October 2023
Bringing the micro newsletter to you
Life isn’t a round, complete circle—it’s shaped by fragments, shards, and pinpricks. It’s a collage of snapshots, a collection of the unspoken, an attic full of situations you can’t quite get rid of. The brevity of flash is perfect for capturing the small but telling moments when life pivots almost unnoticeably, yet profoundly.
-The Art of Brevity, Grant Faulkner
Flash fiction is its own beast. Set free from the confining narrative structures of arcs and inverted checkmarks, it can linger on one moment, a singular thought, a simple scene. You must peel away the rind and pith to be left with just the juicy meat beneath. We draw inspiration from Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story, and Lydia Davis’ narratives that last only one sentence. You can start with a large mass and chip away at it until a shape emerges, like a sculptor, or build it one word at a time, like a brick-layer. Whatever your method, what remains will hopefully be surprising, as precise as it is universal.
A New Story for You:
Chocolate Cake
A story by Jennifer Wortman
My dad’s student from the college, who’d come over for dinner, looked at me and said, “You can’t have any chocolate cake!” I was one. He thought he was making a pretty good joke. I burst into tears. While stammering his apologies, he almost burst into tears himself. My dad told this story forever. He would mimic us both: the student’s goofy “You can’t have any chocolate cake!”; my big “WAAAH!” It was his favorite cautionary tale: joking with babies when you yourself are but a baby, who understands nothing until, suddenly, facing the tears you’ve caused, you understand everything.
A Story From the Archives:
Competition
A story by Meg Pokrass
She let him make love to her the first night and he told her that he would do this every single night for the rest of her life. She let him make love to her the next night, but it had already become some kind of contest in his mind about whether or not he could do this exactly as well as the night before. She let him make love to her the third night, but she was no longer there inside her body. Instead, she was watching from a safe distance—sitting next to the dog, catching her breath.
Book of the month:
We wanted to bring to you one of our favorite Meg Pokrass stories from our archive. Why? Well, besides the fact that it’s a story that settles over you like a sheet pulled above one’s neck and over one’s face, Meg Pokrass is a giant in the microfiction scene. You can read our interview with Meg here, where she elucidates her journey into writing flash fiction. She has released a number of phenomenal collections of short prose, and we’re eager to add her newest book, Disappearing Debutantes, written with Aimee Parkison, to our shelves. Sean Lusk, author of The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesly, calls it “strikingly original” and Robert Shapard says it takes stories “where you never thought they’d go.”
A PROMPT:
Hopefully by now, you’ve found your imagination sparked by the stories here. Perhaps you’re reaching for a pen and notepad, or opening a new Word doc. Seems like a good time for a prompt, no?
Much like short short stories, photography captures the ephemeral, the brief, the most minute of moments. We often find that an image invites us into our senses, and through them, we might bump into the beginnings of a story. This month, we have this revelatory photo for you, which we hope will grab you as it did us. Happy writing!
If you have a photo prompt story to share, submit it in the comments here: