Molly Giles: The Art of Chasing Fireflies
Flash fiction goes by all sorts of names—everything from "short shorts" to "micro-fiction" to "postcard fiction"—but Molly Giles has come up with our favorite term so far: "fireflies." Her fireflies light up the hushes of a night sky, capturing those quick bursts of drama with a vivid lyricism that the form is designed for.
The Art of Flashing
The editors of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine tell us how short-shorts can be complex, how small stories can be big, and why they chose a 360-word limit for their flashes.
Jessica Eve Rattner: Telling Stories with Photos
Documentary photography is Jessica Rattner’s passion. “You have to be a good storyteller,” says Rattner of her art. She says she has always been drawn to individuals invisible to most others. “They see me and I see them,” she says. “We’re all on a spectrum. We’re not all that different from one another. And that’s what fascinates me and has for a long time.”
Redefining Facebook: Lou Beach and His 420 Characters
Lou Beach's 420-character stories are at once graceful and arresting. They read like snippets of a noir novel, yet they're often funny. They might not be exactly 100 words, but we'll make an exception.
Maud Casey Tends to the Gaps of Her Story Materials
Maud Casey didn't take a delicate approach to her first 100-word story. In fact, she says she crashed around, confident that such a contained form could take the bashing. As with several of our featured authors, Casey had never written a 100-word story before—and hadn't written a story this short, in fact. She's pondered economy in fiction, though, and knows how the material of a story tends to find its form—because of, not despite, of the crashing around.
Joel Brouwer: 100-Word Story as Prose Poem
The line between a prose poem and a story is often a thin one, perhaps not discernible at all. Poet Joel Brouwer's 100-word prose poems in Centuries, a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book in 2003, reside on that thin line. Whether Brouwer's centuries are poems or stories really doesn't matter, though. As Andrei Codrescu put it, they "work as missiles, pastries, or treasure chests." We sat down with Brouwer (virtually) to find out more.
Myra Sklarew: A Poet Discovers the 100-Word Story
Myra Sklarew, former president of Yaddo Artists Community and professor emerita at American University, only recently encountered the 100-word story. She's always looking to condense her poems, though, "to get to the white heat of experience," so entering into such a compact story world suits her sensibilities.
