Nominating Editor: Jake Freivald
Flash Fiction Online is a monthly online flash-only magazine that launched in December 2007. As writers, our staff wanted to create a professional flash fiction market, as defined by groups like the SFWA and our own standards; as readers, we wanted to publish accessible and well-written stories. We care more about plot and character than genre. Flash tends to blur boundaries anyway, and our tastes vary widely enough that we publish a broad selection of genres and styles. We've featured Bruce Holland Rogers, who is now writing a column for us, along with other well-known authors such as Bruce McAllister and Jim Van Pelt, but we've also published several authors' very first stories.
I loved David Tallerman's "Strive to be Happy" from the moment I started reading. There's an intensity and discomfort in it, even though there's not a lot of physical action, and I kept getting these little surprises as the words flowed by. For me, the ultimate surprise was how well it resolved—not with all the loose ends tied up, mind you, but with the beginning of something new. It's great stuff all delivered in fewer than 900 words.
Nominated Flash Fiction: "Strive to be Happy" - David Tallerman
Reviewed by: David Erlewine
A story really works when it makes me sad that I didn’t write it. In this case, I will have to accept sharing the author’s first name. In about 800 words, David Tallerman makes me feel sorry for, and genuinely root for, a supremely unlikable narrator. The story involves the aforementioned jerk, who has come to despise and verbally abuse the woman living with him. It is never made clear whether the woman is a long-time girlfriend, fiancée, or wife. But they have been together for some time and whatever love he felt for her is gone.
Every morning he wakes up to find her hypnotized in front of her “dramatically italicised print of Max Ehrmann’s ‘Desiderata.’” The narrator hates the poem’s “cod wisdom,” deriding its “trite, hollow sentences” as “religion for atheists.” The poem “seemed to symbolize everything he despised about her; and the knowledge that those were the same things he’d once loved about her only worsened his rage.” The only words said aloud in the story are his insults as she stands in front of the poster. He knows he is being awful, but her acceptance of such behavior seems to encourage him.
One morning he destroys the poster, surprised by his “childlike ferocity.” Though the woman’s reaction isn’t stated, it appears she just stands by, watching. Then he heads to work. When he returns home, Tallerman ratchets up the tension with pitch-perfect pacing and details, describing "the bedroom in disarray, her clothes gone, her blue leather suitcase missing from its perch beneath the stairs." Tallerman nails the narrator’s response: “Instead, he felt literally deflated, as if one moment he were large and the next very small. She had left him. With that realization came sadness, too imprecise and short-lived to be the grief of loss. After that came relief.” Reading that passage, even now, elicits images from my own break-ups, the relief and sadness I felt in alternating waves.
The narrator finds, on the kitchen table, the poster’s torn fragments “spread like a patchwork quilt” and roughly put back in one piece, now covered in his lover’s notes. Next to the poem’s “As far as possible without surrender,” she has written, “‘No no no! Not anymore.’” This is wonderful, how Tallerman allows the woman’s voice to finally be heard, to explode in our ears.
Next to the patchwork quilt is an envelope. I shared the narrator’s fear that this “last communication” would be hateful, something that would plague him. Inside are the poem’s final lines: “Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.” In the story’s most haunting line, the narrator finds these words contain “some last vestige of love that he had somehow never managed to destroy.” I suspect this guy will mourn, learn, and presumably treat his next lover, and himself, better. I remain impressed that Tallerman got me to care so much about a character that I would avoid in real life. That may be this often-brilliant story’s greatest feat.
Another line from “Desiderata” (not quoted in the story) is to “speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant...” The lover's long-needed words smack the narrator with quiet and clear truth.
This story will stay lodged in my brain way down the line.
Reviewer's Bio:
David Erlewine's stories appear or soon will in about 70 places, including Elimae, Ghoti, In Posse Review, Insolent Rudder, Keyhole (web), Literal Latte, Necessary Fiction (So New Media), Pank, Pedestal, and Word Riot. He lives near Annapolis and writes stories on the train and when his family sleeps. Visit him at his sad little blog.
Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
PANK/Lauren Becker/Sue Haigh/Flash Fiction Review
Nominating Editor: Roxane Gay
PANK is an annual print journal as well as a monthly online imprint. The word pank itself is a regional term from Michigan's Upper Peninsula where we live. If you ask three people what pank means, you'll get three different definitions, but the general consensus is that to pank is to pack or tamp something down. It is used with regard to mining (dynamite) or snow (panking it down to walk on because we get so damn much of the stuff). Where the magazine itself is concerned, editor Matt Seigel believes that PANK comes from the end of the road, the edge of things, a north shore, up country, a place of amalgamation, and unplumbed depths, where things are made and unmade, and unimagined futures are born. An ultima Thule, PANK – no soft pink hands here. We bear old scars, fresh scabs, callous, blood, and dirt. PANK is serene melancholy, spiritual longing, quirk, and anomaly. PANK is experimentation and improvisation. PANK inhabits contradiction.
More than anything we're interested in good writing. Everyone says that, but it bears repeating nonetheless. We particularly enjoy writing from people who take the time to read. You would think that goes without saying, but there are a surprising number of writers who don't seem to read anything but their own writing. We try to avoid them. Those writers make us sad. PANK publishes a lot of work that is cross genre, post genre, experimental and quirky. In our third issue, we had quite a few pieces that played in interesting ways with form. More traditional work also finds it way into our pages. We want words we will remember the next day and the next week and the next month. We've been extremely fortunate in getting a lot of work that meets that criterion.
I loved Lauren Becker's "You Should Know" the moment I first started reading it and I go back to it every few days because I love the way she uses language and the rational tone the narrator employs while relaying something that is irrational. The imagery of being held together imperfectly with rubber bands slays me. The piece is short but tight and there's something going on in every word in every sentence in every paragraph. It is, as a piece of writing, an embarrassment of riches. It's exactly the kind of writing that finds us.
Nominated Flash Fiction: "You Should Know" - Lauren Becker
Reviewed: by Sue Haigh
In this stunning little piece, Lauren Becker casually hands out useful advice on the first signs of madness (a pocket guide to self-diagnosis, as it were ), drawing her reader into her world, the one that lies on the other side of sanity. Look out, she says, with disarming kindness, this could be you.
In a mere 200 words, powerful metaphors – elastic bands stretched to breaking point, moving tectonic plates, bits not quite in place - are hinted at, as if seen from the edge of Becker’s eye, like the memory-traces of a strange dream.
The disturbing tragedy of her song-in-prose hides behind its stark, staccato delivery (not a comma in sight before the third paragraph). Emotions are kept strictly under wraps in case they should escape and blow her cover. The catalyst, a careless lover, is dismissed in a single sentence, as if too many words might destroy her again.
The subtle, insistent rhythm of Becker’s prose, the repetitive nature of her kind advice ("pay attention," "be careful," "see a doctor," "get a pill," "be on the lookout") speak eloquently of what threatens and binds us all – the human condition.
Reviewer's Bio:
Sue Haigh has spent most of her life on the north-east coast of Scotland, but now lives and writes deep underground in a cave-house in the Loire Valley in France.
She has written a collection of short stories, The Snow Lazarus, with support from the Scottish Book Trust. Stories from the collection have been published in print and online magazines and anthologies in Britain and America and have won a number of national and international awards and short-listings.
Stories from a Cave, her book of short stories for children, set in and around her house in France, will be published next year.
Sue studied psychology in Dundee and languages in Bristol, Paris and Cologne. She has worked as a teacher, university lecturer, clinical aromatherapist and counselor.
Sue is currently working on the final chapters of her novel, Missing Words, set in Germany and Scotland, and is also engaged in research for her next book, set in medieval Bruges.
Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.
PANK is an annual print journal as well as a monthly online imprint. The word pank itself is a regional term from Michigan's Upper Peninsula where we live. If you ask three people what pank means, you'll get three different definitions, but the general consensus is that to pank is to pack or tamp something down. It is used with regard to mining (dynamite) or snow (panking it down to walk on because we get so damn much of the stuff). Where the magazine itself is concerned, editor Matt Seigel believes that PANK comes from the end of the road, the edge of things, a north shore, up country, a place of amalgamation, and unplumbed depths, where things are made and unmade, and unimagined futures are born. An ultima Thule, PANK – no soft pink hands here. We bear old scars, fresh scabs, callous, blood, and dirt. PANK is serene melancholy, spiritual longing, quirk, and anomaly. PANK is experimentation and improvisation. PANK inhabits contradiction.
More than anything we're interested in good writing. Everyone says that, but it bears repeating nonetheless. We particularly enjoy writing from people who take the time to read. You would think that goes without saying, but there are a surprising number of writers who don't seem to read anything but their own writing. We try to avoid them. Those writers make us sad. PANK publishes a lot of work that is cross genre, post genre, experimental and quirky. In our third issue, we had quite a few pieces that played in interesting ways with form. More traditional work also finds it way into our pages. We want words we will remember the next day and the next week and the next month. We've been extremely fortunate in getting a lot of work that meets that criterion.
I loved Lauren Becker's "You Should Know" the moment I first started reading it and I go back to it every few days because I love the way she uses language and the rational tone the narrator employs while relaying something that is irrational. The imagery of being held together imperfectly with rubber bands slays me. The piece is short but tight and there's something going on in every word in every sentence in every paragraph. It is, as a piece of writing, an embarrassment of riches. It's exactly the kind of writing that finds us.
Nominated Flash Fiction: "You Should Know" - Lauren Becker
Reviewed: by Sue Haigh
In this stunning little piece, Lauren Becker casually hands out useful advice on the first signs of madness (a pocket guide to self-diagnosis, as it were ), drawing her reader into her world, the one that lies on the other side of sanity. Look out, she says, with disarming kindness, this could be you.
In a mere 200 words, powerful metaphors – elastic bands stretched to breaking point, moving tectonic plates, bits not quite in place - are hinted at, as if seen from the edge of Becker’s eye, like the memory-traces of a strange dream.
The disturbing tragedy of her song-in-prose hides behind its stark, staccato delivery (not a comma in sight before the third paragraph). Emotions are kept strictly under wraps in case they should escape and blow her cover. The catalyst, a careless lover, is dismissed in a single sentence, as if too many words might destroy her again.
The subtle, insistent rhythm of Becker’s prose, the repetitive nature of her kind advice ("pay attention," "be careful," "see a doctor," "get a pill," "be on the lookout") speak eloquently of what threatens and binds us all – the human condition.
Reviewer's Bio:
Sue Haigh has spent most of her life on the north-east coast of Scotland, but now lives and writes deep underground in a cave-house in the Loire Valley in France.She has written a collection of short stories, The Snow Lazarus, with support from the Scottish Book Trust. Stories from the collection have been published in print and online magazines and anthologies in Britain and America and have won a number of national and international awards and short-listings.
Stories from a Cave, her book of short stories for children, set in and around her house in France, will be published next year.
Sue studied psychology in Dundee and languages in Bristol, Paris and Cologne. She has worked as a teacher, university lecturer, clinical aromatherapist and counselor.
Sue is currently working on the final chapters of her novel, Missing Words, set in Germany and Scotland, and is also engaged in research for her next book, set in medieval Bruges.
Thanks for visiting Five Star Literary Stories and reading about this flash fiction.
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