Category Archives: Uncategorized

New Pages has just posted my review of First We Read, Then We Write:
Emerson on the Creative Process By Robert D. Richardson.

Check it out HERE.

This month features reviews by Jason Hinkley, Laura Di Giovine, Josh Maday, Christina Hall, Cyan James, Jason Tandon, Jessica Powers, Brian Allen Carr, and Ryan Call.

James Iredell dropped a line to let me know that his new chapbook is out from Publishing Genius.

Here’s some more info from PG:

Before I Moved to Nevada is a 40-page chapbook, which is a lot, so take some of the water you just boiled, pour a cup of tea, and sit down at your computer and enjoy it slowly. Or even better: build yourself a copy using the print-formatted PDF version. Read it on screen or print it: here at the Publishing Genius home of This PDF Chapbook.

Before I Moved to Nevada is a story about travel, about family, football, friendship, friendship, kissing, sports recreation vehicles, bears, about cabins and rivers. It’s a story that ends with this sentence: “Nothing happened, except for the fish” which is a really good sentence.

Christy Call, who I think is the universal favorite of everyone who went to AWP, drew the deer on the front. There were over 30 emails exchanged proclaiming the superiority of that deer over all other deer. I mean, look at it!

Amelia Gray (AM/PM, Featherproof Books) initiated a dialogue with me about the role of the teacher. Please visit her blog and contribute.

Thanks.

At her blog Green City News, Molly Gaudry opened up a forum about flash fiction, among other things, in an entry entitled “Flash fiction, Indie Lit, and the Beats.”

Here’s my quick response:

“It’s a tremendous challenge you face regarding defining, compartmentalizing, speculating about, teasing apart, questioning a form that’s reared in, or at any rate, results in a feeling of immediacy, poignancy, intimacy, connection, something that may act like a virus, a germ, that assaults, coerces, teases, a form having, at its best, haiku’s cogency, a stand-up comic’s delivery, the speed of telling the news but not the weather, a form that stings like a slap, purples like a bruise, a form that at its worst sounds like some drunk dude flapping his gums (it sounded funny or clever at the time, but was really just some guy being dumb), a form that because of its democratic impulse, has opened the floodgates for all kinds of detritus, making it all the more difficult to ascertain quality, importance, significance. Maybe time will tell. But then again what tale does time really tell anyway?

And so now I ramble.

As for demarcating lines between flash, micro- and short fiction, mini-prose poems, etc., I think it’s critical to consider that while hairsplitting results in two hairs, it also results in one original hair diminished. But then again, who’s to say split-ends don’t have their own kind of beauty? Ah, it’s all pretty hairy anyway.

So then, disjointedness and confusion is one possible, if not viable, approach.”

Please feel free to join in the dialogue.