{"id":63,"date":"2013-09-24T20:05:16","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T20:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/?page_id=63"},"modified":"2017-11-14T19:55:53","modified_gmt":"2017-11-14T19:55:53","slug":"writers-try-short-shorts-part-i","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dept.english.wisc.edu\/wallace\/?page_id=63","title":{"rendered":"Writers Try Short Shorts!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stories<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Writers Try Short Shorts!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some years ago, on sabbatical from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I became interested in the short short story.\u00a0 Or perhaps my interest goes back forty-five years to an American lit\u00a0 course at the College of Wooster in which I first read Hemingway’s In Our Time<\/i>, a series of\u00a0 stories about Nick Adams with curious “inter-chapters” between the longer stories, little\u00a0 one- and two-page pieces that don’t exactly resolve themselves or even forward the action, but\u00a0 that intrigued me.\u00a0 Or perhaps my interest goes back fifty-five years to the Uncle Scrooge\u00a0 comic books I collected, or the Li’l Abner or Mandrake the Magician comic strips I read in the\u00a0 Sunday newspapers, when I was ten.\u00a0 Or perhaps it goes back sixty years to the bedtime stories\u00a0 my parents read me in childhood.<\/p>\n

At any rate, many years ago I started writing and then teaching the short short story.\u00a0 I wanted\u00a0 to move from writing poetry and scholarship to fiction, and this seemed a good way to do it.\u00a0\u00a0 I quickly learned that I wasn’t the only one suddenly discovering the short short; the whole\u00a0 country seemed to be discovering, or re-discovering, it as evidenced by a number of new\u00a0 anthologies on the market, the most important of which was perhaps James Thomas’ and Robert\u00a0 Shapard’s Sudden Fiction<\/i>, which was followed by Sudden Fiction:\u00a0 International<\/i>, Sudden Fiction Continued<\/i>, Flash Fiction<\/i> and Microfiction<\/i>.\u00a0 In addition,\u00a0 Florida State University’s “World’s Best Short Short Story Contest,” the prize for which is a\u00a0 hundred dollars and a crate of Florida oranges and publication in Sundog<\/i> magazine,\u00a0 provided incentive for writers to try short shorts.\u00a0 I tried to win that contest for a decade,\u00a0 and several of my efforts subsequently appeared in my first story collection, Quick Bright Things<\/i> (Mid-List Press, 2000).\u00a0 This year I did finally win the “World’s Best” contest, which must\u00a0 qualify me (for fifteen minutes at least) as something of an authority on the form.<\/p>\n

So, what exactly is the short short story, and where did it come from?\u00a0 Its history and its\u00a0 definition remain somewhat contested.\u00a0 “The World’s Best Short Short Story” competition defines\u00a0 the short short as a story under 250 words; that is, basically a one-page story.\u00a0 And over the\u00a0 years the competition seems to have preferred stories that cover whole lifetimes, what one of\u00a0 the winners, Stephen Dunning, called a “one-page novel.”\u00a0 The anthology Sudden Fiction<\/i>,\u00a0 which includes an appendix with definitions and short short essays about the short short form by\u00a0 various writers, expands the length to 1,500 words, or about five pages.\u00a0 The Handbook to Literature<\/i>\u00a0 edited by Thrall, Hibbard, and Holman, defines it as:\u00a0 “A brief short story, usually between 500\u00a0 and 2,000 words with a ‘twist’ or surprise ending.”<\/p>\n

Thus, most people would agree that the short short story is a story, and that it is shorter than\u00a0 the average story.\u00a0 But is the short short just a regular story made shorter, or perhaps an\u00a0 unlineated poem, a kind of prose poem (Donald Finkel, on reading my short short stories in Worry<\/i>,\u00a0 a chapbook published by Mark Sanders, jovially referred to them as “those poems in which you\u00a0 dropped the line breaks and called them stories”), and does it require a trick ending, or is\u00a0 there more to it than that?<\/p>\n

To answer that question writers and critics have looked to its history.\u00a0 Where does the short short\u00a0 story come from?\u00a0 Perhaps the same place the short story is thought to come from:\u00a0 originally the oral tradition, cave men and women in their caves trying to keep warm and ward off the terrors\u00a0 of the night; Egyptian papyri in 3,000–4,000 BC; the Old and New Testaments with their histories and parables; the myths in the Iliad<\/i> and Odyssey<\/i>; the tales and fables of the Middle Ages; the\u00a0 bawdy and erotic pieces in Boccaccio’s Decameron<\/i>; Malory’s episodes of Camelot in Le Morte D’Arthur<\/i>.<\/p>\n

But it was really in the nineteenth century that the short story and the short short story got\u00a0 established as art forms.\u00a0 Americans like to claim that the short story is an American invention.\u00a0 If that’s chauvinistic, since it ignores the work of Balzac and De Maupassant in France, and\u00a0 Chekhov in Russia, among others, it does bear a grain of truth in that Americans were the first\u00a0 to theorize about it and take it seriously, critically.\u00a0 Both Poe and Hawthorne wrote about it,\u00a0 set down rules, and perfected it as a literary construct.\u00a0 Poe, particularly, in his review of\u00a0 Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales<\/i> in Graham’s Magazine in May 1842, applied the insights of criticism\u00a0 of lyric poetry to the writing of fiction, and the serious literary short story was born.\u00a0 Poe\u00a0 observed that the short story must have a “unity of effect or impression,” and should be able to\u00a0 be read in one-half to one hour (“at one sitting”).\u00a0 In emphasizing the notion of a “single effect,”\u00a0 and of a unity of plot, character, mood, and language, and in connecting the story to the lyric\u00a0 poem, Poe was also, unintentionally, setting down the dicta that would be crucial to the short\u00a0 short story, which can easily be read in one sitting–often in just a few minutes–and which owes much to the intensity and unity of the lyric poem.<\/p>\n

If Poe can be credited with first critically describing the short story, O. Henry and De Maupassant\u00a0 might be credited with contributing examples of the short short before it was named as a\u00a0 separate literary form.\u00a0 Most readers are familiar with the famous O. Henry short short\u00a0 (written while he was in prison for three years for embezzling bank funds), “The Gift of the Magi,” in which a poor couple wants to give each other Christmas gifts but lacks the money. The husband\u00a0 wants to buy a set of combs for his wife’s beautiful long hair, and the wife wants to buy a fob\u00a0 for her husband’s pocket watch.\u00a0 The husband pawns his watch to buy the combs and the wife sells\u00a0 her hair to buy the fob, which provides the “trick ending” that O. Henry was famous for and that\u00a0 became identified with the short short form.\u00a0 De Maupassant’s “The Necklace” is structured\u00a0 similarly.\u00a0 A poor woman, invited to attend a party at the palace of the Ministry, and determined to dress elegantly beyond her means, borrows what she thinks is a diamond necklace from a rich\u00a0 friend.\u00a0 Too proud to admit it when she subsequently loses the necklace, the poor woman purchases an identical one (at an impossible expense to herself and her husband) and returns it to the\u00a0 rich woman without telling her anything, and then works as a cleaning lady for ten years to pay\u00a0 for it.\u00a0 When she’s finally paid off the necklace, and ruined her life, she tells the rich woman\u00a0 the whole story and the rich woman throws her hands up and reveals that the necklace she loaned\u00a0 her friend was worthless paste. Again, the story seems defined, in part, by its twist ending.<\/p>\n

O. Henry or De Maupassant could thus be credited with inventing the short short story, but\u00a0 another source claims credit for actually naming and fostering the form.\u00a0 An engaging little\u00a0 book by Mildred I. Reid and Delmar E. Bordeaux, published by the Trust Building in Rockford,\u00a0 Illinois in 1947, called Writers Try Short Shorts! (All Known Types with Examples)<\/i>, traces the\u00a0 origination of the modern short short to Collier’s Weekly, an American popular magazine that in\u00a0 1925 claimed to have invented it.\u00a0 In the Sept. 12, 1925 issue, Collier’s Weekly announced:\u00a0\u00a0 “Beginning with ‘To Love and to Honor,’ Collier’s presents the greatest innovation in short-story publishing since the work of O. Henry appeared.\u00a0 Each week one of the four authors listed above will contribute a very short story–half pages–from the book of life.”\u00a0 The four participating\u00a0 authors were Octavus Roy Cohen, Rupert Hughes, Sophie Kerr, and Zona Gale.<\/p>\n

The stories in the Collier’s series, and particularly the more recent short shorts in Sudden Fiction<\/i> and after, have tended to downplay the notion of a trick ending and instead focus\u00a0 on a lyric intensity of language, a structure that moves to an epiphany, a sense of a richer and\u00a0 more complex character–what\u00a0 H.E. Francis in Sudden Fiction<\/i> calls “O. Henry without the\u00a0 cheating.”\u00a0 A quick glance at what other short short writers have said about the form further begins to\u00a0 clarify its definition.\u00a0 Fred Chappell observes that it must be “troubling,” must provide a sense of “unease.”\u00a0 John L’Heureux agrees that it should “disturb” us.\u00a0 Irving Howe, in the “Introduction”\u00a0 to his own anthology entitled Short Shorts<\/i>, says “It is fiercely condensed, almost like a lyric\u00a0 poem; it explodes in a burst of revelation or illumination; it confines itself to a single\u00a0 overpowering incident; it bears symbolic weight.” According to Howe it is like most ordinary\u00a0 short stories “only more so.”<\/p>\n

Many of these writers seek to define the short short by suggesting what it’s not:\u00a0 it’s not a\u00a0 parable, which implies a message; it’s not a tale, which is artless, often just an episodic\u00a0 action narrative; it’s not a sketch, which is fragmentary, static.\u00a0 It’s not, as Russell Banks\u00a0 affirms, just a short story made shorter.\u00a0 It’s a form in and of itself (Banks calls short short\u00a0 stories “poes” suggesting their connection to “prose” and “poesy” and perhaps to Edgar Allen Poe’s).\u00a0\u00a0 Robert Kelly, finally, puts his finger on what I think best describes the short short:\u00a0 “neither\u00a0 poetic prose nor prosy verse, but the energy and clarity typical of prose coincident in the scope\u00a0 and rhythm of the poem.”\u00a0 Of course, Kelly’s definition might apply equally well to the prose\u00a0 poem, and because short short stories and prose poems may seem interchangeable (Russell Edson,\u00a0 for example, has published a piece in the Wesleyan poetry series as poetry, and the same piece in Sudden Fiction<\/i> as a short short) it might be useful to try to contrast the two.<\/p>\n

A comparison of the world’s best prose poem of the last twenty-five years (according to me) with the world’s best short short story (according to Florida State University in 1996) serves further\u00a0 to distinguish the short short as a literary form.\u00a0 The prose poem is Carolyn Forch\u00e9’s poem,\u00a0 “The Colonel.”\u00a0 Forch\u00e9, I recall from a visit she made to Wisconsin some years ago, commented\u00a0 that “The Colonel” wasn’t originally meant to be a poem at all; it was a scrap of notes that got\u00a0 accidentally wedged in the manuscript of The Country Between Us<\/i>.\u00a0 When her publisher found the “notes” and praised the “poem,” she decided to retain it in the book.\u00a0 At any rate, I’ve\u00a0 designated it the world’s best prose poem, at least for purposes of comparison.\u00a0 It’s dated May, 1978,\u00a0 and it was written in response to Forch\u00e9’s visit to El Salvador.<\/p>\n

\n
The Colonel<\/h5>\n

What you have heard is true.\u00a0 I was in his house.\u00a0 His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar.\u00a0\u00a0 His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night.\u00a0 There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him.\u00a0 The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.\u00a0\u00a0 On the television was a cop show.\u00a0 It was in English.\u00a0 Broken bottles were embedded in the walls\u00a0 around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace.\u00a0 On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores.\u00a0 We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid.\u00a0 The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of\u00a0 bread.\u00a0 I was asked how I enjoyed the country.\u00a0 There was a brief commercial in Spanish.\u00a0\u00a0 His wife took everything away.\u00a0 There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to\u00a0 govern.\u00a0 The parrot said hello on the terrace.\u00a0 The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed\u00a0 himself from the table.\u00a0 My friend said to me with his eyes:\u00a0 say nothing.\u00a0 The colonel returned\u00a0 with a sack used to bring groceries home.\u00a0 He spilled many human ears on the table.\u00a0 They were\u00a0 like dried peach halves.\u00a0 There is no other way to say this.\u00a0 He took one of them in his hands,\u00a0 shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass.\u00a0 It came alive there.\u00a0 I am tired of fooling\u00a0 around he said.\u00a0 As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something\u00a0 for your poetry, no? he said.\u00a0 Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice.\u00a0\u00a0 Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps the first question to ask is whether this is a poem at all. Forch\u00e9 said that, originally\u00a0 at least, it wasn’t. It’s written in sentences, not lines, and seems to be a piece of prose.\u00a0\u00a0 How is it a poem?\u00a0 One might start with the language:\u00a0 it’s in blunt, declarative sentences,\u00a0 relentless, unvarying, as if trapped in its own grammar, reflecting the sense of entrapment in\u00a0 the situation and theme.\u00a0 But the language is also beautiful, lyrical and musical.\u00a0 The sound of\u00a0 the words is important in and of itself.\u00a0 There’s considerable internal rhyme, assonance,\u00a0 alliteration:\u00a0 “The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house;” “Broken bottles were\u00a0 embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands\u00a0 to lace.”\u00a0 This is the kind of language one finds more readily in lyric poems than in short stories or essays.\u00a0 The vivid evocative imagery is also typical of poetry–the pattern of food imagery,\u00a0 for example, coffee, sugar, lamb, wine, mangoes, salt, bread, ears like dried peach halves. The\u00a0 poem is structured on a juxtaposition of the normal and everyday, the beautiful and savory–food, TV, family–with the inhuman and horrifying, the grotesque and unsavory–violence, murder, death.\u00a0 The juxtaposition creates a sense of unreality, a surrealism in what is a very casually described and realistic scene: daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol, and a man’s scooped-out kneecaps.\u00a0 The\u00a0 fact that the cop show is in English suggests America’s complicity in the scene.\u00a0 The tone, the\u00a0 author’s attitude toward the subject, further underlines the horror–it’s all reported in an\u00a0 almost neutral, factual way; the restraint, the enforced objectivity, intensifies the emotion.\u00a0 It’s a bleak world in which the dead ears are still “alive” in a way, still bearing witness to\u00a0 atrocities. Thus, the piece has many of the elements of a poem–lyrical language important for\u00a0 itself; vivid evocative imagery; an attention to subtleties of tone; surprising metaphors.<\/p>\n

It does, of course, also tell a story, but not in the way a typical short story would.\u00a0 Rather\u00a0 than a character in the story, or a narrator, or the author, telling the story, this piece evokes a story.\u00a0 It’s an evocation of a world, a mood, a theme. Forch\u00e9 is talking more to herself than\u00a0 to us; we overhear her.\u00a0 If a narrator were to tell this story it would have a very different feel and tone:\u00a0 “I went to this colonel’s house in El Salvador.\u00a0 We had dinner and I met his daughter and son.\u00a0 At the end of the dinner he spilled some ears onto the floor.”\u00a0 Of course, what this\u00a0 version would also lack is the rhythm of poetry. The word “verse” comes from the Latin “verso”\u00a0 meaning a turning. Forch\u00e9’s poem is characterized by a turning and returning, a rhythm of\u00a0 repetition, a recurrence of grammatical and syntactical structures:\u00a0 “I was;” “His daughter\u00a0 filed;” “There were;” “the moon swung;” “Some of the ears;” “Some of the ears.”\u00a0 This rhythm of\u00a0 repetition, as opposed to a rhythm of continuity, is typical of poetry.<\/p>\n

Although such simplistic distinctions between poetry and prose are always suspect, they seem\u00a0 useful in distinguishing Forch\u00e9’s poem from Brian Hinshaw’s short short story that follows.\u00a0 Forch\u00e9’s piece isn’t, of course, a lyric poem; although its lyrical elements ensure its status as poetry, it would lose a great deal by being broken up into lines.\u00a0 It would lose some of the\u00a0 starkness of the prose, some of the impact of the juxtapositions, and some of the neutrality of\u00a0 the tone.\u00a0 It is, I would argue, a prose poem:\u00a0 the language and rhythm and voice of poetry in\u00a0 the shape and tone of prose.<\/p>\n

Brian Hinshaw’s “The Custodian,” the World’s Best Short Short Story for 1996 according to Sundog Magazine<\/i>, is, by contrast, more clearly prose.<\/p>\n

\n
The Custodian<\/h5>\n

The job would get boring if you didn’t mix it up a little.\u00a0 Like this woman in 14-A, the nurses\u00a0 called her the mockingbird, start any song and this old lady would sing it through.\u00a0 Couldn’t\u00a0 speak, couldn’t eat a lick of solid food, but she sang like a house on fire.\u00a0 So for a kick, I\u00a0 would go in there with my mop and such, prop the door open with the bucket, and set her going.\u00a0 She was best at the songs you’d sing with a group–“Oh Susanna,” campfire stuff.\u00a0 Any kind of\u00a0 Christmas song worked good too, and it always cracked the nurses if I could get her into “Let It\u00a0 Snow” during a heat spell.\u00a0 We’d try to make her to take up a song from the radio or some of the\u00a0 old songs with cursing in them, but she would never go for those.\u00a0 Although once I had her do\u00a0 “How Dry I Am” while Nurse Winchell fussed with the catheter.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, her daughter or maybe granddaughter comes in while 14-A and I were partways into\u00a0 “Auld Lang Syne” and the daughter says “oh oh oh” like she had interrupted scintillating\u00a0 conversation and then she takes a long look at 14-A lying there in the gurney with her eyes shut\u00a0 and her curled-up hands, taking a cup of kindness yet.\u00a0 And the daughter looks at me the way a\u00a0 girl does at the end of an old movie and she says “my god,” says “you’re an angel,” and now I\u00a0 can’t do it anymore, can hardly step into her room.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The question I initially posed about “The Colonel” was whether it was really a poem.\u00a0 Maybe it\u00a0 was a short short story.\u00a0 The question one might ask about “The Custodian” is whether it is\u00a0 really a story.\u00a0 Perhaps it’s a prose poem.\u00a0 “The Custodian” seems, however, even more clearly a\u00a0 story than “The Colonel” does a poem.\u00a0 The language, for example, which in “The Colonel” is lyrical and dense and important for itself, in “The Custodian” is more idiomatic, conversational,\u00a0 prosy–not lyrical at all.\u00a0 The story is told, not evoked, and the whole is structured on a\u00a0 variant of the classic story form, which moves from a beginning in the middle of things, through\u00a0 some exposition and a rising action, to a turning point, climax, and resolution.\u00a0 The short short story is too short to follow that whole curve, so it often follows a variant (and this may be\u00a0 one major distinction between the short short and the regular short story).\u00a0 Structured more like the joke, the short short often begins in the middle of things, skips the exposition or summary, proceeds with the rising action to, if not a turning point or climax, an epiphany or revelation, which is often like the punch line of a joke.<\/p>\n

“The Custodian,” for example, starts in the middle of things by introducing the main character\u00a0 and the job that defines him, and how it might get boring unless he “mixed it up a bit.”\u00a0 Examples of “mixing it up” follow–how he can make his patient sing any song, how he makes fun of her,\u00a0 how her daughter misinterprets what he’s doing as loving care and so unintentionally shames him\u00a0 that he’ll never do it again.\u00a0 The custodian has an epiphany (a punch line that suggests the joke’s on him), a spiritual revelation that changes him.\u00a0 This narrative curve distinguishes Hinshaw’s\u00a0 short short story from both Forch\u00e9’s prose poem, and from a regular short story.<\/p>\n

Further, character is important to Hinshaw, in ways it isn’t to Forch\u00e9.\u00a0 Forch\u00e9, the author\u00a0 herself, is the speaker of her poem, and she’s talking as much to herself as to us; a character\u00a0 in the story is the speaker of “The Custodian” and he’s talking to us, the audience.\u00a0 In Forch\u00e9’s prose poem, the colonel is a type, and the speaker is our eyes and ears–there’s no real growth\u00a0 or change or development on the part of anyone in the poem.\u00a0 In Hinshaw’s short short story, the\u00a0 narrator is an individual–the reader gets a clear sense of him through his idiomatic speech, his attitude to his job, and his sense of humor. And the narrator learns something about himself and life in general, and changes as a result.\u00a0 The daughter’s misinterpretation of his actions makes him see his patient’s humanity and his own crassness, and he feels he will never be the same again.<\/p>\n

So, to summarize the differences between Forch\u00e9’s prose poem and Hinshaw’s short short story:\u00a0\u00a0 Language is used differently: in Forch\u00e9, it’s an end in itself; in Hinshaw, it’s a means to an\u00a0 end.\u00a0 The narrative mode is different: in Forch\u00e9, the narrative is evoked through a rhythm of\u00a0 repetition–we overhear the narrator; in Hinshaw, the story is told through a rhythm of continuity–the narrator talks more directly to us.\u00a0 The concern for character is different:\u00a0 in Forch\u00e9, the\u00a0 characters are types and less important for themselves than for the emotions they evoke;\u00a0 in\u00a0 Hinshaw, the characters are more important as individuals.\u00a0 The structure is different:\u00a0 Forch\u00e9\u00a0 moves by repetition and juxtaposition; Hinshaw uses a variant of the classic story form, moving\u00a0 from the middle of an action, through several scenes, to a revelation or epiphany for the central\u00a0 character.<\/p>\n

Of course, it might be argued that these distinctions may just be true of Forch\u00e9 and Hinshaw;\u00a0 they may not characterize prose poems and short short stories in general. In fact, my students\u00a0 at Wisconsin and I test them every time we read a new short piece or write one of our own.\u00a0 We\u00a0 also test distinctions between the short short story and the regular story, noting differences of character, style, narrative mode, tone, pacing, and dialogue, in a semester-long course I teach\u00a0 annually. What began as an experiment ten years ago–a one-time-only “special topics” course–has now become a permanent part of the undergraduate creative writing curriculum.\u00a0 Mildred I. Reid\u00a0 and Delmar E. Bordeaux, in Writers Try Short-Shorts!\u00a0 (All Known Types with Examples)<\/i> long ago\u00a0 argued the virtues of such a course.<\/p>\n

It is, however, to the beginning writer that the short short story has especially endeared itself.\u00a0 He finds this brief form a valuable proving ground for assimilating fiction techniques in a\u00a0 most economical manner.\u00a0 Here he gets the opportunity to try his wings on brief flights in preparation for the longer soarings necessary for the short story or the novel.<\/p>\n

With the short short story, the beginning writer finds also a ready market for his work.\u00a0 An\u00a0 established name is not needed to sell a short short even to the best of markets.\u00a0 All that is\u00a0 required is that the story itself be good, and all markets are wide open to the most obscure\u00a0 unknown.<\/p>\n

For these reasons the short short story recommends itself highly also to high school and college\u00a0 classes in creative writing.\u00a0 In addition, the teacher of such a class finds the short short\u00a0 story, once he understands its principles, simple to explain. Assignments in this form are easy\u00a0 to correct and criticize, and the enthusiasm which students show for the short short makes the\u00a0 teaching of it a pleasure.<\/p>\n

There are other reasons for teaching and writing the short short.\u00a0 Over the years I have found\u00a0 that many beginning fiction writers, unable to sustain a narrative for more than eight to ten\u00a0 pages, try, nevertheless, to do in those pages what Flannery O’Connor, or John Updike, or Joyce\u00a0 Carol Oates, or William Faulkner did in thirty to forty pages.\u00a0 The result is often a truncated,\u00a0 unfinished piece.\u00a0 The short short form encourages a young writer to match more appropriately\u00a0 his or her subject matter to the space available. Using published short shorts as models for\u00a0 beginning students is perhaps more realistic than expecting the students to emulate the longer\u00a0 masterpieces that appear in most of the college fiction anthologies.<\/p>\n

But even for more advanced writers, the short short can prove salutary.\u00a0 Not only does it promote economy and precision of language; it can open up rich new areas of subject matter and mode.\u00a0\u00a0 The length of the short short, I have found, encourages young writers to experiment more, to\u00a0 explore wild and often bizarre territory.\u00a0 Without the sometimes daunting pressure of having to\u00a0 sustain a narrative for twenty or more pages, students are more likely to pursue odd premises and take risky chances, moving outside the known and autobiographical to the unknown and fanciful.\u00a0 The range and variety of theme and subject matter I find in my short short classes far exceeds\u00a0 that of my regular fiction workshops in which the same kinds of stories tend to show up semester\u00a0 after semester.\u00a0 Short short classes always seem to promote the surprising and unusual.<\/p>\n

Of course, it is not only students who remain intrigued with the possibilities of the short short.\u00a0 Many established fiction writers today have tried their hand at the short short, and many poets have used the form, as I have, to segue into fiction.\u00a0 Short shorts provide important links in\u00a0 the sequence of stories I recently published as Quick Bright Things<\/i>, and I currently find\u00a0 myself writing a novel.\u00a0 And not a one-page novel, either.<\/p>\n

Short short stories have been around at least as long as people have had the language to make\u00a0 them, and they will probably survive as far into the future as one can imagine.\u00a0 Their special\u00a0 popularity today may, in part, be due to the speed at which we live, in which the attention span\u00a0 of “one sitting” by which Poe defined the short story, has become shorter and shorter.\u00a0 But the\u00a0 great short short story expands well beyond its minimalist limitations.<\/p>\n

Jerome Stern, who administered the World’s Best Short Short Story competition for years before\u00a0 his untimely death, once described what, for him, a winning short short must do.\u00a0 He compared\u00a0 reading it to entering, on a sunny day, a dark room in which a party was going on.\u00a0 At first his\u00a0 eyes, unaccustomed to the dark, would see almost nothing, just movement and shape.\u00a0 Gradually,\u00a0 as his eyes adjusted, he would begin to see people, and then details of furnishing and decor.\u00a0\u00a0 Every time he left the room for a breath of air, and then returned, he would see new things–the\u00a0 party and the contents of the room would in some ways be familiar, but would also have changed.\u00a0\u00a0 He could go back again and again, and always find something new; it would never be quite the same.\u00a0 Invite him to that party, that room, he said, and he’d be happy.\u00a0 You might even end up with a\u00a0 hundred dollars and a crate of Florida oranges.<\/p>\n

Selected Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n