Flash Is the Future

By Matt Weinkam

For the last two years, Literary Cleveland has been running flash fiction and flash nonfiction festivals online via Zoom. During these week-long programs, we hold panel discussions, workshops, and open mics designed to help writers learn about the genres, draft new pieces, share their work, and learn where and how to publish.

Not only have we gotten to work with some of the best flash writers in the country (Venita Blackburn, K-Ming Chang, Kathy Fish, Daisy Hernández, Lindsay Hunter, Michael Martone, Elena Passarello, Amber Sparks), we’ve also seen participants go on to publish work in Split Lip, Necessary Fiction, Fractured Lit, Tiny Molecules, Portland Review, and more.

Running these festivals and talking with panelists brought into focus what flash fiction and nonfiction have in common, what makes short form prose special, and why flash is central to the future of writing and publishing.

Engine of Innovation

During past festivals, Michael Martone, K-Ming Chang, Elena Passarello and others have spoken about flash as an engine of literary innovation, as a place where writers can experiment with new voices, forms, and tones. When you can draft a flash piece in a few days or even a few hours you are freer to take bigger risks than when you spend a few months or years working on a full-length story or essay or book. At the same time, short form prose places fewer demands on readers, allowing writers in flash fiction and flash nonfiction to try new things without overstaying their welcome.

Consider Diane Seuss’s single sentence “I hoisted them, two drug dealers, I guess that’s what they were,” (a much loved essay often cited during our flash nonfiction festivals), or the hilarious body horror list of “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover” by Amelia Gray (a personal favorite). Flash pieces like these accomplish things formally, tonally, emotionally, and politically that are harder to sustain in a longer story or essay.

At the same time, publishing at large is less receptive to experimentation than online flash journals, which are the tide pools of the literary world where strange new writing can evolve. Occasionally experiments from the flash world break out into the mainstream. For example, I suspect the recent popularity of novels in fragmented form (Dept. of Speculation, Memorial, No One is Talking About This) can be traced at least in part back to the rise of flash. Still, mainstream acceptance is not the goal. Flash fiction and flash nonfiction are not just farm-league systems for the major publishers, they are meaningful genres in their own right. They are essential to the future of literature.

That is why one of our major takeaways from these festivals is to be bolder, take bigger swings, and use flash to really explore what writing can do.

Catalyst for Change

Our festival panelists in both genres also identified flash as a potential space to dismantle the cultural redlining that still dominates publishing as a whole.

White writers made up the majority of contributor lists and mastheads and MFA students for so long. But in recent years not only do we see more flash stories and essays published by writers of color, writers who are queer or transgender, or writers who are disabled or neurodivergent, there are also more flash outlets with diverse mastheads and equitable models of publication.

Flash is uniquely suited genre to take back power. As a network of small (mostly online) journals, the world of flash in both fiction and nonfiction largely exists outside of the major established structures of production, reception, and recognition making it more responsive to calls for change. Flash can be a powerful outlet. As Vanessa Chan put it in one of our festival panels, “I think that writing for me is an exercise in regaining power and correcting the imbalance of power structures that exist for someone that looks like me in spaces that are maybe not made for me.”

Not that the flash community has fixed publishing or defeated white supremacy, of course. Genuine multicultural magazines and diverse contributor lists are still too few. But journals like The Offing, projects like SmokeLong en Español, special issues like Brevity’s upcoming Trans Experience, and anthologies of flash by writers of color like Forward: 21^st Century Flash Fiction edited by Megan Giddings help lead the way to an equitable future for all of publishing. A major takeaway from our festivals is the need to push this work further.

In the introduction to Forward, Megan Giddings explains that publishing diverse writers is more than just posturing: “I want to feel like my work is important. Not just something that makes the editors look good, but it so urgent and beautiful and engaging that they had to respond. That I am speaking to humanity and living, not filling a quota. I am a person.”

Genre Playground

But most of all, our panelists and participants celebrated flash fiction and flash nonfiction as genres for play. Writers of all backgrounds and interests find their way to flash to create in a joyful spirit.

Although fiction writers may draw more often from the well of imagination while nonfiction writers more often shape experience and research into new writing, firm genre distinctions are less important in flash. There is more crossover and interplay. I like how Joy Castro puts in in “Genre as a Vessel for Presence” when she says, “I see fiction and nonfiction slow-dancing, inseparable, holding each other close.”

At Literary Cleveland, we are excited to continue this dance, holding flash festivals for as long as the writing community is interested. Our third virtual Flash Fiction Festival is this February 19-25 and our workshop leaders and panelists are all contributors to the new Flash Fiction America anthology out from W. W. Norton on February 14. We will continue and deepen this conversation about flash and the future of writing. I hope you will join us.

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Matt Weinkam is the executive director of Literary Cleveland. His work has been published in Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, New South, DIAGRAM, and Electric Literature. He holds an MA in creative writing from Miami University, an MFA in fiction from Northern Michigan University, and he has taught creative writing at Sun Yat-sen University in Zhuhai, China.

A Review of Randon Billings Noble’s A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays

By Celia Jeffries

When I first taught the essay, it was in the form of five paragraphs: a nice model for young writers used to counting on their fingers.

When I taught high school English, we pushed beyond five paragraphs to more formal essays: persuasive, descriptive, narrative, and expository, all of which may be as necessary as learning table manners, but each of which sometimes felt like writing with one hand folded in the lap.

In college I taught the requisite freshman composition essays: analytical, argumentative, compare and contrast, and, if the school was progressive enough, the personal essay.

For the past few years, I’ve been teaching writing workshops in a literary arts center, working with adults who had survived the five-paragraph essay and all the proscriptive forms handed out in English classes across the land, but each of whom sensed there was another—perhaps better—way to present their thoughts on paper.

I went back to some of my favorite essayists: Joan Didion, John McPhee, Calvin Trillin, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, E.B. White, and M.F.K. Fisher. They weren’t arguing or persuading or comparing and contrasting. Or if they were, they were not following a rigid formula to do so. They were simply speaking their mind—on the page. Sometimes with humor, sometimes with rage, but always with their own engaging voice. I kept reading, moving through the “new journalism,” the “nonfiction novel,”  reveling in how writers were pushing the boundaries and playing with form. Along came “flash” pieces and “hermit crab” essays and prose that looks and feels like poetry, and essays that break out of academic labels to make the reader see and feel the world in new ways.

Finally, along came Randon Billings Noble and her anthology A Harp in the Stars, An Anthology of Lyric Essays. Acknowledging that there is no widespread agreement on what it is or what to call it, Noble has gathered the slippery term lyric essay and folded it into the warm arms of four different forms: flash, segmented, braided, and hermit crab. In her introduction she refers back to mythology, to Orpheus playing the lyre. “His music was so powerful it could almost—almost—raise the dead.”

Lyric essays, Noble says,

have the same power to soothe, to harrow, to persuade, to move, to raise, to rouse, to overcome. Like Orpheus and his songs, lyric essays try something daring. They rely more on intuition than exposition. They often use image more than narration. They question more than answer. But despite all this looseness, the lyric essay still has the responsibilities of any essay: to try to figure something out, to play with ideas, to show a shift in thinking.

Noble says she came to define a lyric essay as “a piece of writing with a visible/stand-out/unusual structure that explores/forecasts/gestures to an idea in an unexpected way.”

Thank you Randon Billings Noble. This anthology is a treasure chest of daring ways to take one’s voice to the page. It opens with two stunning flash essays (defined by Noble as one thousand words or fewer) by Diane Seuss and Jericho Parms, and then off the page flies Sarah Minor’s segmented essay “Vide” that literally must be seen to be believed. “Apocalypse Logic” by Elissa Washuta and “Woven” by Lidia Yuknavitch offer startling braided essays, while Sarah Einstein offers the laugh-out-loud (well, parts of it made me laugh out loud) segmented essay “Self-Portrait in Apologies.”

It’s hard to highlight just a few of the forty-four essays in this collection, each of which “stands out” and offers the reader an idea in an “unexpected way.” Noble has said she’s fond of the six craft essays included because they are “lyric essays about lyric essays; they do what they’re talking about as they talk about it.” As if forty-four outstanding essays and six craft essays were not enough, Noble closes out the anthology with a section titled “Meditations” where she gives the authors the last word: each contributor adds their own short meditation on the lyric essay.

My copy of A Harp in the Stars is already dog-eared and covered with post-it notes and will be at top of my syllabus.

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Celia Jeffries is the author of Blue Desert, a finalist in both the 2021 IPNE literary fiction awards and the 2021 Sarton historical fiction awards. Her prose has appeared in Writer’s Chronicle,  Solsticelitmag.com, Mom Egg Review, Puerto del Sol, and other journals.

The Case for Single-Sentence Prose in the Age of Insecurity

By Jason Thayer

I was having trouble focusing. Every story idea, every essay concept seemed unwieldy, unmanageable in the hellscape of Spring 2020. My mind flitted from anxiety to new anxiety as I obsessively checked the infection rates, monitored the new restrictions, raged against the maskless. I sat down at my computer every afternoon and tried to write something new and failed. I tried to revise my memoir manuscript, but couldn’t keep track of the arc, couldn’t assess whether the pacing in the first chapter was too fast or whether my hook was punchy enough to attract an agent.

The doorbell rang. It was our neighbor, a woman with short gray hair who wore pedal pushers like my mother. She was hugging a cardboard box.

“We have this food I won’t eat,” she said, then took a breath. Exhaled. “I don’t know if you know yet, but my husband died last week.”

I did not know this. I stood on the front porch with her for a few moments, fumbling for condolences, finally taking the box of food.

I told my partner about the interaction, the way our neighbor had used the plural, we, and then the singular, I. We unpacked the saltines, the canned chicken breast, the diet 7-Up. Trips to the grocery store were daunting and so, even though these items didn’t top our shopping list, we made our way through the gifted food.

In the morning while I washed dishes, I’d see our neighbor walk past the window and my mind would swim toward her sadness. Grief is its own isolation, and knowing that she was bearing hers alone, in lockdown, seemed an unprecedented cruelty. My father died when I was a child, and with a loss like this, comes a special communion with the bereaved; I could not stop thinking about my neighbor. Wondering what she made for dinner, and how long the leftovers lasted. Whether she was eating much at all. Whether there were days she didn’t speak to anyone except the cat that skulked across her lawn chasing squirrels. At night, I would look across our yards, the ill-defined property line, and see her reading in her living room, a single light on in the big dark house. In the morning, I would see her walk past my window as I washed dishes, and if I let my mind linger too long on her sadness, my eyes would well.

I sat down to write about this, but again, the task of molding this small interaction into a traditional essay seemed daunting. I did not have the attention span to research the impact of grief on bereaved spouses, or cull my memory for a poignant anecdote that would characterize our deceased neighbor, bringing to light what was lost. Even a flash piece was more than I could commit to, as the daily news grew more and more grim, the world around us more chaotic and unstable.

But what about a single sentence? Could I write a single sentence about my neighbor’s private grief and its vicarious impact? Yes, I could. I could work within these parameters. I could commit to this.

The single-sentence format is well-suited for this new world where our attentions stray, where our brains must keep tabs on virus rates, on which family members aren’t wearing masks, on systemic racism, on cops murdering unarmed Black and brown people.

This isn’t to suggest the single-sentence form is any easier to write. For example, I had wanted to write this blog entry in a single sentence, but couldn’t manage to fit everything I wanted to say. The limitations of a single sentence challenge the writer to twist syntax, bend structure to their will, or else winnow narrative down to the bones.

But with these restrictions also comes the opportunity for innovation. Experiments that might not be sustainable in longer work are manageable, even revelatory in brief formats. Could I read a whole novel where the protagonist was a slice of pizza? No. But a single sentence? Definitely.

Single-sentence stories can be told in a single breath, like Hemingway’s famous, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” But they can also take the form of Diane Seuss’ tour d’force, “I hoisted them, two drug dealers, I guess that’s what they were,” published in Brevity. Here, content dictates form. The long-winded, tangent-laden single sentence mimics the breathless adrenaline of the speaker in that moment, trying to make sense of what she has just done, excising the two drug dealers from her son’s apartment. This form wouldn’t work for a plodding story without that charged immediacy.

For my purposes, a modest single sentence was ideal for distilling a small interaction that lingered with me:

I did not know our neighbor died until his wife knocked to offer a box of food she wouldn’t eat: pancake mix, diet 7-up, Pepperidge Farm white bread her husband had stomached during a 3-month-long losing-battle to cancer, a box I took gratefully, offering condolences—no hugs, because the virus was already spreading, and because I didn’t know these neighbors well enough to provide this comfort, in fact, had no idea that the jolly guy I’d bantered with under the black walnut tree we shared, had cancer—and now I try not to watch her, absorb her loneliness, take it as my own, the widow social distancing in that big house, leaving briefly for daily walks past our kitchen window as I wash dishes, griddle my partner a breakfast of pancakes.

I had seen single sentences published in lit mags before, but I’d never heard of a journal that dealt exclusively in single-sentence content. Well, I thought. That’s an idea. That’s a magazine for this new age of insecurity.

This July, I launched Complete Sentence, an online magazine of single-sentence prose. Weekly, we publish single-sentence essays, stories, reviews, and hot takes. If you are having trouble focusing, consider this challenge: write a single sentence. Just one. And then send it our way.

For submission guidelines to Complete Sentence, click here.

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Jason Thayer is the Editor-in-Chief of Complete Sentence. His work has been published in The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, Hobart, and Essay Daily among others. Find more info at jasonthayer.com and on twitter @thejasonthayer.

Our Happy Brush With the Pulitzer Glitter

Diane Seuss

Lavish congratulations and turquoise sequins glued onto sea-colored cotton to Diane Seuss, frequent Brevity contributor, and one of two finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, for her book Four-Legged Girl.

This might be a good time to reprise some of Diane’s stunning prose work over the past few years, including “I hoisted them, two drug dealers, I guess that’s what they were,” “Gyre,” “Candy,” “I can’t stop thinking of that New York skirt, turquoise sequins glued onto sea-colored cotton,” and “You Like It Don’t You, You Like It Hard and Cold.”

Hard to beat those titles.

New Brevity Coming Soon

In Brevity’s Winter 2012 issue, John Warner, Melissa Delbridge, Nina Boutsikaris, Anne Panning, Philip Gerard, Heal McKnight, Amy Butcher, SJ Sindu, Samuel Autman, Margaret Whitford, Sheila Squillante, Kerrie Kemperman, Kara Garbe Balcerzak, Dylan Brown, Diane Seuss, and Brenda Peynado offer brief, vivid prose focused on inadvertant idiocy, stillness, gunfire, family funerals, how quickly gossip travels, almonds, community college teaching, and narrative. Stunning work across the board.

Watch for it late next week.

Brevity’s Bright and Sunny Summer 2010 Issue

We’ve launched a truly outstanding Summer 2010 issue, featuring twelve beautiful concise essays from Fleda Brown, Steven Church, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Sarah J. Lin, John Calderazzo, Marcia Aldrich, Melissa Ballard, Erin Murphy, Danny Goodman, Lisa Groen Braner, Diane Seuss, and Jenny Spinner.

In our Craft Section, Drema Hall Berkheimer visits those moments when the muse seemingly has better things to do, and Sharon DeBartolo Carmack outlines the ways a writer can put proper flesh onto the bones of ancestral stories.

Also Book Reviews from Michelle Wittle, Kelly Ferguson, Patty Wetli, and J. Luise, and stunning photographs from Ryan Rodgers.

Come visit.

BREV29: A Warm Winter Stew

BREVITY, the journal of concise nonfiction, launches the 29th issue today, bringing you the Big Bad Wolf, a glass eyeball, Parisian lingerie, a pair of stolen sneakers, an orphaned doe, and, possibly, a visitor from another planet. Maybe it’s just the snow playing tricks on our eyes, but each of these pieces seems to ask the same thing: “Did I see what I think I saw?” Bundle up and get warm by the intense fire of such talents as Lance Larsen, David Bradley, Tim Elhajj, John Bresland, Diane Seuss, Joe Bonomo, Kyle Minor, Laura Sewell Matter, Elizabeth Westmark, and Bryan Fry. Also, new Craft Essays from Brenda Miller and Lisa Knopp, and Book Reviews from Mary Richert, Richard Gilbert, and Stephanie Susnjara.

Read Brevity 29