Why On Earth Did I Cut This from Bagatelles?

What would you do if I died, she said.

Bury you, I said.

Innovative, Opinionated Lift Your Right Arm Author Slams Lit Lions

Innovative, Opinionated Lift Your Right Arm Author Slams Lit Lions

This ran on the Booktalk Nation blog the week before my interview. I think they chose to write about my taste in fiction in order to stir up some controversy that would lead to a larger audience for the interview.

How a Nincompoop Became a Prick

I recently had a short piece accepted for a new anthology, Flash Fiction Funny. The editor is Tom Hazuka, one of the editors of the original Flash Fiction anthology, and I suppose one of the people most responsible for that term gaining currency. My piece, “Double Date,” was originally published in North American Review in 1993, and the premise is that Hamlet and Ophelia and the Macbeths go to a restaurant on a double date. I think I probably had used Leona Helmsley as my model for Lady Macbeth. In the piece as originally published, Lady Macbeth refers to the waiter as a nincompoop. Tom didn’t feel that word really worked, and he made a suggestion that led to the most amusing editorial exchange I suppose I’ve ever had.

When Tom sent back a revised manuscript with several edits, Lady Macbeth was now calling the waiter a varlet. Varlet! I had to look it up. It’s certainly not a word I’ve ever used. Of course, it’s a Shakespearean word, but that’s just what I didn’t want. I wrote back to Tom and told him that I didn’t want to use varlet, and that I felt nincompoop conveyed the anachronistic mood I was aiming for.

Tom’s response was, “‘Nincompoop’ doesn’t work for me.  ‘Punk’?  ‘Schmuck’?  ‘Loser’?”

My next move was, “For nincompoop replacement therapy, of the 3 you suggest I’d go with ‘schmuck,’ but if we’re going that far how about ‘asshole’?” Why not use the official word of New York, I figured.

Less than an hour later I got an email back from Tom: “I like schmuck or prick.”

I shot back a one-word email: “Prick!”

Tom: “Is it better alone or with ‘pompous’?”

I replied, “Let’s stick with just plain prick. While I like the alliteration, I think adding pompous would mitigate her crudeness.” And that’s how a nincompoop became a prick.

Compromise. Accord. Agreement.

If only the Middle East were this easy.

“Are you gong to take that from this nincompoop, varlet, punk, schmuck, asshole, prick?”

And It’s Flash Fiction in the Lead!

This is interesting, a graph charting the frequency of appearance of various terms for short-short prose over the years in Google Books (found as a footnote in the Wikipedia entry for flash fiction). It does indeed seem like it’s pretty much in the past decade or so that flash fiction has settled in as the term of choice.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=short+short+story%2Cflash+fiction%2Cmicrofiction%2Csudden+fiction%2Cpostcard+fiction%2Cmicro-story&year_start=1800&year_end=2010&corpus=15&smoothing=3

Mr. Deadman’s Playlist

Mr. Deadman is a great lover of music, and he has embraced the latest technology.

 

My Booktalk Nation Interview

Last night I was interviewed by Doubleday editor Gerald Howard for Booktalk Nation.  Here’s the archived interview.

Short Prose: The Crossroads of Genre

In 1990 I taught a course in short prose writing. I just came across the course description (a dot-matrix printout!). This was way before the term “flash fiction” gained currency.

While primarily a writing workshop, this class will also involve considerable study of significant works in short prose forms throughout history. A major premise of this class is that such terms as “prose poem” and “short-short story” are limiting and misleading, and that short prose can be seen as a distinct genre (rather than a sub-genre of poetry or fiction) with its own set of traditions, but nonetheless a territory where other genres–verse, fiction, essay, anecdote and aphorism, to name but a few–can meet and fraternize. Among the writers and works discussed will be Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, the symbolist and surrealist short prose traditions, several early Japanese works (The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, and Essays in Idleness of Kenko), the parables and shorter fictions of Kafka and Borges, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, Cortazar’s Cronopios and Famas, Memory of Fire–Eduardo Galeano’s lyrical history of the Americas, and a healthy selection of work by contemporary U.S. practitioners (Lydia Davis, Russell Edson, M. Kasper, Roberta Allen and others). Participants will write and present short prose works in response to a group of fairly open assignments related to the readings. An emphasis will be on exploring varied possibilities of short prose, both in individual pieces and in sequences (the special properties of the “sequence” will be addressed in depth).