more blood, goading today's writers to "replace tweets with kidney punches."
Sending authors on book tours? Yawn. Throwing authors into a steel cage for a straight-up Raw is War-style rumble royale? To quote the late Randy Macho Man Savage, "OOOOH YEAH!" So who should get in the ring?
1. Joyce v. Woolf
First up, the man with a pirate’s eye-patch, and the woman who reduced him to “a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” Let's remember their handicaps: Joyce depended on his wife to help transcribe Finnegans Wake, while Woolf alternately adored and detested her husband. Neither of them was known for being particularly strong, but they both won their fair share of quarrels. In spite of Woolf’s brilliance and formidability, I think Joyce’s familial reliance on liquid courage would be a deciding factor; there’s no way stream-of-consciousness could ward off a drunken uppercut.
2. Austen v. Brontë
The viral video Jane Austen's Fight Club has already hinted at what this fracas would look like. But who wins? There’s no question Charlotte Brontë knew how to inject testosterone into her books: she published under the masculine pseudonym Currer Bell. But she only wrote four novels compared to Stone Cold Jane Austen’s six. All the same, Charlotte wrote about a woman who struggled to gain authority and power despite the men in her life, while Austen’s women are more content to offer scathing commentary about their neighbors. It's close, but my money’s on Charlotte for putting the "brawn" in "Brawn-të."
3. Sontag v. Didion
Instead of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of writerly takedowns. This is a purely theoretical fistfight, though, since Ms. Sontag has passed away, and Ms. Didion (generously described by Tom Brokaw as “physically frail”) has insisted that working at a typewriter is “the only aggressive act I have, it’s the only way I can be aggressive.” I’m seeing this as a David-and-Goliath thing; I’m sure a typewriter isn’t the only thing Joan Didion could wrap her hands around. I’d bet my collection of signed first editions that Didion would give Sontag a year of magical PAIN!
4. Franzen v. Foer
I don’t usually think of hipster types as being well-suited to the steel cage, but I could picture these two Jonathans facing off. The giant glasses take onthe slim glasses. One writes panoramic bestsellers chronicling America; the other pokes and prods at his words for literary and visual effect. They’ve both been criticized for being overly sentimental, even in stories about typefaces. I think Franzen would be in better shape to fight, but they’d probably just sit, look at each other, and breathe world-weary sighs at an audience that would rather pay to see them manhandle each other than create vivid, complex characters mirroring our lives. I predict a mutual forfeit and at least one thrown cup of pinot grigio.
5. Tolstoy v. Dostoyevsky
Ladbrokes would go insane with this one. The Millions has already asked eight experts to weigh in. The two authors boast doorstops—The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace—that blew away any other competition. The strange thing is, despite living at the same time, they were only in the same building once, and Dostoyevsky regretted that they never met. So who would win? From the pictures, neither of them seems to have been a hale and hearty fellow, although Tolstoy's military career might give him a slight leg up. Both have impressive beards. I could see them deciding to form a tag team, or perhaps signing up with the underrated Bolsheviks.
image: bythatyoumean.com
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