Rusty Barnes – Writing Prompt The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction Edited by Tara L. Masih Rose Metal Press 2009 FLASH FICTION EXERCISE Memory-Mapping Exercise from Rusty Barnes I acknowledge here the conflation/adaptation of a couple of exercises from Josip Novakovich’s essential book Fiction Writer’s Workshop (Story Press, 1995), the “Settings” chapter in particular. Where Novakovich asks writers to use lists of objects remembered from the childhood home and descriptions of the childhood neighborhood to imagine what happened in those places, using a map if necessary, I take the exercise in a different, character-generating direction. I’ve…
Author: Mom Egg Review
I teach a course in Flash Fiction, and have come to appreciate the kind of skill required for brevity of narrative and surprise/conflict. Over the years I have seen stories just over a paragraph to four pages that capture moments or even large swaths of time and the discoveries that happen to people in the midst of their lives. Post-Civil War writer Kate Chopin’s page/plus “The Story of an Hour,” about a woman’s startling realization about marriage and identity, created controversy in its time and is continually included in literature anthologies (I use it in my Intro to Lit class).…
You (or your character) wake up one morning to find you are not one, but two. However, the other you is somehow different. Try to show this difference through dialog and action, rather than “telling”.
POEMS ON LOVE OF IDENTITY / IDENTITY OF LOVE Curated by Sharon Dolin Sharon Dolin is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Manual for Living (2016); Serious Pink (2015 reissue); Whirlwind (2012); and Burn and Dodge (2008), which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Her other awards include the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Drisha Arts Fellowship. Her work has appeared in dozens of magazines as well as in these recent anthologies: Short Flights: Aphorism Anthology, The Poets Quest for God, The Incredible Sestina Anthology, Ecopoetry,…
He buzzes me in, the stairwell narrow. His shop is filled always, holiday or not, with clients and clever women, an eagle’s nest from which he views the world below— “Bespoke Clothier” gilded on the plate-glass window. The room is tight and beautiful, a womb of neatly stacked swatches, samples, imported silks, exotic fringes, all impeccably sorted, reflected, re-reflected in the full-length mirrors. I fold my mind into a perfect square and slip my doubts between his wooly promises. I dream about the stairs, on each step a gift: a pretty box, bouquet, framed photo, scented letter, a poem. And…
The only hard thing is the alarm everything else I love— flicking on the coffee dumping goggles, cap and clothes into my bag for later slipping on the suit greeting the sleepy doorman who opens the door to the street in morning air that says Manhattan is an island with its scent of rivers and tides only blocks away how the light changes with the seasons darkening now with fall how late in winter the sun sometimes rises while I’m still sitting on a subway plastic seat the almost-empty car not yet carrying the scrum of commuters who’ll be boarding…
to the pigpen I have prepared for you. Come and settle your fumes over the couch where I have lain myself among my books awaiting your arrival, O Grievance and Resentment, you well-worn pair, with your inspirations. You, the comfy old shoes of my voice, what has happened to us? Haven’t you always been here to march my swallowed sarcasm across the page? Didn’t you always make yourselves handy when some slight or infidelity rankled my memory? Hasn’t your purpose always been to lace yourselves snugly around my desire for revenge? Suppose I had an entire day free to brood…
Drunk and depressed twenty-five or so, waiting at bus stop, Cyclone behind me. Wanted to turn and ride but too self-conscious, even drunk. A pity. I loved this brain-rattling roller coaster this gravity train the slams and turns and twists and whips like slaps. I preferred the skull-shaking first car when I could get it. Once Paul and loopy I plus his friend and pale green girlfriend were crossing the street when a car starts backing up. He pulls me out of the way saying there’s a Chinese saying if you save someone’s life you are responsible…
Your wine-deep Eyes wound In the dark The gift of abandon on your lips: Open roses to my thirst Exultant petals *** I spilled the wine The stain spreading Over my prince’s white scarf A sign the rains of distance Had come between us City lights on your aging skin No longer dark promise Of your solar throat Throbbing around me In the Metro tunnel I encircled your waist Found your mouth, teeth closed gates We take different exits Your gaze blazes through my raincoat I resist the urge to turn We each retreat To another language To the land…
When she began to report on the world outside (first grade), strange pages came home. I saw everything all over again—the hunybee, the bootiful air, and the erthworm primitive without his “a.” Now she keeps a stethoscope in her car. In the emergency room, the paddock, the pasture, and on the exam table—paws, panting, skitterings, and wings, black hooves, and orb-like eyes— she listens to all sizes of beats and murmurs with that rapt listening of one who is tuned into a dark-chambered muscle. Afterwards, her fingers fly over the keys to say what was inside. She says that every…