New Flash Fiction Review published one of my pieces April 27 in its "New Work" section online. It's a fairly new online mag with a wonderful group of editors: San Francisco's Meg Pokrass, the excellent Boston short story writer Pam Painter, Texas short-short fiction writer Tiff Holland, and advisory editor and anthologist James Thomas. I read on the W.W. Norton web site that James and his colleagues Robert Shepard coined the term "flash fiction." I met Meg Pokrass through Facebook. She's one of the few writers daring enough to feature new work on FB and ask for feedback. She talked about this experience, and read some of her work, on a snowy mid-September day at the 2014 Equality State Book Festival in Casper.
I consider myself a writer of short stories that aren't that short. Stories in my first published book are of traditional length and follow a structure similar to those penned by writers I've studied, everyone from Hemingway to Tobias Wolff.
But over the past 20 years, I've published three short pieces, including the one below. I had a 1,000-word piece in the Norton anthology, In Short: Brief Creative Nonfiction. I published a short-short called "Flying Nurse" in High Plains Register a few years ago. I've been writing short blog pieces here for ten years. In my youth, as editor and columnist for a Denver arts and entertainment weekly, I wrote columns that were 750-1,000 words. Most of my magazine and newspaper pieces have been fairly short, although I've also written some long-form mag pieces. Humor and satire, which I purport to write on these pages, is better short. It's challenging to write short. And fun. Which is why I'm going to stop right here, referring you to my latest flash fiction:
WELCOME TO ZAN XLEMENTE, ZALIFORNIA
My daughter M went to a nuthouse in San Clemente and all I got was this lousy metal keychain with CALIFORNIA writ large the blue of the sea under a gold-and-orange/red sun.
Read the rest at New Flash Fiction Review.
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