FF Net

Last Thurs (just got home--am behind) a short of mine was reprinted @ Flashfiction.net ("Front Yard...." which originally appeared in QF #12).

Randall Brown does a great job w/ this site, and he offers a great riff on the story at the end of the post. Thanks, Randall!

Jessica Breheny's SOME MYTHOLOGY

I've been following Jessica Breheny since I read her story "Bug Funeral" in Avery #4. She's got a new chapbook out, SOME MYTHOLOGY, from Naissance, and can I say: it's pretty damn good....

If you're a writer--and you probably are--you'll appreciate JB immediately as a stylist. As a stylist, she's first rate. Like, for this last little while of my life, I haven't read anyone better.

Here's a bit from the first par of the opening story, "MirrorMirror," which was first pubbed in 580 Split:

"I live in a secret room with mushrooms and bats, skeletons and roots, pitchers and pipes. When I fly I have no legs. I hold out apples for my guests. Every night I set out to study fear."

And, because I can't help myself, a whole par from the title story:

"It wasn't until later that I met you in a class on Greek Mythology, and we drank the city into a sweet swirling puddle neighborhood by neighborhood, and you showed me how history is toppled together in a heap of velvet and cocktails, waltzed me into an oblivion of drunken ghosts. We Shanghaied each other from bars to corners to bars, and when you kissed me, at a bus stop haunted by garbage that flew around us like birds, it was poison and whiskey, a death that happened to someone else a long time before we were born."

W/ paragraphs like that, I'm a happy reader, but SOME MYTHOLOGY offers more: it's really cohesive, really carefully conceived as a whole--in ways I'll probably be better able to articulate when I read it again. But I sense that right away. Maybe I could say this for now: in these stories, if there's mythology, it's blurred, pulled into the anxieties of lived experience.... And if there's experience--regular fucked-up subjectivity--you can see how its subjects try to negotiate it as story/mythology, and later how they negotiate the stories themselves.....

Final analysis: great stuff: go forth and read.

3 Gymnos, translated

Some of my forebears are from Poland. I'm doing a seance tonight to call one back and get him/her to read one of the Gymnos that Piotr Siweki has translated for the Minimal Books blog.

He did Oklahoma City, Houston and Baltimore.

He's also translated work by Kim Chinquee, Molly Gaudry, Matt Bell, and lots of other friends and familiars.

....

Have been on the road, and am leaving again soon. Happy July everybody.....

Open Query Letter: 'VSF' Anthology

[Opening Paragraph: The Pitch]

I'm putting together ananthology called VSF: Very Short Fiction. I see it as the Flash Fiction anthology of the 21st century. I want you to want to publish it.


[Paragraphs Two, Three and Four: One Argument]

Hazuka and Thomas and Thomas' '92 Norton anthology, Flash Fiction, popularized the term, 'flash fiction,' and also an aesthetic – stories that often seem, in their art, flash- or glimpse-like. Such stories can be wonderful, of course, but a lot has happened since then; a lot is happening now.

Here's how I would characterize what we're currently seeing: pretty much every really talented new writer is participating in the exploration of a form whose conventions are far, far less set than are those of the full-length short story.

The VSF anthology will offer:

• a range of lengths under the 1000-word mark. In '92, Hazuka and Thomas and Thomas set the ceiling at 750 words, but most of the stories included were between 500 and 750 words. To capture what's happening now, I think you need an anthology that has a more than token offering of microfiction, and one that's also open to what people are doing in the 750 – 1000 word range.

• a range of styles and approaches. Writing in his intro to the Best American Short Stories volume of '92, Robert Stone had this to say: "As of 1992, American writers seem ready to accept traditional forms without self-consciousness in dealing with the complexity of the world around them." As of now? Writers are doing amazing vsf within what Stone calls the "realist mode," but they're certainly not confining themselves to that, or to any tradition.


[Paragraph Four: Who the Hell are You?]

I'm Scott Garson. This is my blog. Welcome. I'm the editor of Wigleaf and the Series Editor of the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions annual. My collection of microfictions, American Gymnopédies, was published as part of the WWP very short fiction series. (Jim Heynen's blurb: "Like Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies, Garson’s atmospheric shorts surprised me with their subtle shifts and eccentricities. Linked by geographic places, the collection progresses in tiny increments to become a dance between internal and external geographies. In perception and execution, this is a wonderfully original work.")


[Paragraph Five: Why Aren't You Doing This the Conventional Way?]

I'm not lazy but writing letters bores me. I think I can get a publisher this way. I think it will be the right publisher.


[Paragraphs Six and Seven: A Parting Argument]

This anthology will be landmark and will sell.

It will sell because it will be fucking great. It will be fucking great because it will offer the best of an intense reading experience that most readers are not now being offered. Very short fiction isn't poetry, but it's closer to poetry than the novel and even most short stories. Pick up the average collection of stories nowadays—something like More of This World and Maybe Another—and you get fat, relaxed paragraphs that assume, from the start, readers' willingness to invest in a character that hasn't yet been introduced. This is much like most novels (and is the reason, I think, that readers don't spend a ton of money on collections; if they work like novels, why not read the real thing?). Very short fiction works differently. I won't limit it via definition, but I'll say this: in vsf, each word is a choice. Together they will burn into your brain. You'll feel like you're on drugs. You'll feel like you're on crack. You'll be saying, Please, Mr. Garson. More.


[Paragraph Eight: Polite Adieu and Expression of Good Wishes]

Thank you so much for visiting today, best,

Scott

Mini I-view @ Fictionaut

Happy to be boxed in the F-naut Five. Thnx to Meg Pokrass.

Newsbits

* Guest post up at Emerging Writers Network for Short Story Month. There've been lots of great ones at EWN this month, by Dan Wickett and Stacy Musynski and others. Mine's on "Ghosts and Lovers," a story from Joanna Howard's recent collection, On a Winding Stair.

* Little 'pensee' up at The Laughing Yeti, Shome Dasgupta's Writers on Reading project. Words by Matt Bell and Brian Evenson went up in the days after mine. (I've been returning to this site; it's sort of addictive.)

Unofficial Acknowledgements Page for American Gymnopédies

So: American Gymnopédies is here. It's sold out again (for now?), but for anyone who got one, copies should arrive by Tuesday.

Some public thanks here for my editor/publisher, Molly Gaudry @ WWP. I read it through, the collection, for the first time this morning, and I realized something—maybe something obvious but something I hadn't fully realized before: what you get in the case of something like this, if you're the writer, is not all yours. MG brought to this thing ambition, investment, big talent. She's been a visioner. Heart MG.

Others who need to be upped for contributions or involvements big or small: David McNamara at sunnyoutside, James Ullmer, who did the cover and interior art, Pia Ehrhardt, Jim Heynen, Michael Martone, David McLendon, Sara Lippmann, Peter Cole, J.A. Tyler, and all the editors of the mags in which some of the Gymnos were first published—though the editors, except for Corium, do get thanked in the pages (thnx Corium).

Today I'm a happy boy.

Next in line for the WWP Very Short Fiction series: Pedro Ponce, with Alien Autopsy, and Kathy Fish, with Foreign Film. I've taught stories from both of these collections. Believe this: I'll be the first one ordering them.