Where Fairy Tales Come From

First off, I have done A Thing: my short story "Candy, Shoe, and Skull; Sallow Flowers Plucked Like Chains" appears in this month's issue of Niteblade Fantasy and Horror Magazine.

And yes, it's the dark fairy tale issue.

If you know me, you understand why that is perfect.

I've read the magazine and there are some delightfully wondrous and oh-so-dark retwistings of fairy tale in these digital pages. So far my favorites, other than my own story (because: of course), are Eric J. Guignard's "A Kiss and a Curse," a Beauty and the Beast retelling of dire consequence, the narrative poem "Et je ne pleurais jamais les larmes cicatrisantes magiques; c’est seulement un mensonge joli: Arne-Thompson Index No. 310" by Elizabeth McClellan featuring a Rapunzel with agency and engineering on her side, and Rhonda Eikamp's "The Men in the Walls," which is also very, very dark. Well, they're all dark. This is, after all, the dark fairy tale issue. But there's a delight in these dark stories that my brain keeps turning over and over. I love the twists and shapes of these tales.

My piece, "Candy, Shoe, and Skull; Sallow Flowers Plucked Like Chains,"really came about because I kept picking at the notion of where fairy tales come from, then applied that to the modern world.

We're all just dark and twisty beings who don't understand what's going on.

There are two main theories in folklore studies about the origins of these stories of the people and the fact that so many cultures developed the same basic tales seemingly independent of one another. One notion is that these tales arise from the collective subconscious.

Read the rest of this post . . .

Flash Fiction Panel Discussion

I was going to recap this discussion, but why bother when you can go here and listen to the audio yourself?

What I think I liked best about this panel was that they didn't attempt to define what flash fiction is or how it's different from a prose poem.  Basically they all said we write flash fiction, but hey, if an editor wants to publish it as a poem, we got no problem with that.  Brilliant.

"Eulogy," a writing prompt

I was asked to "write a eulogy" for a class on lyricism. There was no instruction or restriction as to who or what we eulogized and after tossing around serious ideas and funny ideas and, well, all other ideas, I ended up writing the following:

Before we go any further, I would like to raise my glass and pay my respects to our dearly departed friend.

He was a good soul. Kind to strangers and patient to a fault. I’ve spent countless hours with him, and on our many adventures he never failed to entertain. He will always live on in our memoires: his pale pink complexion and upturned nose, his bow tie and tiny blue jacket, his unforgettable way of stuttering “th-th-that’s all folks.”

Let that stutter be a lesson to us all. Our dear friend’s condition never got better and yet he persevered. He didn’t let his speech impediment get him down; he was never upset by his trouble pronouncing even the most common of words or phrases. If he was smiling when he stuttered he continued smiling, and if he was beet-faced and livid as hell he didn’t let the stutter stop him from delivering one scathing retort.

That crazy duck and that conniving rabbit laid into our friend from time to time. Occasionally, he was even bested by a hound dog, but our rotund friend always recovered. The next time we saw him he was right as rain, ready to embark on a relaxing vacation. And, oh, what vacation stories he had!

Please bow your heads and take a moment to pray for the soul of our dear friend, Porky. And as we invoke the Lord’s name, to ask Him: O Lord, bless this, your bounty, which we are about to receive. It has been lovingly prepared and beautifully arranged. And, I must agree with Elmer when I say that I have never seen a pork supper to rival the one now before us.

AWP: prose poem vs. flash fiction

Me: still sick. It's a sinus thing. Yuck.

The AWP panel that claimed to discuss the differences between prose poems and flash fiction fell flat. Robert Olen Butler gave his personal definition, but no one else did. This may yet become a defining theory as he judges the Southeast Review's World's Best Short Short Fiction contest every year.

Butler's theory was that prose poems, like all poetry are about epiphanies, bright shining moments. And that flash fiction, like all fiction are narratives about yearning. The difference between long and short fiction is that the yearning becomes more condensed. That the moment when the character realizes the yearning is the end of the story in a piece of flash fiction. "Yearning" being his word for the deepest desires of the characters.

Ron Carlson said he always thought that he wrote stories not poems. But then someone approached him and asked to publish a collection of his poetry, so now Carlson supposes they're poems.

A Holiday Treat

As we move into the long holiday weekend -- the long holiday week for me and my cat-tastic travels -- I have been gifted with the following: the long awaited audio files from the Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop participant readings!!!!

The readings are grouped by day instead of being separated out by individual speaker, which means that I won't be able to put my clip up on my website unless I get fancy with my audio file editing skills. And by 'get fancy' I mean develop any at all because I've never done that before.

Yours truly was only number three to read on day one, but if I remember correctly (and I might not as the adrenaline was fairly high) the girl reading before me was rightly hilarious. The woman after me ... I remember nothing of, at that point the adrenaline of reading in front of roughly 80 - 100 writing savvy peers had wiped my brain clean of any cognitive process.

Those of us up on the first day only had a couple of days to write and polish what we read because "the spirit of the thing" was to read new work, work that had been started there at the Kenyon workshop -- for my group that meant there were only three writing projects to pick from, one that had been written in the 24 hours prior to the reading. I ended up reading the very first piece that I wrote there. Not only did the extended 72 hours help, but it fit the best into the three minute time frame.

And hearing it now ... there's words, repetition I would cut. Argh. Are we ever really ready to let go of our writing?

Flash Fiction: The Bed We've Made

Flash fiction, short shorts, or short-short fiction are all what they sound like: small, complete fiction stories told as briefly as possible. Length varies depending on whom you're talking to and what contest you're entering. The Southeast Review dubs it as any piece of fiction 500 words or shorter for their World's Best Short Short Story Contest (WBSSSC). Glimmer Train states for their Very Short Fiction Award that it's anything less than 3,000 words but they note that they don't think anyone can write a good story in less than 500. Not that I'm trying to start a Lit Mag cat fight.

Fight! Fight!

Ahem. Many of my short shorts start off as poems that has awkward childhoods. They knew they weren't really supposed to be poems but they were born to parents that were poems and in between poem children and had to grow up in order to find out their place in the world was among fiction, though they'll always love their foster family. (Was that last little tid bit in the Ugly Ducking story? I can't recall. Probably just my modern therapy adding on information.)