4 creative nonfiction prompts to play with for no apparent reason

[1] Disappointments start small and grow into us. Janet Malcolm remembers the power of her first disappointment—how it reframed the world and the way in which she consciously related that world to her self hood. She considers the significance of her response to being given peony petals rather than the promised rose petals. Janet uses this to probe the childhood self and the negative emotional space that surprised her. Was it the first time she felt self-consciously set apart from her peers? Or was it an aesthetic that remained constant, one which leads her to the present day when she looks down on “fragile” peonies? Write a brief CNF about the first memory you have of disappointment. 

[2]. Wildebeests follow the rain in annual migratory loops around southeastern Africa. Write a flash CNF that makes us of this fact.

[3] Molly Brodak's harrowing and unredemptive memoir, Bandit, follows the life of her father, a gambler, a bank robber, a survivor, a prisoner. Brodak uses her father's narrative to reveal the child that grew out of it. Use the following line as a prompt to free-write: "The houses I lived in felt more like boats than houses."

[4] Is there anything you wish people could know about you automatically, without explanation? Any part of your past experience that you need to mark down and keep? What tattoo would you use and why? If you’ve already done this, then use your most resonant tat for this exercise. Write a CNF about the tattoo you would choose to tell an integral story in your life—and how that experience has marked you.

The yellow scarf, the magnificent detail

Reading Mary Ruefle’s “Woman With a Yellow Scarf” (Iowa Review, 2008).

She gives us a woman with a yellow scarf in a story by Camus. The blinding sensory detail that draws the reader out of a story, that changes the tone and texture without resolving it. Without settling anywhere we can know or mark.

I think of the dead sparrow on the front porch steps with a cat purring nearby, a cat coiling her tail and stretching near the fallen sparrow. You are torn between horror and the emergent need to parent, to congratulate proud Whiskers. Oh Whiskers, what a strong a reckless kitty you are! (Oh Whiskers, what on earth?)

You enter the house in search of plastic bag to remove the broken bird. Whiskers rumbles between your legs, purring, satisfied. You forgot Whiskers was wicked. You forgot so much about the nature of furred beasts when you let him into your bed and started telling stories in which he served as protagonist. Something new and strange has emerged between you and Whiskers. There is no way to explain or discuss this emergence. And no way to know if Whiskers understands.

[This is where the story changes. This is the first brick of suspense weighing on your characters. Use it. ]

Cameo forms in poetry

Sometimes I need to slip out of my own head and into someone else’s straitjacket. Ergo cameo.

Since this is hard to read, I’ve attached a PDF at the bottom. Download it. Have fun with it. Cameos are the perfect compositional form for traffic.

Writing prompts about ecstasy, Rilke, Godard...

1. Jean Luc Godard’s film, Masculin Feminin (see trailer above)

2. The song, “Visions of Johanna,” by Bob Dylan on repeat.

3. A sexual superstition you’ve heard or experienced (i.e. women can’t get pregnant if they’re on top). And why. And all the rest.

4. That time you did or did not try Ecstasy.

5. A moment in which you felt a slight gap between yourself and the world.

6. Rilke’s belief “in the possibility of love in a climate of death.” And how that looks.

7. The fact that Karl Marx’s favorite virtue in women was weakness while his favorite virtue in men was strength. Using this as the basis for a dialogue between Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, his wife.

8. That moment when Jenny Laura Marx and Paul Lafargue committed suicide together.

9. Something in response to Nelly Sach’s one line poem: “But silence is where the victims dwell.” 

10. A poem or story for which the secret, unrevealed epigraph might be Sigmund Freud’s 1915 statement: "Our own death is indeed, unimaginable, and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as spectators."

Writing the grotesque: Lessons from the Oates industry

In her “Afterword: Reflections on the Grotesque” to Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, Joyce Carol Oates writes:

“I take as the most profound mystery of our human experience the fact that, though we each exist subjectively, and know the world only through this prism of self, this ‘subjectivity’ is inaccessible, this unreal, and mysterious, to others. And the obverse—all others are, in the deepest sense, strangers.”

She reflects on the lure of the grotesque, the charm of the vampire as evidence that evil can be as seductive as it is repulsive—that it can render us not just victims but accomplices in its destruction. There is a sense of horror or dread bound up in the grotesque, a sense of perversion in which we can feel how something good begins rotting. 

The stories in her collection include range the gamut of grotesque topics, including dolls, haunted houses, child abductions, rape, sexual violence, white cats, repetitive games and game worlds, murder of a child.

I’ve excerpted a bit of “Extenuating Circumstances,” my favorite short story from this collection below. You can download the entire PSF using the link.

Because I feared loving him too much, and in that weakness failing to protect him from hurt.

Because his crying tore my heart but angered me too so I feared laying hands upon him wild and unplanned.

Because he flinched seeing me. That nerve jumping in his eye.

Because he was always hurting himself, he was so clumsy falling off the swing hitting his head against the metal post so one of the other mothers saw and cried out Oh! Oh look your son is bleeding! and that time in the kitchen whining and pulling at me in a bad temper reaching up to grab the pot handle and almost overturning the boiling water in his face so I lost control slapping him shaking him by the arm Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad! my voice rising in fury not caring who heard.

Because that day in the courtroom you refused to look at me your face shut like a fist against me and your lawyer too, like I was dirt beneath your shoes. Like maybe he was not even your son but you would sign the papers as if he was, you are so superior.

(Read the remainder of Joyce Carol Oates’ story below. )

“Extenuating Circumstances” is structured as a legal apologia, with first person narrator confessing why she killed her child, and addressing it to the (absent) biological father.

Like a legal document, each paragraph begins with the word “Because…” followed by an extenuating circumstance.

The first paragraph: “Because it was a mercy. Because God even in His cruelty will sometimes grant mercy.”

Oates adds dread and suspense in both the formal framing and the resolute punctuation. Although some paragraphs include questions to the father, no statement ends with a question mark. The lack of question marks propels the dread forward, giving us the sense that the answer does not matter, the conclusion having already been acted upon. Like the verdict of our culture on single mothers.

It’s a fantastic story—and a fictional model for writing the grotesque in motherhood under patriarchy. There is a continuing sense that the mother is damned no matter what she does—damned by the child, damned by the role, and damned by the man.

On the line between autobiography and fiction

In her 1652 literary salon, Madeleine de Scudery introduced the word “roman a clef” to describe a genre of writing that is autobiography overlaid with fiction. Now also called by various names including auto-fiction, nonfiction novel, autobiographical novel, etc.

“So ask me again now—what is autobiographical about my novel—and I will talk about fidelity to emotional effect and contextual variance. About level shifts and category shifts and the impossibility of exact equivalencies. I might discuss the translatability of the source material and then take you through the reconstruction of sound or image or structure. I will mention how inner becomes outer, how sometimes all you can do is convey meaning or form but not both. I will talk about the tension in word choice and metaphor, the gift of plenty and the risk of nuance. I will invite you to wend with me, to wander through the words. Because I am always in the work and outside of it. I am and am not the story.”

- Michelle Bailait-Jones, “On the Impossibility of Locating the Line Between Fiction and Non” (LitHub)

Example of nonfiction novel: Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana.
Multiple epigraphs, pictures, footnotes (academic and digressive), references to pop culture, explications of literary theory. Stories structured by associative leaps and hops from digression to digression. Dedicated to Teju Cole, whose style inspired it.

Kailash uses two voices to tell his story. There is his older self, speaking from twenty years’ distance with the help of his journals and notebooks, and then there is his guiltier, younger self. That’s the voice that the newly arrived, inauthentic-feeling Kailash uses to address an imaginary judge who wants to kick him out of the country. 

- Joanna Biggs, “Erotic Exploration in Immigrant, Montana” (New Yorker)

Kumar explains early and forcefully why these subjects—geopolitics and sex; geography and desire; history and lust—should share pages. In an enormously funny yet simultaneously dark recurring device recalling Roth’s Portnoy addressing his psychiatrist, Kailash speaks to an imagined immigration judge whom he pictures adjudicating both his status in America and his libidinous proclivities. Sex, Kailash tells us, is the “crucial part of humanity denied to the immigrant. You look at a dark immigrant in that long line at JFK…you look at him and think that he wants your job and not that he just wants to get laid.”

-Sanjena Sathian, “Geopolitics and Sex, Geography and Desire: On Amitava Kumar’s ‘Immigrant, Montana’" (The Millions)

Teju Cole: “To be a writer in exile is a great thing. But what is exile now, when everyone goes and comes freely?” 

Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti practice an auto-fiction in which the book turns in to the self while Alice Sebold and Teju Cole write novels that turn to the world.

The difference between fiction and memoir may be the difference—when it comes to meaning, that recyclable plastic thing we crave in our lives, and without which we become despondent and ultimately inert—between metaphor and referential mania. They say the truth shall set you free, but it seems rather to be the case that fiction, or, Stories About Fake People, who can be understood by means of the empathic engine of metaphor to be yourself, shall free you from that intolerable freedom we call meaninglessness. 

- Rebecca Wolff, “Our Sense of Truth” (Lithub)

Phillip Roth’s view of selfhood as perpetual performance with a character in a book being only one variant of that enormous possibility.

“People constantly change their story… we are writing fictitious versions of our lives all the time, contradictory but mutually entangling stories that, however subtly or grossly falsified, constitute our hold on reality and are the closest thing we have to truth.”

- William Gass quoting Phillip Roth, “Deciding to Do the Impossible” (New York Times)

Tim Parks on Leo Tolstoy’s use of life for fiction. After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy chose the performance of goodness and sainthood over the writing of fiction, which felt to him like an indulgence. His relationship with Sonya, his wife, and their thirteen children, kept him rooted in the flesh and the material. Then in 1887, Tolstoy returned to fiction to write The Kreutzer Sonata (my personal favorite novella), in which protagonist holds his views on abstinence and material world and kills his wife in a fit of rage when he discovers she is having an affair with the violin teacher. Six years later, Sonya fell involve with her younger piano teacher but Tolstoy did not kill her. It’s not clear whether he wrote the script for the affair or predicted it. A character is not a steady state so much as a tension between various poles and forces. The problem is being anyone at all.

“Let’s offer this formulation: a certain kind of writer, for whom the day-to-day performance of self—the interaction of personality with the world—is complex and conflicted, invents multiple fictional selves who deal with the same predicament in different ways. Rather than establishing any ultimate truth about identity, such a writer explores possibilities that might be dangerous or incompatible in real life. In short, the writing becomes an extension of the living.”

- Tim Parks, “How Best to Read Auto-Fiction” (New York Review of Books) 

In “Corn Maze,” Pam Houston talks about the blurred lines between fiction and nonfiction.  When she toured for her first fiction collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, the question she was asked most often was how much of this really happened to her? She answered honestly: “A lot of it.” 

Houston maintains that truth can never be an absolute. The instability of truth automatically locates creative nonfiction between genres.

“When it was decided (When was that again, and by whom?) that we were all supposed to choose between fiction and nonfiction, what was not taken into account was that for some of us truth can never be an absolute, that there can (at best) be only less true and more true and sometimes those two collapse inside each other like a Turducken. Given the failure of memory. Given the failure of language to mean. Given metaphor. Given metonymy. Given the ever-shifting junction of code and context. Given the twenty-five people who saw the same car accident. Given our denial. Given our longings. // Who cares really if she hung herself or slit her wrists when what really matters is that James Frey is secretly afraid that he’s the one who killed her.”

The line of acceptable imagining in blurry. Houston gives example of three Italian kayakers which she loosely invented for an essay which the editor removed because they weren’t “real” in the sense of being verifiable. Maybe they were Spanish. On the other hand, the same editor added a fog to create atmosphere. 

Her novel of 144 chapters does not purport to be nonfiction. And yet, as the James Frey scandal blew up, Pam Houston revisited her naming strategies.

“In past books I have used Millie, Lucy, and Rae. For the sake of sentence rhythm, I was leaning towards something with one syllable, but it would also be convenient to the book if the replacement name meant something as embarrassing as what the name “Pamela” means: which is all honey. I had considered Melinda, which on some sites means honey and could be shortened to Mel. I had considered Samantha which means listener, and could be shortened to Sam.  But in the car with the elk in the pasture and the snow on the road and Jeff Tweedy in my ears I was all of a sudden very angry at whoever it was who put all that pressure on Oprah Winfrey. This book was in danger of missing the whole point of itself if my name were not Pam in it. If my name were not Pam in it, who was the organizing consciousness behind these 144 tiny miraculous coincident unrelated things?”

In naming characters for fiction, the conventions don’t always make sense. You can write fiction that resembles a real person more than the nonfiction that names them and proceeds carefully. 

“Speaking only for myself, now, I cannot see any way that my subsequent well-being depends on whether or not, or how much, you believe what I am telling you—that is to say—on the difference (if there is any) between 82 and 100 percent true. My well-being (when and if it exists) resides in the gaps language leaves between myself and the corn maze, myself and the Las Vegas junkies, myself and the elk chest-deep in snow. It is there, in that white space of language’s limitation that I am allowed to touch everything, and it is in those moments of touching everything, that I am some version of free.”

Her writing tends to avoid didactic statements because she feels like she can’t speak for everyone.

“I have never felt comfortable speaking for anyone except myself. Maybe I had been socialized not to make declarative statements. Maybe I thought you had to be fifty before you knew anything about the world. Maybe I was afraid of misrepresenting someone I thought I understood but didn’t. Maybe I was afraid of acting hypocritically. Maybe I have always believed it is more honest, more direct, and ultimately more powerful, to tell a story, one concrete and particular detail at a time.”

And finally, in loose sum, a writing prompt of sorts from Alexander Chee’s essay, “The Writing Life,” found in How to Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays:

“The writer Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that day ‘the consolations of the mask,’ where you make a place that doesn’t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory.” 

Lia Purpura on the writer's journal

A Journal and a Notepad

Lia Purpura recommends carrying an intermediary little pad as a catch-all that you can transcribe into your journal at the end of the day.

Found journals include the artifacts of daily life, the to-do lists, the odd objects, the sudden observations.

Review your journals for “patterns of thought” or “patterns of image.” Note recurrences and memories that keep begging to be addressed. Set tasks or writing habits for yourself in the journal. For example, “I’ll look out this window every morning for 3 months and record what I see.” Note the patterns that emerge in a single day of your life. How do these patterns juxtapose against the rhythms? What patterns emerge in a week? What obstacles continue to arise that thwart you?

Writing Prompt

David Shields describes “appropriation art” as “when you steal but make a point of stealing, because by changing the context you change the connotations.” How is this true? How does it apply to fashion? Give a few examples of writers and artists that create appropriation art.

"Fraudulent artifacts": over 150 artifacts forms for prose

Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, is hot in my head right now.  Shields and Vollmer define “fraudulent artifacts” as “a text purporting to be a particular form of writing… which also tells a story, stirs thoughts and emotions, inspires inquiry, initiates action, and/or calls into question that which is—or has purported to be—real.”

Here's the frame:  An artifact is by definition an object constructed by a human being. Every artifact arises from a series of decisions taken by its maker. These artifacts are governed by social conventions and how we use or abuse them, how we fill the box. Conventions are nothing if not a way to create expectations. These expectations are a primary tool in the writer’s arsenal.

A fraudulent artifact infuses a received form with a story, thus creating an object “more authentic than the original upon which it was based.” The deceptiveness is self-reflexive as well as confessional.

Notice where risks can be taken in each form or genre and then "redraw the limitations." Use the form as vehicle to carry narrative. Make sure artifact reveals something about the narrator, generally the maker of the artifact. And, if you're smart, read the introduction to the book online in PDF for free, where the authors lay this out more cogently. 

“Experimental fiction is the art of telling a story in which certain aspects of reality have been exaggerated or distorted in such a way as to put the reader off the story and make him go watch a television show. Another aspect of the experimental story is the innovative use of language.

The ending of an experimental story is very important. It should make no sense, thus disrupting the reader’s dominant paradigm. You, the reader, should just sit there, stunned, asking yourself, “Wait, am I missing the last page?””

— George Saunders, "Writing Experimental Fiction"

“Breaking the rules involves risk. Risk produces tension. Tension produces energy. Energy produces momentum.”

— David Shields and Matthew Vollmer

Over 150 Extensive Artifact Forms for Fiction or Nonfiction

 Note: This isn't exhaustive. And many could fall under multiple categories. 

HOW-TO GUIDES & INSTRUCTION MANUALS

"How To Become a Writer" by Lorrie Moore
"A Guide to Fooling Yourself" by Lauren Schenckman
"How to Date a White Guy" by Naira Kuzmich
"How to Measure Your Breast Size" Laura Madeline Wiseman
"How to Skin a Bird" by Chelsey Biondollilo
"How to Be Another Person in 5 Days" by Rebecca Bernard
"How to Explore a Graveyard" by Lindsey Palka
"A Manual for Surviving an Accidental Drowning" by Cait Powell (safety manual)
"Installing Linux in a Dead Badger" by Lucy A. Snyder
"Instructions for Extinction" by Melanie Rae Thon
"Confirmation" by Kristina Ten (religious instructional)
"After Your Milk Comes In" by Lauren Goodwin Slaughter (sleep training guide)
"Parenting 101" by Chella Courington (parenting how-to)
"The Etiquette of Adultery" by Tara Laskowski
“The Instructions” by Eric D. Anderson
“Rudderless Fiction: Lesson One” by Rick DeMarinis
”The Putti” by Shelley Jackson
Marriage manual (see Stanley Crawford's Some Instructions to My Wife...)
Housekeeping manual
Social story or social prompt for ASD persons
"Travel Tips" by Manuel Martinez
"Elevator Pitches" by Jonathan Lethem (elevator pitches for movies)
"Prayer for Alien Abductees" by Rob Kenagy (liturgical form)
"Rules and Regulations for Benehmen!, the German Board Game of Discipline" by Teddy Wayne (board game rules)
"A Game of Clue" by Steven Millhauser (board game rules)

INTERVIEWS OR PROFILES

"Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" by David Foster Wallace
"Interview With a Moron" by Elizabeth Stuckey-French
"Office Women: Three Portraits and Thirteen Questions" by Clare Polders
"The Explanation" by Donald Barthelme
”The Lawrence Quint Interview” by Charles Baxter
”An Explanation for Chaos” by Julie Schumacher
”On Not Growing Up” by Ben Marcus
Immigration interview
Any one of Michael Martone's illustrious third-person bios
"Unauthorized Biography" by John Yua (informal bio)

CLASSIFIEDS

"Single Woman for Long Walk on the Beach" by Ron Carlson
"Will Babysit for Little $$$$" by Ben White
"Writer Michael Martone's Leftover Water" by Patrick Madden (an Ebay listing)
"Selected Personals from the American Psychiatric Association's Dating Website" by Frank Ferri
Robin Hemley's "Reply All" by Robin Hemley (listserve)
Advertorials
Missing pet flyer
Missing person poster
Obits 

EPISTOLARY FORMS

"A Novel in Nine Letters" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Letters to Jim Harrison" by Sean Lovelace
"To Whom It May Concern" by Michael Sheehan (open letter)
"Dear Committee for the Socialization of Illegal Aliens" by yours truly (letter to government agent)
"Love Poems for the Border Patrol" by Amitava Kumar
"Letter to my love" by Tif Holland (love letter)
"Why, Honey?" by Raymond Carver (love letter)
"Possible Postcards from Rachel, Abroad" by David Shields (potential postcards)
"Postcard from the Bum House" by Stephanie Dicksinson(postcard)
"Dear Fiction Editor" by Kyle Brown
"A Cover Letter From an Art Major Seeking a Job That Literally Requires Him to Apply the Skills He Learned in School" by Oyl Miller (cover letter)
"Reference #388475848-5" by Amy Hempel (traffic ticket correspondence)
"Letter to a Funeral Parlor" by Lydia Davis (customer complaint)
"Shrinkology" by Sea Sharp (customer complaint)
"Letters to Wendy" by Joe Wenderoth (novel as epistolary series addressed to a business establishment)
"I Can Speak!" by George Saunders (product refund request)
"Apology #9: Not About the Toaster" by Edward Hardy
"Letter to Stephen Hawking" by Samantha Hunt (fan mail)
"The San Diego Snake Company's September Newsletter" by Meg Favreau (newsletter)
"A Memory of the Christ by the Apostle John" by Adam McOmber (religious epistle)
"The Book of John" by Stephen Yuan (biblical epistle)
"Diary of the Blockage" by Amelia Gray (diary)
"Editorial Notes From Your Twitter Troll" by Orli Matlow (editorial notes)
Break-up letter
Recommendation letter
Rejection letter
Sympathy card
Congratulations card
Notebook entries
Wedding announcement
Email correspondence
Twitter dialogue or twitter DM chat

ACADEMIC ASSIGNATIONS, ASSIGNMENTS, SYLLABI, & VARIOUS PAPERS

"Prospectus" by Amie Barrondale
"It Looks Like This" BY Caitlin Horrocks (high school essay)
"How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House Of Correction and Began My Life Over Again" by Joyce Carol Oates (English class essay)
"Writing Prompts for Girls and Women" by Leigh Stein (writing prompts)
"Book Report" by Jenna Lee (book report)
"Reading Comprehension" by Peter Cherches (assignment)
"Have You Ever?" by Ian Frazier (assignment)
"Conjugate "to be", using complete sentences" by Ani King (grammar exercise)
"Impressions and Preliminary Maxims Gleaned From Teaching High School English" by Will Slattery
"The Professor of Longing" by Jill Talbott (syllabus)
Mike Topp's "Stuyvesant Bee #88" by Mike Topp (high school newspaper)
Will Slattery, "Impressions and Preliminary Maxims Gleaned From Teaching High School English"
"The Preliminary Notes" by Rick Moody (notes on teaching)
“A Field Guide to the North American Bigfoot” by Ben Greenman
"The Instrumental Side of Human Communication" by Wendy Brenner (conference presentation)
"Zeno's Paradsox (of which he had several)" by David Jose Villaverde (summary of concept in philosophy or rhetoric)
"Key Concepts in Ecology" by Michelle Ross
"The Varieties of Romantic Experience: An Introduction" by Ron Cohen (psych course lecture)
"Poetic Template for Introducting a Featured Bard" by David Alpagh (introduction)
School journal
Science project description
Book review
White paper
Field report
Analysis of intital conditions

SCIENCE, MATH & THEORETICAL MEASUREMENTS

"Phantoms" by Steven Millhauser (case study)
"Problems for Self-Study" by Charles Yu (theorizing conceputual physics)
"Let X" by Chad Simpson (math theorem and notes)
"Variant Table" by Elizabeth Wade
"The Pain Scale" by Eula Bliss (scale of measurement)
"Mouths" by Steven Zultanski (statistical compendium)
"Demonectomy" by Lish Troha (description of medical prodecure)
"The Heart As Torn Muscle" by Randall Billings Noble (description of medical condition)
"Update" by Nels Hanson (medical history)
Medical discharge report
Psych evaluation
”A Primer for Punctuation of Heart Disease” by Jonathan Safran Foer
"Drug Facts" by Lauren Trembath-Neuberger (drug reference)

SPEECHES AND LECTURES

Keynote speech 
Political stump speech
Lecture notes

EXHIBITS

"The Extinction Museum: Exhibit #71 (flap of lichen preserved between two panes of glass)" by Tina May Hall (museum exhibit brochure)
"1001 Xanadus" by Malcom Sutton and Francois Lemieux (ancient text)
"Artist Statement #64" by James Bradley (artist statement)

LEGAL DOCUMENTS AND REPORTS

“Will and Testament” by Matthew Vollmer
"Vis a Vis Love" by Mieke Eerkins (marital contract or prenup)
"Appeal" by Mike DiChristina (legal appeal)
Rich Ives' "Declarations of Attendance"
Estate inventory
Divorce decree
Police report
Security incident report
Noise complaint
Suspicious wildlife activity report
Suspicious activity report
Workplace employee assessment
Nonprofit donor report
Nonprofit request for funding application
Business plan

REFERENCE & PARATEXTS

"The Year's Best Fiction 2008: The Authors Speak" by J. Robert Lennon (anthology)
"Acknowledgement" by Michel Martone (acknowledgements)
"Table of Contents" by Lance Olsen (table of contents)
"The Year's Best Fiction 2008: The Authors Speak" by J. Robert Lennon (anthology)
"Acknowledgement" by Michel Martone (acknowledgements)
"JoAnna Novak" by Joanna Novak (third person bio)
"Liner Note" by Jonathan Lethew (liner note)
"A Note on the Type" by Ben Greenman (liner note)
"Contributor's Note" by Michael Martone (contributor's note)
"Disclaimer" by David Means (disclaimer)
"Dildo" by Shirley Jackson (description or explanation)
"History" by R. M Berry (introduction)
"Introduction" by Ben Greenman (introduction)
Enclyclopedia entry
Wikipedia entry

INDEXES ETC.

"The Index" by J.G. Ballard (index)
"An Index of How Our Family Was Killed" by Matt Bell (index)
"Words for Snow" by Jil Talbot (lexicon)
"Glossary of Chain Accidents" by Temim Fruchter (glossary)
"Primary Sources" by Rick Moody (annotations)
"excerpts from a dictionary of coincidences, vol. i" by Sean Brijbasi (dictionary)
"The People Catalogue" by Michael Parris Lee (compendium)
"Compendium of Chinese Ghosts, Part I & II" by Elaine Chiew (compendium)

Web and social medias

Rob Wittig's"The Fall of the Site of Masha" by Rob Wittig (website)
"Mr. Plimpton's Revenge" by Dinty W. Moore (google map)

1. Facebook post with comments

2. Spam

3. Nextdoor.com post

4. Internet banner

5. YouTube comment

6. Subreddit chat transcript

7. Travel guide or intinerary

Surveys, self-help and questionnaires:

1. Dwaine Rieves' "The Animal; Questionnaire 1"

2. Customer satisfaction survey

3. Mary Kay Jordan Fleming's "Parent Readiness Quiz"

   "Questionnaire" by John Yau

4. Claudia Cortese's “Origin Story” and “Answer Key to Origin Story”

5. Nancy McCabe, "Can This Troubled Marriage Be Saved?: A Quiz"

6. Art Taylor's "Master the Art of French Cooking" (recipe)

8. Colin Nissan's "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers" (seasonal advice column)

9. Heather Murphy's "To Reduce Your Likelihood of Murder" (safety tips)

Transcripts or minutes:

1. TV transcript

2. Dictation transcript

3. Informational video transcript

4. Phone text transcript

5. Neighborhood garden club monthly minutes

Memoirs and bio forms

Captain's log
Pilot's log
Amber Sparks' "The Noises from the Neighbors Upstairs: A Nightly Log" 
Travel diary
"Tunings, Counterfactuals" by Michelle Herman (memoir)
Dream journal

David Shields' "Life Story"

John Barth's "Life-Story"

Eulogy
Epitaph

Kevin Brockmeier's "The Jesus Stories" (holy scriptures)

Resume

Various lists

1. Ingredient list

2. Menu or meal plan

3. Spotify playlist

4. Kelle Groom's "25 Reasons to Attend the Gala"

5. Lea Page, "Things I Did After Each of 32 Rejections"

6. Kathyrn Lipari's "12 Things I Can Tell You About Cutting"

7. Rich Ives' "Improperly Used Tools of Parenting"

8. Matthew Williamson's "Discarded Notions"

9. Meg Pokrass' "To-Do List"

10. Sofi Stambo's "Lists" (shopping lists)

11. Deb Olin Unferth’s “Things That Went Wrong Thus Far”

12. Dennard Dayle's "Recent Activity" (credit card statement)

13. Kristen Iskandrian's "Remarks My Immigrant Mother Has Made About Babies"

14. Jack Pendarvis' "Our Spring Catalog" (publisher's catalog)

Other must-reads in my innovative fiction craft bible:

• Gary Lutz, "The Sentence Is a Lonely Place"

• David Miller, "16 nonfiction forms and how to write them"

• Nolan Liebert, "Be Brave: Experimental Writing Ahead"

• Richard Thomas, "Dissection of 'Twenty Reasons to Stay and One to Leave'"

• Lydia Davis, "Odd Behavior"

• Rick McGrath, "J. G. Ballard's Graphic Experiments"

 

Random promptings

And a few things I've never seen which may possibly exist but would still be very cool to read at some point:

1. Retirement community newsletter

2. Application for political asylum

3. Eviction notice

4. Currency transaction report for withdrawal or deposit of large sum at bank

5. Hobby Lobby supply room inventory

6. Hobby Lobby secret abortion fund

7. Hobby Lobby Recovery Group minutes

8. GoFundMe profile

9. Mall parking lot prophecy

10. World of Warcraft guild rules

11. Personal fitness goals questionnaire

12. Ketosis and Halitosis report

13. "20 epigraphs I almost put in a poetry chapbook before I stopped huffing bath salts"

14. Notes from a Roy Moore sermon

15. Conscious uncoupling announcement (see Gwenyth Paltrow and Chris Martin for possible template)

16. "Suspicious wildlife activity report from Lifeway in Nashville, Tennessee"

17. "List of fortune cookie fortunes that actually happened"

18. Product recall for specific translation of Bible

19. "Why I didn't graduate" graduation speech transcript

20. Amazon.com wedding registry

21. "Writing Retreat That No One Can Afford" application

22. 22 things you did instead of writing a memoir

23. 21 things you did instead of telling your spouse the truth

24. 20 ways to protest Trump while shopping for groceries at your neighborhood Piggly Wiggly

 

Where to submit

And, of course, it's always a tough call when deciding where to submit your innovative form fiction. Some literary magazines nurture a special affinity for formal and genre innovations. Take the time to learn more about the editors and the landscape. Then pick your best piece and roll the dice.

• Black Warrior Review

• Camera Obscura Journal 

• Container: focus on pieces "contained" by interesting structures

• DIAGRAM: innovative formalist aristocracy

• decomP 

• Eclectica 

• Evergreen Review 

• Five Points 

• freeze frame fiction

• FRiGG

• Gargoyle 

• Gone Lawn

• Guernica 

• ideomancer

• jmww 

• Mad Hatter's Review 

• McSweeney's 

• NOON 

• Nth Position 

• Pedestal 

• Pidgeonholes

• Smokelong Quarterly: focus on innovative flash

• Synaesthesia

• The EEL

• The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts

• Unlikely Stories 2.0

The art of enumeration: Over 70 fabulous list-stories

 I'm finally stealing the time to learn a dance that my mother used to love--"it's the most feminist dance, Alina, no man to worry about pleasing, no fellow that needs to feel like he's leading". My writer side can't resist the urge to string those steps into a story, a series of Spanish instructional words describing parts of the body as well as flameno steps. The list form feels natural in stories trace new discoveries of knowledge or half-developed skills.   

Though the feel is contemporary, list stories actually borrow from a classical rhetorical device, enumeratio, which divides or segments a big idea into navigable, numbered parts. We are hella fortunate to have so many incredible models in this form--Deb Olin Unferth’s “Things That Went Wrong Thus Far” comes to mind. In this flash, Deb uses the numbered list to narrate a couple's vacation from the first person POV. Each number makes further use of letters to expand the details. The strategy reminds of Benjamin Fondane’s “cine-poems” in that the list is structured by discrete emotional events rather than punctuation.

Enumerations

Since I'm not a fundamentalist about text or rules, some of the "enumerations" aren't as clear or numbered but the feel was somehow "listed." Without further ado, a long list of enumerated stories of various veracities that I admire and love. Because what's so great about having a cool list if you're not going to share it? 

1. Aaron Burch, "Overcast" (Memorius)

2. Amorak Huey, "Where the River Is Shaped Like Words and the Words Are Shaped Like Blades" (The Collagist)

3. Andres Neuman, "The Things We Didn't Do" (The Paris Review)

4. Annabelle Carvell, "Good Girls Don't Use the F-word" (matchbook)

5. Ashley Adams, "What the Water Told Us" (Heavy Feather Review)

6. Barry Graham, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Road Trip" (Everyday Genius)

7. Barry Graham, "The Same Story" (FRiGG)

8. Blake Butler, "The Copy Family" (Fifty-Two Stories)

9. Caitlin Horrocks, "70 Sentences That DuoLingo.com Believes I Will Need to Know In Spanish" (CHEAP POP)

10. Carmen Lau, "Brief Interviews with Fairy Women" (The Coil)

11. Carmen Maria Machado, "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU" (The American Reader)

12. Chris Ames, "Twenty-two voicemails" (Heavy Feather Review)

13. Christopher Merckner, "Cabins" (Lithub)

14. Claire Polders, "Office Women: Three Portraits and Thirteen Questions" (Necessary Fiction)

15. Claudia Cortese, "The Hunger Essay" (Gulf Coast)

16. Claudia Cortese, "The Red Essay" (Mid-American Review)

17. Claudia Cortese, "The Twine Essay" (Black Warrior Review)

18. Deb Olin Unferth, "Things That Went Wrong Thus Far" (Boston Review)

19. Debbie Urbanski, "An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried" (Motherboard)

20. Elaine Chiew, "Compendium of Chinese Ghosts, Part I & II" (Jellyfish Review)

21. Eshani Surya, "Between Colitis Flares, Expect the Following Symptoms" (New Delta Review)

22. Eugenio Volpe, "Quadrupled" (FRiGG)

23. Glenn Shaheen, "Water in Its Three Forms" (matchbook)

24. Gwen E. Kirby, "Shit Cassandra Saw That She Didn’t Tell the Trojans Because at that Point Fuck Them Anyway" (Smokelong Quarterly)

25. James Yeh, "Girl With Cool, Damp Mouth, of Four Very Short Stories" (Everyday Genius)

26. Jamie Grefe, "Obscurities of the Doom Horizon: A Series of Forty Eight Interconnected Stories"  (Gone Lawn)

27. Jennifer Egan, "Black Box" (The New Yorker)

28. Jennifer Genest, "Ways to Prepare White Perch" (New Delta Review)

29. Jeremy M. Davis, "The Terrible Riddles of Human Sexuality, Solved" (Evergreen Review)

30. Jeremy Packert Burke, "Russian Verbs of Motion" (Nashville Review)

31. Jim Ruland, "The Lever" (Fanzine)

32. John Meyers, "Seven Confessions" (Cease, Cows)

33. Joshua Cohen, "Indentical City" (Fanzine)

34. Kate Petersen, "Homework 3 (Spring 2016)" (The Collagist)

35. Katherine D. Stutzman, "First Lines from Frank O'Hara" (jmww)

36. Kathy Fish, "A Room With Many Small Beds" (Threadcount)

37. Kathryn Lipari, "Twelve Things I Can Tell You About Cutting" (Smokelong Quarterly)

38. Kathryn McMahon, "Twelve Things Only the Mosquitos Know" (Cease, Cows)

39. Kristen Iskandrian, "Remarks My Immigrant Mother Has Made About Babies" (PANK)

40. Lea Page, "Things I Did After Each of 32 Rejections" (Brevity)

41. Leigh Stein, "Writing Prompts for Girls and Women" (The Rumpus)

42. Leonard Michaels, "In the Fifties" (This Recording)

43. Lindsay Hunter, "Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula" (Fifty-Two Stories)

44. Louise Phillips, "21 Stories About Samantha" (Requited)

45. Mark Atkinson, "Five Fears" (Gone Lawn)

46. Mark Budman, "Super Couple" (New World Writing)

47. Marsha Pelletier, "How to End a Relationship" (Nailed)

48. Matt Bell's "An Index of How Our Family Was Killed" (Conjunctions)

49. Megan Giddings, "Three Boyfriends" (Passages North)

50. Meghan McClure, "The Grieving House" (Pithead Chapel)

51. Mercedes Lucero, "How to Heal a Family in Three Easy Steps" (Fiction Southeast)

52. Meriwether Clarke, "The Grimm Brothers: A list essay" (North By Northwestern)

53. Molia Dumbleton, "Twenty Four Hours" (Gone Lawn)

54. Nicholas Grinder, "Formers (By Alphabet)" (Caketrain)

55. Paul Crenshaw, "12 Bible Stories in Need of Revision" (Subtropics)

56. Peter Wild, "Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style" (Fifty-Two Stories)

57. Randal Eldon Greene, "Irony" (3 A.M. Magazine)

58. Rebecca Barnard, "How to Be Another Person in Five Days" (Smokelong Quarterly)

59. Rebecca Orton, "Every Age She'd Ever Been" (Gone Lawn)

60. Richard Siken, "Field of Rooms and Halls" (Gulf Coast)

61. Rob Roensch, "Peter" (Bull: Men's Fiction)

62. Robert Lopez, "Three Subway Stories" (Okey-Panky)

63. Stan Brown and Brad Adler, "40" (Evergreen Review)

64. Stephen Graham Jones, "Modern Love" (Everyday Genius)

65. Steven Millhauser, "Thirteen Wives" (The New Yorker)

66. Suzanne LaFetra, "Nine Days" (Brevity)

67. Tara Laskowski, "The Etiquette of Adultery" (Necessary Fiction)

68. Tuli Kupferberg, "101 Ways to Make Love" (Evergreen Review)

69. Victoria Redel, "The Way It Began" (The Literarian)

70. Wendy Oleson, "How I Liked the Avocados" (Smokelong Quarterly)

71. Will Slattery, "Impressions and Preliminary Maxims Gleaned from Teaching High School Creative Writing" (Essay Daily)

Tangentially, a flashback to one of my list attempts: "Seven Stories About Girl Scars" (Tinge)

(Lots of thanks to Wigleaf, where I first discovered so many of these stories.)

Bonus: a few list stories forms I haven't read and someone should maybe try.... lists that might be fun and somewhat summer-tasty... lists I'd love to see or read:

• A field guide to the plants in your backyard

• Colors of night

• Nicknames you wanted to use but didn't

• Hotels or motels where you've stayed and what happened

• Ice cream flavors

• Toenail polish colors

• Ways to say asshole in various languages

• Little Free Library books 

Eleven strange writing prompts

“Those who can ask without shame are viewing themselves in collaboration with—rather than in competition with—the world.”

— Amanda Palmer, THE ART OF ASKING

1. Tell me a story about parents and competition.

2. In How Fiction Works, James Woods discusses writing over character by inserting a "descriptive pause" which draws attention to surface or a texture, an abrupt interruption that changes the pace or movement in a scene. He notes that fiction writer Joy Williams is an expert at this strategy of pinching loose strands from a small rug. Write (or rewrite) a scene using this descriptive pause to experiment with modulation and pacing.

3. Oscar Wilde said the most humiliating moment in his life was when he sat in the rain for thirty minutes at a train station between prisons, pummeled by the jeers and laughs of bystanders. Fingers pointing— being subject to a gaze he could not refute. He felt like rumor incarnate. Write a piece in which the edge between rumor and reality is revealed as a foreskin many do without.

4. In Ron Wallace's flash fiction, "Worry," he develops the following great metaphor: "Worry grew between them like a son, with his own small inconsistencies and then more pressing demands." By personifying worry as a child, Wallace shows how a married couple normalizes and nurtures worry, developing their own intimacy with it, holding it near, carrying it together. Try developing your own great metaphor that turns an emotion into a character. Alternately, write a flash fiction that offers a different metaphor for worry.

“A border wall is the opposite of fenestration. A clogging of the country’s pores, sure to incite inflammation.”

— Justin Hocking

5. Justin Hocking describes "fenestrated writing" as writing through a window opening for light. Using his analogy, write two paragraphs, one walled, the other fenestrated, about the same topic. Notice your use of spacing and punctuation. How does white space survive a window?

6. A woman is grocery shopping when she notices a man watching her in the fruit aisle. She feels suddenly self-conscious. “What if he’s one of those men who looks down on women who buy bananas or grapefruits in the middle of June?”, she thinks. She opts to touch a few peaches, feel them out, check the expression on his face. He pretends not to notice. What happens?

“What I find far less appealing, for the most part, are stories that would seem to be in flight from all this, stories that hide some central kind of depth or complexity or fear, that do not tip a hand to a vast inner life, a primal reaction to impending death, or that sort of thing. Call it emotional artifice. It’s always a little bit depressing to be lied to, particularly with platitudes . . . It’s all good. No worries. That sort of thing. Really? No worries? None at all? OK. That said, there are poorly executed versions of the supposedly braver kind of writing, and all the distinctions fall away, because the result, without artistry, can be weak, unconvincing, embarrassing, pretentious.”

— Ben Marcus

7. Revise and edit a recent piece of prose with an eye to Marcus’ view of the chem-trails that emotional artifice leaves across a story.

8. In an interview decades ago, poet Philip Levine said he didn’t have an enemy in Korea, meaning there wasn’t anyone there he wanted to kill. How is this definition of an enemy squared with our easy construction of dangerous others? Juxtapose this with NRA commercials of girls in shorts, spray tans, montage of slaughter weapons.

9. Write a flash about something you did to get attention as child. Or write a list flash of things you did to get attention as a child. If you were perfect, write a list flash of things that other kids did to get attention. And use that as a title without commenting on it—allow the text to absorb and reflect it instead.

10. Self-revelation fails when personal voice doesn’t scrutinize the connection between observer and observed. Just know that. Write it on the inside of your wrist in black pen. Now look up at your family and smile.

Alternate doxa: thoughts on writing fiction

1. Sometimes we write a story to force ourselves to acknowledge the person who wrote that story.

2. Every rapture begins with attention which swells into appreciation which enables witness.

3. When writing fiction, the challenge may be how to best use the sustain pedal. How to push a sound until it fills just enough of the room to bud an echo. How to satisfy and fulfill while encircling an absence. How to hollow out and round the sound. A room with music calms the restless reader. 

4. Don't force your mammals to carry an awkward plot. Cows are incapable of predicting or sensing an earthquake. Cows don't even respond to an earthquake when the hills begin rolling. Don't abuse cows by asking too much.

5. There is always a secret weapon. 

6. Emotional blindness thickens the soup. There's something intransigently sexy about well-written alexithymia, or when persons are unable to articulate their own feelings or understand the feelings of others. 

“We do wear masks to be seen, but I also think in the US we often wear masks to be overlooked, to disappear in a sea of familiar hat-wearing heads, to be accepted, to feel safe. ”

— Interview with Former Cactus

7. Make use of the incredible literary community that flourishes on Twitter. 

8. Explore what Roland Barthes called "doxa", repressive discourses or worldviews which keep our consciousness from reaching too far into logic or practicality. Barthes believed that every character has their doxa, that which keeps him moored or restrained, that which limits his imagination. Use your doxa to divide yourself. How would you change if you had other doxa? Do the same for your characters.

9. See what happens if you avoid the bad childhood as an explanatory device. 

“The bad childhood is there to explain the troubled adulthood, etc. In fact the past, in narrative terms, is the worst sort of cudgel, and we’re punished with infantilizing explanations of how things have come to be. Back story until death. No matter how stylish and well-shot and interestingly-paced many of these shows are, they are defined by emotional artifice, regulated by storytelling conventions that seem destined to keep us at arm’s length, or, worse, alienated from our own true experience.”

— Ben Marcus

10. Experiment with what Carmen Jiminez Smith calls "aesthetic promiscuity... the feeling of feeling infected by forms deployed by other poets.” Or fiction writers. Broaden voice to make space for multiple aesthetics.

11. In How Fiction Works, James Woods discusses writing over character by inserting a "descriptive pause" which draws attention to surface or a texture, an abrupt interruption that changes the pace or movement in a scene. He notes that fiction writer Joy Williams is an expert at this strategy of pinching loose strands from a small rug. Write (or rewrite) a scene using this descriptive pause to experiment with modulation and pacing.

12. Write jealousy in public spaces with a surfeit of pedestrian traffic so you pay keen attention to the details of body language and physical atmosphere. Dialogue is too limpid to reveal the full power of jealousy; how it alters a room or the space between bodies. 

13. Fact: Deborah Eisenberg’s first short story was published when she was almost forty. 

14. Be mindful of the way in which female characters operate from passivity or powerlessness. Try to present the seemingly mindless or automatic with appropriate complexity. 

15. Read Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings" while sitting in traffic. Read it again on the toilet. Read it one more time before falling asleep for good luck. 

16. Sneak in a few song lyrics for yourself. Do this for each story until you wind up with a collection that doubles as a playlist. 

17. Do the destabilizing thing. 

18. Daunt less. Haunt more.

19. Invest in characters that disturb you. Fiction works best when it's not intended to populate the room with drinking buddies.

20. Find a way to manage the loneliness. Or don't. But find a way to live with that.

“I want to write the cowardice and fear that leads us to ideologies of hate. Writing is so many colors of marvel and awe but also, somehow, witness. The simple act of holding up a mirror, and asking you to look.”

— Interview with Former Cactus

21 flash fictions I adore

Studying flash is that rope I throw myself when feeling slumpy about my writing silence. Twenty one flashes I adore in no particular order. Acknowledging that I love so many different flashes but the time I can steal to post about them is not enough--never enough time to say all the things I want to say in this world.

1.
Amy Rossi, "If You Need Me, I Will Be Over Here Listening to 'Slide It In' On Repeat" (Hayden's Ferry Review)
Simply delicious.

2.
Megan Giddings, "Three Boyfriends" (Passages North)
For the rich extended metaphors, the personifications, the way the boyfriends touch everything. A no is tree branches scrabbling against a bedroom window at 2:30 AM.

3.
Anna Lea Jancewicz, "The Water" (Cease, Cows)
So erotic somehow--beautiful. It just reaches out and holds you, draws you into the ocean, reminds you what it means to drown.

4. 
Annabelle Carvell, "Good Girls Don't Use the F Word" (matchbook)
For the irresistible way in which Annabelle engages the taboo. For the ideal use of the list form in flash. For the careful stucturing and then the way everything falls apart at the end. Falls perfectly. 

5.
Georgia Bellas, "Salisbury Beach Pizza Time Machine" (Wigleaf)
Because it takes the tiniest details, blows them up into sensations. Something that sticks as you free-ride nostalgia. It's over so fast. A slice you can't forget. 

6.
Christopher Merckner, "Plates, By Bing and Grondhal" (the museum of americana)
Addictive and visceral. The turbulence of ordinary language. His wife does not regale, either, but she is a woman, and when it’s women there—and it is always women there, because the dudes are at work or otherwise doing something ineffectual and to no clear purpose and by means utterly clownish – there is no need for regaling.

7.
Claire Polders, "Office Women: Three Portraits and Thirteen Questions" (Necessary Fiction)
I love the movement, the frame, the questions....

8.
Claudia Cortese, "The First Mall" and "The Milk Bells Inside Her" (The Offing)
Just keep reading and reading these two. 

9.
Robert Lopez, "Two Syndromes At Once" (Fanzine)
The play around the dated word "Mongoloid" fascinates me because my child was born with congenital hypothyroidism which used to be called "cretinism." I love flashes that bumble around archaic words. Also moves so lucidly and well. Reader is drawn into narratorial "we". This is when we realize we might be suffering from Stockholm syndrome and we ask each other if this is what is happening. 

10. 
Deb Olen Unferth, "Likable" (NOON)
First line: She could see she was becoming a thoroughly unlikable person. Perfect set-up for what follows; the use of questions; the blurred POV....

11.
Jennifer Kircher Carr, "Applause" (Hobart) 
Because I swear I've been in this auditorium, losing my mind before--so convincing. Also a great use of sentence length to create motion, to stir chaos, to mix voices, to render us anonymous in the watching.

12.
Elaine Chiew, "Compendium of Chinese Ghosts, Part I & II" (Jellyfish Review)
For the gorgeous writing and the Chinese ghosts. For the fascinating personifications and liminalities. For the detached but close narration that reminds me so much of immigraniada's exile. Death is so pissed off at being given no lines he keeps buzzing around the buffalo as a pesky fly.

13.
Karen Donovan, "Several Repurposed Pictorials" (Smokelong Quarterly)
Because it starts with "Earth pig" and doesn't stop. A perfect example of using images to create flash. For the concept of "pictorials" and how much inspiration is borne in this model piece. 

14. 
Jami Attenberg, "The Off-Season" (Smokelong Quarterly)
For the brilliant way in which New @NewYorker is a framing device. For the way in which mosquitos weave in and out. Something brilliant in the stitching of this flash.

15.
Aubrey Hirsch, "Why We Never Talk About Sugar" (Vestal Review)
Because I vividly imagined being pregnant with so many objects while reading. And the plot is fantastic, details perfectly rendered. Those six small spoons. Impeccable

16.
JoAnna Novak, "The Wait" (The Paris Review)
For the perfect construction. The canvas pulled taut. Incredible language and verb reverals that remind me of Grace Paley at her best. Now, when you bring me to your different bed, I slow myself from desiring you, new person. Ceremony, like patience, is a dark art.

17.
Meg Pokrass, "Lily and the Jackalope" (Failbetter)
Because I couldn't stop laughing. Fell in love with the narrator. Enjoyed every second these four flashes. Being a religious woman and a Republican made the concept of truth a confusing matter at times.

18.
George Saunders, "Sticks" (Story)
Classic example of exposition using an object. Vivid details, clever narrative, unforgettable. 

19.
Leesa Cross-Smith, "Little Doves" (The Offing)
For the effective use of POV. For unforgettable language: A soupçon of lust-musk. For the voice/s and the incredible intimacy. The delicate brushstrokes.

20.
Maria Pinto, "Black People Don't" (Pinball)
For the visceral writing, the action, the livingness of it. For the coming-of-age, the entry into old wounds, the discovery of new ones, the scars that we learn. Magnificent voice.  Her voice about-faced within the second syllable, becoming stern on the upswing, as if its obedience training could keep the 17-year-old dog’s body on task.

21.
Vi Khi Nao, "Super Aroused Women During Sandstorms" (Kill Author)
Because.... my god. 

Using Handbook of Nature Study as poetry prompt

When I can't find a way to enter a poem, I flip through Anna Botsford Comstock's Handbook of Nature Study (free online) and play with the questions. Written in 1911, the book's language often prods me in unexpected directions. I like to read the descriptions and individual studies and then play with the questions on paper, bringing my own experiences in the field to bear on the study. 

“The overlapping of the feathers on a hen’s back and breast is a pretty illustration of nature’s method of shingling, so that the rain, finding no place to enter, drips off, leaving the bird’s underclothing quite dry. It is interesting to note how a hen behaves in the rain; she droops her tail and holds herself so that the water finds upon her no resting place, but simply a steep surface down which to flow to the ground. ”

— Anna Botsford Comstock

How does a hen look when standing in the rain?
Of what use is this bird to us?
Does a hawk, having lost its mate, live alone ever after?
Why do people shoot hawks?
Why is it a mistake for people to shoot all hawks?
What notes does the chick make when following its mother?
What does the hen say when she has laid an egg?
Does the chickadee ever seem discouraged by the snow and cold weather?
When disturbed does it fly up or down?
Does he sing only on moonlit nights?

I love the language, the descriptors, the verbiage...

“...another quite different principle acts upon the coloring of the plumage of the mother birds; for if they should develop bright colors themselves, they would attract the eyes of the enemy to their precious hidden nests; only by being inconspicuous are they able to protect their eggs and nestlings from discovery and death. The mother partridge, for instance, is so nearly the color of the dead leaves on the ground about her that we may almost step upon her before we discover her; if she were the color of the male oriole or tanager she would very soon be the center of attraction to every prowler. Thus it has come about that among the birds the male has developed gorgeous colors which attract the female, while the female has kept modest, unnoticeable plumage. ”

— Anna Botsford Comstock

"Submitting to chance only to cheat on it": A poetry exercise from Charles Simic

“The first rule for a poet must be, cheat on your unconscious and your dreams.”

— Charles Simic, "The Little Venus of the Eskimos"

In his essay “The Little Venus of the Eskimos”, Charles Simic describes the way he comes to a poem by foraging his biblio-ecology. I found myself playing with his method this afternoon, a perfect way for book-lovers to get lost between the pages of the read and unwritten. To quote Simic:

“My entire practice…consists of submitting to chance only to cheat it… I, for example, may pull a book from my bookshelf and, opening it anywhere, take out a word, or a phrase. Then, to find another bit of language to go along with my first find, I may grab another book or peek into one of my notebooks and get something like this:"

he rips some papers
forest
whispers
telephone book
a child’s heart
the mouse has a nest
concert piano
lost innocence
my mother’s mourning dress

“In the house of correction called sense, where language and art serve their sentences, the words are making whoopee.”

— Charles Simic

After the words are written down, Simic allows them to “play off each other.” The result being something like this:

Innocence

Someone rips a telephone book in half. 
The mouse has a nest in the concert piano.

In a forest of whispers,
A child’s heart,
The mother’s mourning dress.

“I open myself to chance in order to invite the unknown.... If you worship in the Church of Art With a Message, stay away. Chance operations make trouble, promote ambiguity, spit on dogmatism of any kind. Everything from our ideas of identity to our ideas of cause are cheerfully undermined. Surrealist games are the greatest blasphemy yet conceived by the arts against the arts. In them, the disordering of the senses is given ontological status. Chance brings a funhouse mirror to reality.””

— Charles Simic, "The Little Venus of the Eskimos"

What looks like a poem might still be subjected to chance, an additional scattering and refocusing. He mentions collaborating with James Tate on some poems by taking a word or phrase and turning themselves into Paul Auster's "pinball machine of associations."

The word "match" and the word "jail" would become "matchstick jail". They'd keep playing and then stop to survey what they had. Then they'd revise, free-associate again, and discover an unexpected poem emerging. Simic describes the process as alternating between feeling like the same person as Tate, or feeling like the poet, or feeling like the critic with no clear pattern or reason for feeling any of it. I love the experience inherent in the writing of a collaborative poem like this.

“Chances continues to be one of the manifestations of cosmic mystery. The other one is mathematics. We are crucified in awe between freedom and necessity.”

— Charles Simic

For more of the marvelous and overtly anti-nationalistic, read Charles Simic's The Life of Images: Selected Prose.

Writing beyond Victorian sexual tropes: "I Enjoy Nineteenth Century Novels"

I'm excited to have a story in The Write Launch's Special Short Stories Issue this month, alongside some wonderful writers.

I love the exploration of still/unstill quiets in Adrian Plau's flash piece, "Making the Ping":

The quiet we listened to then was my sister’s quiet. It was strict and hard. It needed more and more but could not grow quiet enough. But it was brittle. It took over the house and yet a little thing could break it. A pillow could tumble on the couch or a faint wind make a window on the first floor creak a bit and it would shatter. Then she had to start from the beginning again, piling up layer after layer of heavy quiet only for it to tear again once anything moved or made a sound. You could not hear little things in her quiet.

I love how it characterizes and creates a subtle plot around a ping, a sound, a silence. 

I also love Kelly Ann Gonzales' "Dancing on Graves", evoking an un-american way of dealing with death. There is so much paucity in our commercialized mourning industry--so much self-help and so little flesh and bone. 

Because that is what Filipinos do. We cook and we dance and we cry as we cook and dance. Court jesters in our microcosm kingdoms. We didn’t have power, but we had responsibility. An ingrained sense of duty to our families and heritage. Buena was the only other Filipina I went to school with, so even if we were just family friends, she might as well have been actual family. 

“Life,” she would whisper to me, mapping a skeletal finger, nails lifeblood red, along my chin, “without other people like us is too difficult and far too lonely.”

My longer short, "I Enjoy Nineteenth Century Novels," came out of a space that kept offering a literature professor who was unhappy with her middle-years, unsatisfied with her profession, undesirable to herself somehow. I wrote the story because I wanted to know more about the character--wanted to see where she was going.

The students file through the door as I prepare to grade papers. When a pair of male legs pauses near my desk, I ignore them. After leaving tiny red fire ant-marks on the mediocre essay, I look up. 

The student is waiting. His patience startles me. Late-afternoon sunlight broadens his narrow, vulpine face. 

He says he wants to be a writer. He wants to write the world without hiding the bones. He has a degree in architecture. He hopes to expose the weakness of load-bearing beams.

The narrator doesn't have a name--doesn't inhabit herself responsibly or fully. She permits herself to be seduced into intimacy with a student. Part of what fascinates me is the way in which we rationalize breaking rules. 

He says it is in my professional interest to lay it on the table. It is in my interest as a female to refrain from dismissing the power of individual narratives.

Nineteenth century novels are frequently the entry-point for study of white literary feminism and the cult of Victorian womanhood. I also wanted to reveal how the writing of sex can be unsexy, to corner the reader in that intimate space that seeks the arousal-shame cycle. 

Although he enjoys nineteenth century novels, Victorianism moralism leads females to undermine their sexuality. He cringes. He hopes to describe a positive sexual experience from a female perspective. If it wouldn’t be too tiresome, would I mind sharing one such example from my own life– clinical if needed– so he might better understand the pieces and parts which go into such an account from a literary perspective? 

Since it is the last class before the final exam, I agree to help him. Just this once. Since the memory feels fresh.

Sometimes a character doesn't give you the ending you crave. Sometimes they let you watch them tread water. I think it's important to explore the sexual boundaries that women are tempted to violate. I think it's logically untenable to claim, simultaneously, that 1) we are sexual creatures whose desires should be acknowledged 2) we are innocent of sexual harassment or sexually-inappropriate behavior because we are women. 

You can read the whole story here.

Marriage, poetry, and how that poem happened

“It is impossible for either side to withdraw now; the only question at stake is whether or not we actively take the initiative. ”

— Xerxes

There is "no middle ground" in the war between Greece and Persia. One must swallow the other. Like marriage.

From last year's notebooks....

---

I cannot text the words to P. as the plane takes off. If I say I love you, the story is finished. He will disappear into a morgue.

So I'm writing a poem inspired by Billy Collins' "Litany". Calling it "Litany with Pina Colada." Playing with Collins uses tercets, or 3-line stanzas, to the slow reader down. Stanzas "as stones in a stream" one must step on to cross. [I can't remember where this got published... or maybe I just read it at poetry readings because it was likable. Unlike so much of the rest.]

"Liberate" is such a strange, aggressive verb--not light or open-ended like free. 

My lover wants to liberate me. My killer wants to imprison me. They are the same man working different shifts. I train the eye to know the man by the uniform. When we cross the border, I will drink a very cold orange juice with ice. I will color my hair red as bolero’s rose. I will sleep through a night. I will take my baby to the doctor for pneumonia. I will let the sun rub my shoulders, fear nothing. I will find my father and uncle. I will be a white man’s hardworking wife. Under my pillow, a knife.

“ She was happy and ready: the happy wife, the ready woman in possession.”

— D. H. Lawrence, "The Blind Man"

And what's the difference between possessing--what we assume marriage grants, a safe haven-- and being possessed? Our complicity, so stark. 

The first five years of married life, the impossible intimacy; being pregnant; the "emotional enthusiast" lacking energy for her spouse. A man taking offense at being comforted for his loneliness; the thundercloud of a feller falling asleep before you. And you assume they understand what you've given up to be a wife. You assume this understanding is enough to build loyalty, but socialization recoils against the need for a wife, the crave of comfort. They hate us for loving us. It's so generic. Like cheese dip.

“We can’t talk about all that the universe contains because to do so would be to render it finite and we know in some way, that we cannot prove, that is infinite. So what the universe doesn’t contain is as significant to us as what it does.”

— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

More than fifty years ago, the Higgs field emerged as an omnipresent expanse of energy that explains why some theoretically-massless particles have mass. The boson was predicted to appear when a particle interacting with the Higgs field excites it. Since physicists could not directly observe the field itself, they looked to bosons for evidence of the field's existence.

Nothing is finished. All of us are beta now, products not ready for official release, the upgrade on the horizon.

Phenomenologically speaking, the swan has yet to dive and its white is soundless. I am fine. Not even wet. My ears ring with crickets and uninvited bullfrog events. A disjunct between two connected places— this grimy lake and the downtown four blocks away. One being the boson to a Higgs field that proves its existence but I am too lazy to discern which.

Again, this lake where most teens in my town get pregnant bears an invisible physical relationship the downtown clinic where they creep behind bodies to secure an abortion. To visit one is to feel potency of the other by implication.

The proper form in which to narrate a marriage

from a how-to manual

For as the interior of the house (and we also mean by "house" Marriage) is the female and what is outside the house is male, it follows that whenever I (who am the male) enter the house, which lies passive and horizontal and open unto my comings and goings, and as I wander among its furnishings (which we will call the organs), the overstuffed armchair, the pink sofa, the rich red carpets, and come upon you, surprising you and-- but what more is there to add?

Stanley Crawford, Some Instructions to My Wife (Dalkey Archive, 1985)

from a gender-bending distance

I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space.

Jeanette Winterson, "The Art Of Fiction", Paris Review

from inside the belly of the whale, i.e. a requisitioned "man cave"

Sitting in the garage in a nightgown with a typewriter it might be the only time I'm calm.

Wendy Wasserstein, "The Art Of Fiction", Paris Review

from the son's youthful perspective

In his play, she's not quite capable of a real thought without the help of the romantic figure who is remembering her in the first scene... .. my mother isn't immortalized in it, she's plagiarized. She doesn't even get to own her own lines.

Richard Bausch, "Brace", Collected Stories of Richard Bausch

from a birth canal

My granny back in Tennessee was born with the web of a cowl over her head like a wedding veil, and I came into this world wearing that same veil. I see what other's don't. I am wed to the truth and a missionary of it.

Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir

from a couch where one is watching reality TV and unintentionally turning it into a metaphor for performance of marriage gestures

It's about the careful construction of two central narratives: false actualization and authentic shame... it reflects our unrequited yearning for the authentic. Americans are drowning in a cesspool of fake emotion, nearly all of it aimed at getting us to buy junk. 

Steve Almond somewhere

from ancient treatises on wars

It is impossible for either side to withdraw now; the only question at stake is whether or not we actively take the initiative. 

Xerxes on the war between Greece and Persia

from rules in a world imagined by one of your favorite lesbian novelists

Men are best left in groups by themselves where they will entirely wear themselves out in drunkeness and competition. While this is taking place a woman may carry on with her life unhindered.

Your greatest possible strength is that every man believes he knows the sum and possibility of every woman.

Jeanette Winterson, Sexting the Cherry

from inside a seashell where we invest in the power of echoes

If left unused, conversations can grow rusty over time. The opinions and feelings we’ve expressed before, when left to their own devices, can grow sluggish and curmudgeonly. They become too used to sitting alone and unconsidered, and if you ask them to move, their joints can ache, or parts of them can crumble away. Sometimes you can return to an opinion you’ve not visited in years and find it’s died and rotted away  without you even noticing. Sometimes a feeling we assume we’ll have forever can abandon us and leave a gap we don’t notice until we suddenly feel the need to call upon that feeling.

Janina Matthewson, Of Things Gone Astray