The Rose Metal Press Field Guide obviously gives us a lot to parse through - we're taken through pretty much every aspect of flash nonfiction in detail. I'd like to focus mostly, though, on the most immediate distinction of flash - its form. Judith Kitchen praises digression in her piece on pg. 118, saying "it is getting a bit lost on the way out in order to make discoveries on the way back". But flash demands concision, and we don't have the luxury of multiple pages over which to explore ideas. We must, as Carol Guess says, "winnow it into a window" (18) from which to view the world. So after you've allowed yourself a bit of digression, how do you prioritize information and decide what to cut? Does the flash form really allow for the exploration of abstracts, or can we merely hint at them as we pass them by? What do we lose in flash form - and what do we gain?
There is also, as always, the question of where to begin. In the introduction, Moore says, "the reader is not a hiker but a smoke jumper, one of those brave firefighters who jump out of planes and land 30 yards from where the forest fire is burning. The writer starts the reader right at that spot, at the edge of the fire, or as close as one can get without touching the actual flame. There is no time to walk in" (XXII). This plays back into the question of digression and editing, as we're not allowed the luxuries of history or backstory, but is also a puzzle in itself. Flash has to hook the reader from the very first words because it doesn't have time to lure them in. So how do you decide what the most enticing part of a story is? As a writer, do you play with time as Kyle Minor suggests (139) before settling on a beginning, or is there some other way you find the hook? Or do you even agree that flash has to start "at the edge of the fire" at all?
Your questions, Olivia, get me to thinking about the many ways that we talk about what is at the heart of a work of nonfiction, and how as writers we might know it when we see it. In the old days, we would use the word "theme," but somehow that seems corrupted a bit by the reductive ways it's talked about in critical analysis. In this class, inspired in part by Pollack's great essay, we've talked about "the question," and the ways in which that collides with narrative and yields meaning. My mentor, Don Murray, used to talk about the "instructive line," or the sentence that seems most bent by the weight of meaning. It can appear anywhere in a draft, and is the thing around which we revise. In our book this week, Anne Panning writes about the "wheel plot" in flash, and everything "naturally supports the main idea/object and makes the wheel spin" (39). Yesterday, I met at a downtown coffee shop with a fellow writer to share work-in-progress, and we naturally talked about what is the center of gravity in her short pieces. In one case, it was a question. In another, a feeling. Perhaps the appeal of flash nonfiction is that it can be built around a feeling or object rather than an idea or question; its ambitions can be more limited than in longer essays, and this opens up all kinds of material.
ReplyDeleteWhat we're talking about, I suppose, is the same thing we teach in a first year writing class: unity. The premise is that a "good" piece of writing manages the many relationships information so that they're related in some way to a dominant meaning. One of the things I've been thinking about lately--and especially so after reading our book this week--is that we actually need multiple ways to talk about this. Just focusing on "the question," while useful, doesn't always help explain what unifies a work. This seems especially true of flash nonfiction, which can seem to find unity in so many ways.
What I loved best about the Field Guide is that there were so many different perspectives. It seemed like some writers advocate for or use abstractions (Hurd’s “Pauses” comes to mind), while others privilege scene and specifics. Some digress a lot for such a small space; others, only a little. It made me feel better about this genre that I’ve found so intimidating, because it read to me like there are far fewer hard and fast rules about flash nonfiction than I previously thought. But to get to your question, does it allow for the exploration, I would say yes, but that it’s probably tough to do. I think it would be easier to hint at them than to explore them, but I don’t think I’d say they *can’t* be explored. In that I guess we lose the ability to let abstractions run a little more rampant, but we gain the ability to tame them because we have limited space. (This is all making sense to me in my head but I have no idea if I’m articulating it very well.)
ReplyDeleteTo respond to your second point, where to begin, I thought of the piece by Hemley discussing the “punctum and stadium.” He describes the punctum as “a small detail that wounds us,” and I think this seems most important to me when thinking of where to begin. It sort of changed how I thought about the necessity of jumping into the fire – I think more about “framing” the wound in the best way, for it to get the most attention. I think I would have to take much longer pieces I’ve already written and look for the frame and the punctum contained within the piece for me to be able to do this, though. The starting point definitely seems to me the most intimidating.
I’m very new to flash nonfiction, and the Field Guide definitely inspired me to play around with it. Even after reading the whole book, I keep coming back to the fire metaphor that Olivia referenced above. I’m not exactly sure how to find the most enticing question or idea or object, the “edge of the fire”, but I did get the impression that flash nonfiction isn’t really concerned with comfort. The “luxuries of history or backstory” are just that—luxuries. I agree with Emery that they don’t have to be entirely lost in flash nonfiction, but they don’t appear in the ways that readers and writers alike expect. In a lot of longer nonfiction, even if the content is unsettling, I think we can at least take refuge in familiar structures, strategies, and time to process. That doesn’t seem to be the case with flash. I think what could be gained with this form is more poignancy and directness. From what I’ve read, it seems to hit harder and get at just one central thing—we’re zoomed into it, everything moves fast, and everything “unnecessary” is gone. The downfall of all this, depending on how you look at it, is that what gets cut might be all the stuff that makes readers feel close and connected to the writer, but if we return to the fire metaphor, that’s not really the point in this subgenre. My strategy for experimenting with flash nonfiction in the future will be to initially disregard what I think an audience would want, and start with the biggest, scariest thing.
ReplyDeleteI’m really happy with this week’s reading, and, like Emery, really appreciated the “different perspectives” this guide had to offer. I’ve been itching to write about objects, but wasn’t sure if I could or how. I found myself most drawn to Anne Panning, Bret Lott, and Jeff Gundy’s essays. I thought that these essays discussed objects as a way of complicating one’s relationship to place and/or memory. My memory isn’t that great, and it’s been really challenging for me to reconstruct parts of my past. I like that so many of these essays offer pathways into a memory that feel hazy, blurry around the edges. This form feels oddly freeing for me, because I feel like it encourages me to find a moment and exist within it. I think “edge of the fire” beginnings are effective, but as a reader beginnings that focus on something mundane, something that I don’t often pay attention to are just as powerful.
ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by Judith Kitchen's encouragement of digression. "My advice is to court digression," (120) she says and lists several functions of digression in the essay and also provides a series of prompts to amass digressions. Most interesting to me is her claim that the brain will forge a connection between disparate parts or, if not the brain, the heart. As Olivia suggests, exploration seems to place added emphasis on the act of editing and revision. Perhaps we need to amass a pile of parts in order to choose the contours within that give shape to the work. Through digression we accumulate possibilities and, therefore, agency through selection. Maybe our job as writers is to minimize the appearance of randomness in our work.
ReplyDeleteWhat I notice throughout Field Guide is the tendency toward specificity in these brief essays and the power it wields. It seems, as with all writing, an invitation to pay closer attention.
I loved this week’s readings, as well, and I’m also new to flash nonfiction and now excited to try out some ideas. I do love the idea of starting flash nonfiction pieces “at the edge of the fire” (Moore XXII). When I think about my favorite examples from the book, I see this happening, or I at least see that they waste no time and begin with a sense of immediacy that pulled me into each essay.
ReplyDeleteAlthough this is the case in poetry, as well, I was often amazed at how much could be explored in so little space in the pieces we read. One of my favorite essays was Brenda Miller’s “Swerve,” and it holds so much meaning despite being so short. At the same time, I think I would have enjoyed a longer essay on the same topic, and part of me wishes there had been more. Based on this example, I think flash nonfiction allows the reader to take that hint of meaning and run with it and maybe make more of their own meaning with it. (I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about those favorite essays.) Or maybe the writer just has to have a stronger sense of what the experience means so it doesn’t have to be explored as thoroughly. A longer essay allows the writer to spend more time creating that meaning, though.
flash demands concision, and we don't have the luxury of multiple pages over which to explore ideas. We must, as Carol Guess says, "winnow it into a window" (18) from which to view the world. So after you've allowed yourself a bit of digression, how do you prioritize information and decide what to cut? Does the flash form really allow for the exploration of abstracts, or can we merely hint at them as we pass them by? What do we lose in flash form - and what do we gain?
ReplyDeleteAs Bruce pointed out, the limitations of flash nonfiction “open up all kinds of material.” Some of the examples of flash nonfiction at the ends of chapters used the form as a cue to be very direct and straight, others went in a very different direction, and attempted to allow scenes and images to speak for themselves. These are the ones that seemed most interesting to me, where they straddled the line between essay and prose poetry by intense focus on the affective dimension of scenes, images, ideas, and also language itself. To quote Brian Massumi “the qualification of an emotion is quite often... itself a narrative element that moves the action ahead, taking its place in socially recognized lines of action and reaction. But to the extent that it is, it is not in resonance with intensity. It resonates to the exact degree to which it is in excess of any narrative or functional line.” I think that we often have an intuitive sense of that. Maybe this is part of why we are distrusting of the summative final section of our essays, or why so often the essays that leave more questions open than answered are the most impactful, or why it is so much more easy to reject the expositive remembering voice if they take too many liberties with making meaning of the events described, or why Prof. Ballenger advises us to choose subjects that are troubling or of which we remain uncertain.
I think that Robin Hemley's discussion of punctum and studium is very interesting in this regard, as Emery brought up, but I think that Hemley gets it wrong. Barthes was correct in his reluctance to reproduce the picture. Its affective dimensions are reproduced in it's absence, and that is what Hemley feels through its description, not the same punctum that the picture holds for Barthes.
Cynthia Ozick as quoted by Patrick Madden says “the shape and inclination of any essay is against coercion or suasion,... the essay neither proposes nor purposes to get us to think like its author—at least not overtly” and I think that this statement is maybe a bit optimistic. I would agree that the essays that I consider to be good do not do this, but many others do and very overtly.
Whoops, I copied some of Olivia's prompt into a word document so that I could refer back to it without switching windows back and forth, but I forgot to remove it, so lest I be accused of plagiarism, the first paragraph of this response is directly taken from Olivia's question above.
DeleteWell, there was so much to choose from and mull over in this book, and it's a collection that I'll come back to again and again. Embedded within the essay were many useful tidbits of advice and great quotes. One of my favorite being Brett Lott thinking about the book Matters of Life and Death and then the Hannah quote from one of his stories: "Memory, the whole lying opera of it." Very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI also liked Kyle Minor's essay on beginnings (and if that beginning event is in the right place), and, hey, what about other things aside from cause-and-effect and what about people and their emotional lives and the things they do. I like his words: "Or what does it say about me, the god of this telling, that I have to take it there?"
I often struggle with trying to decide what are the vital "bits" worthy of coveted placement in a flash non-fiction piece. Of the readings for this week, I was taken by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (say that 3 times fast) and her advice regarding the use of research and lists in flash nonfiction. She says, "There is much to be learned about a character or speaker by analyzing what he or she parses out in list form. ..What rises to the top of one's consciousness and what echoes in the blank spaces between each item on the list? What gets lost in those small bits of radio silence" (113). I plan to take her advice and use this as a way in--what do my lists say about me and what I seem to want to say/not say about a topic? What might those abandoned food diaries and compulsively revised shopping lists reflect?
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