I wrote this piece a few weeks ago after reading some Wendell Berry. It was published in the latest edition of Rat’s Ass Review. I’d love for you to read it.
VFW photo credit here.
Category: writing
“Placing it Elsewhere” by Andrew Bertaina
Check out this poem by Andrew Bertaina at Rejection Letters.
“Last Picnic” by Charles Simic
I found this poem years ago and come back to it often. Read it here at Harvard Review.
Poetry: Now by Marc Darnell
A good reminder…
Photo by Jessica Lynn Dotson
Hug your son and tell him you love him,
or do something with him, anything—
stop tinkering with your crap in the garage.
That overgrown toolshed isn’t an homage
to the greasy god of car part hoarding.
Hug your son and tell him you love him.
In a few more years he won’t be driven
to sleep in the house of a widower drinking.
Stop tinkering with your crap. In the garage
the yellowed calendar girls know your age—
you can’t sit on the beach with them mingling,
so hug your son. Tell him you love him
before your headlights are cracked and dim,
while he’s in a far place, his heart sinking,
and you’re still tinkering in the garage
as you gasp with acid reflux and wage
war with esophageal cancer, and start thinking
it’s too late to find him and tell him you…
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Forthcoming at Quatrain.Fish
Quatrain.Fish publishes very short poetry of four lines or less. Here’s their Editor’s Note:
I know for myself, when I set to write a short poem, I tend to end up with about six lines. Those of course, won’t be welcome here at Quatrain.Fish. Most poetry of four lines or less (fewer, if you insist) isn’t a poem at all, but part of a poem or an ill-formed thought. Yet if, as Poe claimed, long poems aren’t poems at all, then perhaps the most poetical of poems is the shortest of poems.
Perhaps.
True or not, a perfectly crafted, tiny poem is like a sharp knife or a sex-laden wink, an empty elevator shaft or the perfect vista bursting through fog: perfectly captured images and emotions that can creep into our lives and never leave. We hope Quatrain.Fish publishes one or two or three or thirty that can be that for you.
A piece of mine was just accepted for publication. I look forward to sharing it soon.
In the meantime, check out Quatrain.Fish. They are permanently closing to new submissions in December, so get your short work to them soon.
Isaac Bashevis Singer on the State of the Short Story (circa 1980)
Although the short story is not in vogue nowadays, I still believe that it constitutes the utmost challenge to the creative writer. Unlike the novel, which can absorb and even forgive lengthy digressions, flashbacks, and loose construction, the short story must aim directly at its climax. It must possess uninterrupted tension and suspense. Also, brevity is its very essence. The short story must have a definite plan; it cannot be what in literary jargon is called ‘a slice of life.’ The masters of the short story, Chekhov, Maupassant, as well as the sublime scribe of the Joseph story, in the Book of Genesis, knew exactly where they were going.
Dirty Realism and Very Short Fiction
Over the years, many people have ended up at this blog because of some posts on dirty realism. A definition of the style from Wikipedia, circa 2009:
“Dirty Realism is a North American literary movement born in the 1970s-80s in which the narrative is stripped down to its fundamental features.
This movement is a derivation from minimalism. As minimalism, dirty realism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Authors working within the genre tend to eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional.
Dirty realism authors include the movement “godfather” Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), as well as the short story writers Raymond Carver (1938-1988), Tobias Wolff (1945), Richard Ford (1944), Frederick Barthelme, and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (1950).”
My favorite line from this description is: “The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional.”
When I was thinking about this a dozen years ago, flash fiction was not as well-established across the literary internet as it is today. The flash fiction I was writing was almost exclusively in the dirty realist voice. In my way of thinking, the stories weren’t really about what happens in them as much as what the actions (or lack of) and the urgency of shorter forms evoke. Compulsions of style and length dovetailed by default. For me, realism was (and maybe is) the natural voice of very short fiction, and very short fiction is a natural expression of the realist voice.
These days, I think there’s much more to it. But there’s still a kernel of truth to these connections, at least for me and for my shorter work. The trick is not to be too clever or too pithy, and sometimes that’s much harder than it sounds.
Chris Cocca 