surf-hushed in dusk's first breath

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

As you'll note below in links to Justin Hunt's many publications and prizes over the past few years, it's no surprise that this prolific poet won Bacopa Literary Review 2015's second-place poetry prize:  

Autumn, Huntington Beach

They curl in sand,
October in their sagging
skin, pocked bodies
poured bronze with sun.

Others sit, lips and teeth
as dull as their chairs
corroded frames, hair
frayed like plastic seats,

time unraveled. Men
plump into years or shrink
on bone, knees knobbing
into wind, last probes

of day. Women murmur,
cull words from brine,
sigh until they're sated,
surf-hushed in dusk's

first breath. Soon, dark
will come. They will stand,
gather belongings, plod
gray sand and dunes

back to their Harleys,
campers and tents. Soon,
but still they sit or lie, eyes
seaward, empty moons--

no thoughts of leaving,
no thoughts at all. 

In 2015, Justin's poems appeared in Comstock Review (2nd prize, 2015 Muriel Craft Bailey Contest for "Two West and a Half South"), Atlanta Review (International Publication Prize for "Oblivion," Fall Poetry Issue, 2015), Kansas City Voices (Whispering Prairie Press, 1st place for "Of Light and Time"), Spoon River Poetry Review's 2015 Editors' Prize Contest ("Nocturne" was 1st runner-up), 2015 Freshwater Review ("My Mother, My Father"), and Northern Colorado Writers Pooled Ink's annual poetry contest ("Cold Night in March" was Editor's Pick). 

Justin's poem "On the Phone with Kansas" appears in the poetry collection What Matters (Jacar Press, 2013) and his poem "Half-Light" in Pinesong (North Carolina Poetry Society, 2013). He was also published three years in a row in Main Street Rag's Kakalak ("Requiem in Wide Open Minor" in 2013, "Baseball" in 2014, and "Who Looks for You" in 2015). 

Submissions open until June 30, 2016

MORE CREATIVE SPARKS, FROM VLADIMIR NABOKOV

by Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

Sometimes when you're reading a creative writer, just a few words set off the sparks in your mind. Here's an example. Lately I've been reading Nabokov's Letters to Vera, which, like everything Nabokov has written, is full of sparkling passages. At one point he mentions Joyce and Proust:

"Joyce met Proust just once, by chance; Proust and he happened to be in the same taxi cab, the window of which the first would close and the second would open--they almost quarreled. On the whole it was rather tedious" (p. 267) 

On this same page Nabokov gets into some fascinating macaronic word play, taking off on Joyce. Here is my embellishment of that passage, which I recently inserted into a long novel I'm preparing for publication: 

"Joyce and Proust ended up by chance in the same taxi-cab one day. They had never met before. Joyce would open the window, Proust would ask him to close it. Drafts. This opening and closing and opening again and closing again went on for the whole of their life together (ten minutes). Then they climbed out of the taxi--thoroughly disillusioned with each other--and went their separate ways for all time."

Is this plagiarism? No, this is creative borrowing plus embellishing. A pedantic reader might also object, "But are you sure you have the facts right? Is this what actually happened? Aren't you, to some extent, making up this scene between two great writers?"

Yes, I am making up the scene, embellishing upon two great writers. But I'm not writing a scholarly work. I write fiction. I can make up Joyce and Proust in my fiction if I like. I can even make up Nabokov. I've already made him up once, in my short story, "Hobnob." 

It's a wonderful life, being a fabricator! 

Submissions open until June 30, 2016

A Safe Place to Escape

by 2016 Bacopa Managing Editor, Mary W. Bridgman

Two of my pieces have been published in Bacopa Literary Review, "Happy Hunting" (fiction) in 2012 and "Garbage Mass with Class" (creative nonfiction) in 2013. Both of these are humorous. Although I do compose some serious pieces, I prefer to write for entertainment. I like to laugh, and I love to bring a smile to readers' faces. 

In "Garbage Mass with Class," for example, I described lying awake at night "tormented by fears of impeding disaster--an inevitable avalanche of unwanted, unusable, unfashionable, hermetically sealed boxes of chemically preserved wedding gowns." 

In "Happy Hunting," stepmother-in-law Rosebud's efforts to help around the house included "a tacky shower curtain, with an image of Elvis Presley, hanging in our bathroom." When a shot in the night awakened everyone: 

"What's goin' on?" she asked. "I heard some loud noises and I figured it might be the Rapture, but I wasn't taken up."

"Must not be the Rapture after all," I said through gritted teeth. It was clear Rosebud didn't expect we would wind up in the same place should the Rapture occur during our mutual lifetime.

Books have been valued companions on my life journey, often an escape from the stresses of everyday living. That's what I want to create for readers: a safe place to escape and relax for a while. I've written a book of short stories, two middle-grade novels, and most recently, a cozy mystery. These haven't been published yet--I'm trying to go the traditional route, seeking a literary agent, which may be an impossible dream. Who knows? It doesn't hurt to try, and it's exciting to have a dream.

Cozy mysteries, my favorite reading pastime, feature amateur sleuths and interesting casts of characters that reappear throughout a series of books, such as Stephanie Plum in Janet Evonovich's well-known series (One for the Money, Two for the Dough, Three to Get Deadly, etc.). Readers gravitate to this genre because the cozy world generally makes sense: in the end, the mystery is solved and justice prevails. And I'm intrigued by the puzzle-solving aspect, trying to figure out Who did it? as I read along. It doesn't matter to me whether I can figure it out or not, as long as I've enjoyed the ride.

So maybe that's a good place to end this post. I'm up for a new challenge as Bacopa's Managing Editor, which is more of an administrative role than a literary one. I'm responsible for monitoring and acknowledging submissions, making sure there's no identifying information, so the genre editors will judge solely on merit. At the end of the day I hope I can say I've learned something new and, in the process, enjoyed the ride! 

(See also: Attorney Puts Retirement in Context; "Christmas Chaos" in From Our Family to Yours--Florida Writer's Association, Vol. 1; Chicken Soup for the Soul: Thanks to my Mom) 

Submissions open until June 30, 2016

PICKING UP SPARKS, THEN SPARKING NEW SPARKS

by Bacopa Fiction Editor U.R. Bowie

A Story by Hillary Mantel, "The Present Tense," London Review of Books, Jan. 7, 2016
 
In what is otherwise a realistic story, about teaching in a third world country, the teacher injects a bit of fantasy in making up a tale to tell her students. About a man whose head got turned around backwards. The fantasy infects the reader, grows inside, so that we end up with something like this, part Hillary and part Hillary+reader:

"A man went off to work one day and came home to his wife with his head turned backwards on his shoulders. His bare feet were as long as his calves, his toes were fat, arthritically so, and he wriggled his fat arthritic toes as he walked, grinning from ear to ear out of his bassackwards-fitting head, exposing blockish teeth like gravestones."

This is writing with verve. Don't you think so? Doesn't it beat the run-of-the-mill thing about middle class Americans and their tribulations, told in a style that is dull and pedestrian? You can find the original Mantel story online if you wish, and you can compare what she wrote to the embellished paragraph above.

But the point I make here concerns, precisely, the embellishments. You read something that has a certain creative frisson. Then that spark ignites something inside you, and you become creative, creating new flame out of someone else's creative spark. So goes the creative process down through the ages: art inspiring new art that inspires new art, ad infinitum. Thanks, Hillary.


Submissions open until June 30, 2016

I Do Not Know Any Home

We're delighted to feature excerpts from Bacopa Literary Review 2015's First Place Fiction winner, Ellen Perry. Readers will find a hint about what to expect in Perry's prize-winning "Milk--Bread--Soft Drinks" with her beginning quote: 

I do not know any home. So why should I be homesick? (Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter)

Notice how Perry creates a strong sense of place with echoes of memories: 

Watching my clothes dry at a 24-hour laundromat in New York City, I eased myself into a corner seat near the window and took one sip of "Co-Cola," as my family back in south Georgia called it, and all of a sudden I was ten years old again, sitting on that wobbly bench outside Kincaid's Store, waiting for Mama to get off work at River Girls and take me to the fireworks. . . My mother, Ada Lee, gave birth to me when she was 17. My father was 18. . . "Your daddy used to could throw a baseball like they was no tomorrow," old Mr. Kincaid told me at his store when I asked about Dewey. . . I'd pay for my Coke and sit out front under the red and white "Milk--Bread--Soft Drinks" sign. . .

. . . everyone in town knew about River Girls, the bar and strip club down by the railroad tracks. . . At various times the church ladies (armed in Hamrick's pantsuits and tight, short perms) marched door-to-door to get signatures, trying to close down the "devil's juke joint." But River Girls stayed busy and. . . I was in heaven with all the store-bought clothes, TV shows, Bible stories, Cokes, and freedom until one day I noticed that Ada Lee had stopped laughing. . .

I like to think that my mother had argued with her boss at River Girls, stormed out of there and drove like crazy to get to me before the fireworks started, but I won't ever know. . . I stayed for a while with the Kincaids and then with Dewey, but his girlfriend said it wasn't working out so I moved to Athens to live with my grandparents. . . the only time I'd returned to Georgia was to attend Mr. Kincaid's funeral just before I finished school. I cried for days and swore I'd never go south again.

Then that laundromat Co-Cola sneaked up on me and tasted like home. It took me right back to the banks of the Altamaha where I first heard stories running smooth like the river and, on Independence Day, where I learned to make them up.

More stories by Ellen Perry:

"It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," Gravel
"Divorce, $189: Fast and Affordable," Spank the Carp 
"I Wonder," The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature 
"Letters from Asheville & Beyond: A Fictional Journey into Western North Carolina" (blog series): Part One: "We Take 'Em All" and Part Two: Get on the Bus."
"Mature Adult Cat Chow," Wussy
"Customer Service," Deep South Magazine
"Derby Day," Finalist for A Room of Her Own Foundation's Orlando Prize for Short Fiction (Fall 2015)

Submissions open until June 30, 2016

The Prose Poem: An Eccentric Genre

by Bacopa Prose Poetry Editor Kaye Linden

Our 2018 Prose Poetry guidelines: Prose poems are pure creation, the playful and daring edge of poetry. The writer must provide powerful lyrical language and, above all, a truthful, commanding voice.

The eccentric prose poem is not honored as poetry by many writers because it is modern, nontraditional, and misunderstood. A prose poem breaks the rules of poetry. Prose poetry is the rebel with a cause, a woman ruling her own country, a mixed genre that identifies with no form in particular.

Prose poems don't use the line breaks of traditional poetry and may offer complete sentences in narrative form or odd fragments strewn across a page. They might consist of half-page or three-page narratives or one-line symbolic declarations, the obvious and the implied work in balance to surprise the reader. Whether a prose poem runs in broken lines or dense narrative, its major element, as with all poetry, is its language. That language is often simple, with implied symbolism, as with Edson’s "The Ant Farm" (The Tunnel: Selected Poems):

In spite of Columbus the world collapses and goes flat again.
The sky is a bell jar where a child in another scale watches his ant farm.
When the bored child yawns two thousand years pass.

Someday we have crashed to the playroom floor; the careless child knocks us over
with his fire truck. . . All that dirt lying in its broken sky.
Swept up, it is thrown into a garbage can at the back of the universe. 

Few writers can define this eccentric genre. At the same time, the use of sentences as opposed to broken lines does change the rhythm and oral read of any poem, and the use of sentence structure in dense or loose narrative elicits a different feel and expectation for the reader. 

Prose poetry allows experimentation and a breaking of poetic rules because of its flexibility and lack of strict definition. It often, but not always, has a specific shape on the page. Except for line breaks, it makes use of poetic device and tactics such as imagery and doesn't employ a plot or story line as does short fiction. 

For the amazing geography of the world of prose poetry, take a look at Great American Prose Poems From Poe to the Present edited by David Lehman (Simon & Schuster). In his Introduction, Lehman describes the prose poem as "an insistently modern form. . . inherently subversive. . . a hybrid form, an anomaly if not a paradox or oxymoron. It offers the enchantment of escape. . . ." 

Prose poetry and flash fiction hang out together like best friends. The poem above by Russell Edson doesn't boast all the definitive elements of flash story but it does have some—small frame, compression, minimalism, a tiny world, word weight. Not much of a story line though, is it? This poem works by implication and imagery, subtext and symbolism, the marks of poetry. And my flash piece, 1st prize winner for Creative Nonfiction in Bacopa Literary Review 2015 before I became an Editor, could just as readily be considered a prose poem:

The Linear and Circular One Sentence of Tattoo Designs over His Body

David runs through Goliath with a sword but Goliath stands strong, his sandal strap broken by the tip of steel, blood at the ankle, a few hairy hairs shaved from his knee, but he stays upright, an angel of the bottomless pit, the hero of one tattooed story with its swirly blue ink marks connecting letters over each vertebra of spine, letters that spell out “Never again” and “violence is not the way” with the word “way” spiraling down the spinal column, each lumbar protrusion covered with inky lines and letters, until the ink bleeds into Popeye opening a can of worms on the left buttock, and Olive smoking a pipe on the right buttock, the pipe smoke weaving a curly-Q whirly loop and merging into Spider man’s web on the left thigh, the web webbing its lacey stars and stripes network down and around the shins, around and around until it splatters inky blue spiders over the gastrocnemius of the left calf muscle and covers the ankles and feet with tiny Buddhas that continue under the feet and protect the soles of feet and the soul of the man, (but how on earth did he suffer through that painful tattooing?) and seen from under jeans, the feet appear dirty and garden-weary but when rolled up, like Eliot’s Prufrock on the beach, the design works magic like a waterfall works magic, a watershed of rainbow colors spreading in a rainfall of tattoo etchings across his massive shoulders, his sharp abs, pecs, scapulae, triceps, biceps, quadriceps, embellishing and fertilizing all six hundred and thirty-nine muscles, a landscape of linked vessels and lines emerging whenever he takes off his shirt, a rare occurrence, only when the gorgeous and the giants come to town and he dreads the time when he runs out of tattoo space on his skin and he must share his stories with his words instead.

Suggested reading:

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry, Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek (Eds)

An Introduction to the Prose Poem, Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham (Eds)

(Drawn from two of Kaye Linden's posts in the Writers Alliance of Gainesville blog)

 

What is Creative Nonfiction?

by Mary Bast

What is creative nonfiction? In some ways it's like jazz: fact-based writing that has the quality of ragtime or classic or bebop or swing, played as the blues, or even with a cross-rhythm, and always with a moving inner voice.

Creative doesn't mean inventing. It means incorporating the styles and elements of good fiction, poetry, memoir, and essay. Creative nonfiction is writing-of-the-real, using devices such as sense of place, voice, and character development; as experimental as other literary forms while remaining grounded in fact. 

Before he became the 2016 Creative Nonfiction Editor, Rick Sapp's Vanover's Luck was featured in Bacopa Literary Review 2014. The first sentence reads like fiction, the urge to dive in is so strong:

Even as he lies crumpled and bleeding at the base of a tree, his mouth full of Remington 2x4 shot pellets, John Vanover thinks of himself as a lucky man.

There's also compelling intrigue in John's knowing the exact make and size of the pellets. Has he shot himself? Or does he just know guns? 

We learn that Vanover was born in the Virginia hills and knows Appalachia's knolls and coves, its caves and creeks as well as he knew the path to the outhouse on a moonless night when he was young. 

Note the rhythm and literary style of the following paragraph:

Ask John about working the mines, the deep tunnels with air, he says, that smells like cold steel, mines so dark that a dream about life outside makes miners clench their eyes tight, mines that snake under unsuspecting farms, under deer and turkeys, under nesting field mice and the scowl of hawks and owls like burrowing worms and he says, his voice trailing off in tone and volume as if he is ashamed, "I loved it."

The author could have told Vanover's story in a more documentary form, and no doubt that would also have been well-written. 

But for Bacopa submissions, we're looking for creative nonfiction like Vanover's Luck: an aesthetic experience, the orchestration of a true story.

Bacopa Literary Review 2016

Over the next few months we'll give samples of what we're looking for by highlighting work we respect, some from Bacopa Literary Review and some from other sources. 

Here's Julia Wagner's poem "Coming to Center," first prize poetry winner in the 2014 Bacopa:

Not seeking novelty, but permission,
music provided the first movement.

I would come to understand the world
through those lessons.

The Arabesque, the Frappe, the Jete—
rhetoric of creative motion: my freedom.

The young body, as it trained, became impetuous:
More!

But, something derailed just then—
a danger in silences.

I did not hear well Madame's clapping rhythm  
(one-two-three-one-two-three-one-two-three)

but better, those holy metrical stops,
the curious pianist reading close her score.

My Glissade stretched far too long,
Madame's curious brow,

sure to meet just inside the note's rest.
Music taught this, not dance:

to be autonomous, despite the routines.
And to stop when it wanted.

Julia's book Aegis is available at Amazon.com, a collection that experiments with the connections between language and memory. The word Aegis assumes safe passage, a place holder for both word and memory.



 

35 Tips for Writing Flash: Fixed and Experimental Forms & Mastering the Genre

In the current posts Bacopa Literary Review Flash Story Editor Kaye Linden generously shares chapters from her book, 35 Tips for Writing a Brilliant Flash Story: a Manual of Flash Fiction and Nonfiction Writing.

CHAPTER 1 ("Small Frame")  

CHAPTERS 2 & 3 ("The House Theory" & "Slice-of-Life Stories")

CHAPTERS 4 & 5 ("Compression, Minimalism" & "A Striking Title")
CHAPTERS 6 & 7 ("First Few Lines" & "I Want It But I Can't Have It...")
CHAPTERS 8 & 9 ("Kaye's Rule of Six C's" & "Compressed Scene/Story Line")
CHAPTERS 10 & 11 ("Stimulus/Response, Chronological Order" & "Whose Story Is it?")
CHAPTERS 12 & 13 ("Moving the Story Forward" & "The Shape of Flash")
CHAPTERS 14 & 15 ("Consequences of Desire Thwarted" & "Characters")
CHAPTERS 16 & 17 ("Setting, Weather, and Crowds as Characters" & "A Sense of Meaning")
CHAPTERS 18 & 19 ("Point of View" & "Tense Choice")
CHAPTERS 20 & 21 ("The Ticking Clock" & "Chekhov's Gun")
CHAPTERS 22 & 23 ("Don't Underestimate Your Reader" & "Word Weight")
CHAPTERS 24 & 25 ("Concrete Details/Imagery" & "CUT Adverbs/Adjectives")
CHAPTERS 26 & 27 ("Dialogue" & "The Verb 'To Be'")
CHAPTERS 28 & 29 ("Subtext/Implication/Backstory" & "Myths and Tales")
CHAPTERS 30 &31 ("Surprise the Reader & "Sentence Structure/Phrases")

CHAPTER 32

 Fixed and Experimental Forms

As you have seen in the previous chapter, flash lends itself wonderfully to experimentation. The writer can try any playful writing in a short piece because there is not a lot of time or emotional energy invested. If it doesn't work, it's easy to rewrite.

Here's an interesting fixed form for you to work with:

With each new sentence, double the word count of the sentence before.

An example:

One. One story. Of black teeth revealed. Black teeth revealed behind luscious wet red lips. Lips parted, seductive, her chiseled face in a bar, mirrored behind one glass, smudged with lipstick.

Fixed forms are fun. They unleash the wild muse.

An example, one of my experimental flash nonfiction pieces that won first prize in Bacopa Literary Review's 2015 annual contest for creative nonfiction, is here. I wrote the flash in one sentence, an experimental handling of form. The one-sentence structure reflects the continuity of the tattoo patterns over a man's body.

Prompt: Turn the timer on for 5 minutes. Write about an epiphany or "aha" moment you had had, but write it in a long sentence. Don't think too much, just write.
 

CHAPTER 33

Mastering the Genre

Read, read, read flash fiction and nonfiction flash stories and learn from the masters.

Borrow techniques, initiate variations and deviate with your ideas while you practice from famous examples and develop a unique flash style. Join flash critique groups either in your town, online or take classes. Start your own critique group.

In the next blog post you'll find a list of resources that include a sprinkling of flash writers and their work.

Prompt: Study a tiny story by a famous flash writer and substitute each word with your own. Warning: Be careful not to plagiarize or copy any other writings.

There are sites online, such as Grammarly.com, where you can copy and paste your work to make sure you have not plagiarized by mistake.

Stay tuned for CHAPTER 34 ("The Four Keys to Revision")

and CHAPTER 35 ("A Few Tips About Prose Poetry")

See also, Kaye Linden's 35 Tips for Writing Powerful Prose Poems

35 Tips for Writing Flash: Surprise the Reader & Sentence Structure/Phrases

In the current posts Bacopa Literary Review Flash Story Editor Kaye Linden generously shares chapters from her book, 35 Tips for Writing a Brilliant Flash Story: a Manual of Flash Fiction and Nonfiction Writing.

CHAPTER 1 ("Small Frame")  

CHAPTERS 2 & 3 ("The House Theory" & "Slice-of-Life Stories")

CHAPTERS 4 & 5 ("Compression, Minimalism" & "A Striking Title")
CHAPTERS 6 & 7 ("First Few Lines" & "I Want It But I Can't Have It...")
CHAPTERS 8 & 9 ("Kaye's Rule of Six C's" & "Compressed Scene/Story Line")
CHAPTERS 10 & 11 ("Stimulus/Response, Chronological Order" & "Whose Story Is it?")
CHAPTERS 12 & 13 ("Moving the Story Forward" & "The Shape of Flash")
CHAPTERS 14 & 15 ("Consequences of Desire Thwarted" & "Characters")
CHAPTERS 16 & 17 ("Setting, Weather, and Crowds as Characters" & "A Sense of Meaning")
CHAPTERS 18 & 19 ("Point of View" & "Tense Choice")
CHAPTERS 20 & 21 ("The Ticking Clock" & "Chekhov's Gun")
CHAPTERS 22 & 23 ("Don't Underestimate Your Reader" & "Word Weight")
CHAPTERS 24 & 25 ("Concrete Details/Imagery" & "CUT Adverbs/Adjectives")
CHAPTERS 26 & 27 ("Dialogue" & "The Verb 'To Be'")
CHAPTERS 28 & 29 ("Subtext/Implication/Backstory" & "Myths and Tales")

CHAPTER 30

 Surprise the Reader

Interesting surprises and twists are not mandatory in flash but create interest and delight for readers. Don't trick them with a predictable twist but offer a subtle or surprise ending or development.

When the father in "Agoriclautrophobia" left his daughter alone, the reader might sense surprise because that appears to be odd behavior for a father, but the eccentricities of human behavior offer interest.

Another tool for surprising a reader lies in the language, specifically the reworking of clichés. Clichés are hackneyed, tired sayings that have lost their impact over time. Avoid them. Use fresh expressions to offer an image: "Half-decayed cattle with jaws wide open in a scream."

This image extends to later in the story when the daughter imagines her "father's jaws wide open in a dying scream."

Part of the surprise in the story is the combination of the concepts of claustrophobia and agoraphobia. The surprise lies in the fact that people can and do feel claustrophobic in open spaces. Some people feel that way out in the middle of the ocean where "there's so much, room, so much to fear . . ."

Prompt: Take an old story and  cross out clichés with a red pen. What can you change to offer a fresh phrase, surprise, or perspective? Try changing the point of view, or change the main character into one of the minor characters. How would another character's perception change the story? Surprise yourself.
 

CHAPTER 31

Sentence Structure and Phrases

Flash has its own rhythm, produced by compressed sentences and phrases that give a particular rhythm and pacing to the sound of very short prose. Depending on the writer's intention, breaking grammar rules such as eliminating commas or periods and the use of repetition can offer a wonderful sense of urgency in a compressed narrative flash.

Prompt: To practice writing from a different angle, write a series of questions mixed or not mixed with a couple of sentences. Place a tiny twist at the end. For example:

 "What am I doing here? Where is he? What time is it? Why is he so late? Should I leave? Why are my palms sweating? Am I going to throw up? Did he dump me? Do I have the wrong restaurant or the wrong time? Why is that waiter looking at me? It's because I'm on my fourth whiskey, isn't it? Do I have on too much lipstick? Maybe my lipstick's a mess. I'd better take a look in the mirror. What the heck happened to him? Where the . . . Oh, there he is now. Hi there. How are you? Sit down. What did you say? I look tense? I don't know why. I was just relaxing with a drink."

You get the picture: Up the ante by playing with sentence structure and rules. Great stories arise from playing with structure. 

Here is an example of a flash fiction I published in 2015 in The Rat's Ass Review. Note the pacing, the breaking of grammatical rules, and the minimal dialogue. This flash piece also works as a prose poem. 

The Wet

Kaye Linden

Ma, aboriginal toothless shaman, throws her ninety-nine-year-old bones into the front seat of the windowless jeep and jams her foot down on the accelerator. Desert driving, flash flood driving with rising waters at the hubcaps and trackless tires sinking fast into whirling mud swirls. Sky blows blacker than her skin, wind whips red welts into her hanging jawline, Ma pains on, the falling down mulga-wood homestead in sight, too distant on the boiling roiling horizon, straight one line straight line straight ahead no wavering but straight the shortest distance between two points. Rain pouring pouring pouring torrential blinding into her old eyes she keeps driving driving driving through driving rain to get home home home before the rusty untrusty jeep sinks deeper into sudden ravines and eddies that grow rounder and hungrier taking but seconds to fill holes in the ground. She reaches the leaning splitting woodpile homestead in the raining pouring driving wet, the wet, the Alice Springs wet, the wet that only those people who live in The Alice know, understand, and brace for each five years. The homestead swirls under water, turning and topsy and turvy and upside down and inside out, her broken armchair floating in pieces, rusted pots afloat, the sheltie dog swimming to meet her, tongue lolly-gagging hello, eyes yellowed and alight, but Ma's jeep coughs and rattles and chokes and sinks with Ma not a swimmer but a hiker with strong old hiking legs, army boots that anchor her down into water. She grabs the old dog's matted wet back and they both go down and around, thunder announcing their pending demise, kookaburra laughter long gone, gasping and hacking and face just up level with water, eyes turned up to the heavens, to the ancient gods whose hands don't read out. "Where are you, you bastards?" Ma shouts to the sky and the dog whines a carping whittling fingernails-down-the-blackboard kind of cry that only those from The Alice understand, only those who have seen white brittle bones bleached in desert heat and sun after those on a run for their lives have lost. Panting dog and woman cling to each other, going down, going down, going down but with a whoosh and a gurgle the water stops, the rain stops, the rivers cease running, the widening knife-like gaps in red mud close and Ma stands on her feet again, holding the dog in her arms, sinking to ankles in army boots, but standing in remnants of a flash flood in Australian desert,

        here now,

        there now,

        gone.

Stay tuned for CHAPTER 32 ("Fixed and Experimental Forms")

and CHAPTER 33 ("Mastering the Genre")

See also, Kaye Linden's 35 Tips for Writing Powerful Prose Poems

35 Tips for Writing Flash: Subtext/Implication/Backstory & Myths and Tales

In the current posts, Bacopa Literary Review Flash Story Editor Kaye Linden generously shares chapters from her book, 35 Tips for Writing a Brilliant Flash Story: a Manual of Flash Fiction and Nonfiction Writing.

CHAPTER 1 ("Small Frame")  

CHAPTERS 2 & 3 ("The House Theory" & "Slice-of-Life Stories")

CHAPTERS 4 & 5 ("Compression, Minimalism" & "A Striking Title")
CHAPTERS 6 & 7 ("First Few Lines" & "I Want It But I Can't Have It...")
CHAPTERS 8 & 9 ("Kaye's Rule of Six C's" & "Compressed Scene/Story Line")
CHAPTERS 10 & 11 ("Stimulus/Response, Chronological Order" & "Whose Story Is it?")
CHAPTERS 12 & 13 ("Moving the Story Forward" & "The Shape of Flash")
CHAPTERS 14 & 15 ("Consequences of Desire Thwarted" & "Characters")
CHAPTERS 16 & 17 ("Setting, Weather, and Crowds as Characters" & "A Sense of Meaning")
CHAPTERS 18 & 19 ("Point of View" & "Tense Choice")
CHAPTERS 20 & 21 ("The Ticking Clock" & "Chekhov's Gun")
CHAPTERS 22 & 23 ("Don't Underestimate Your Reader" & "Word Weight")
CHAPTERS 24 & 25 ("Concrete Details/Imagery" & "CUT Adverbs/Adjectives")
CHAPTERS 26 & 27 ("Dialogue" & "The Verb 'To Be'")

CHAPTER 28

 Subtext/Implication/Backstory

Flash consists of the unwritten, the unsaid, reading between lines, a hint or two, a tiny signpost, a suggestion. The reader picks up clues that fill in the emotional tone, gaps or past events of the story. For example:

The last time I visited my father, we drove to his childhood home--Thousand Acre Sheep Station, dead center Northern Territory, an endless expanse of red soil and gum trees, fenceless and defenseless from hungry dingoes and buzzards. The open jeep bumped and shook its way through scrubby mulgas, around sinkholes, and over the occasional dead wallaby. I leaned back and studied the blue sky with its wispy white clouds.

Note the subtext or implications:

The narrator is speaking of the last time she visited her father. The questions arise: Why was she visiting? Where was she living? The relationship is long-distance? Where was her mother? It was his childhood home, not hers The home was a huge sheep station (ranch) in the center of Australia's desert. Such are the questions that lead readers to wonder. Let them fill in these blanks with the implied information, the subtext.

Prompt: Read "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway. This short story is rich with subtext. Examine how Hemingway handles backstory and implication. Then write a micro-flash of under 250 words in which the writing implies what has happened without stating what happened.
 

CHAPTER 29

Myths and Tales

Rewrite myths and tales, study them, and learn from their story lines. These are the basic stories of heroes and heroines and offer wonderful ideas for twisting, experimentation, and rewriting.

Study Joseph Campbell's model of "the hero's journey." I have adapted the hero's journey to my writing of flash. These are aspects of this journey that offer a solid foundation for story. A perfect example is Star Wars.

Prompt: Write a fairy story or myth from a different perspective, a different point of view, in another tense, or turn the hero into the bad guy and the bad guy into the hero.

Stay tuned for CHAPTER 30 ("Surprise the Reader")

and CHAPTER 31 ("Sentence Structure and Phrases")

See also, Kaye Linden's 35 Tips for Writing Powerful Prose Poems

35 Tips for Writing Flash: Dialogue & The Verb "To Be"

In the current posts, Bacopa Literary Review Flash Story Editor Kaye Linden generously shares chapters from her book, 35 Tips for Writing a Brilliant Flash Story: a Manual of Flash Fiction and Nonfiction Writing.

CHAPTER 1 ("Small Frame")  

CHAPTERS 2 & 3 ("The House Theory" & "Slice-of-Life Stories")

CHAPTERS 4 & 5 ("Compression, Minimalism" & "A Striking Title")
CHAPTERS 6 & 7 ("First Few Lines" & "I Want It But I Can't Have It...")
CHAPTERS 8 & 9 ("Kaye's Rule of Six C's" & "Compressed Scene/Story Line")
CHAPTERS 10 & 11 ("Stimulus/Response, Chronological Order" & "Whose Story Is it?")
CHAPTERS 12 & 13 ("Moving the Story Forward" & "The Shape of Flash")
CHAPTERS 14 & 15 ("Consequences of Desire Thwarted" & "Characters")
CHAPTERS 16 & 17 ("Setting, Weather, and Crowds as Characters" & "A Sense of Meaning")
CHAPTERS 18 & 19 ("Point of View" & "Tense Choice")
CHAPTERS 20 & 21 ("The Ticking Clock" & "Chekhov's Gun")
CHAPTERS 22 & 23 ("Don't Underestimate Your Reader" & "Word Weight")
CHAPTERS 24 & 25 ("Concrete Details/Imagery" & "CUT Adverbs/Adjectives")

CHAPTER 26

 Dialogue

Even the inclusion of one line of dialogue in a flash can offer support for story line and character strength.

Keep dialogue tags simple: "he said" "she said."

Simple dialogue tags are not "heard" by the reader's conscious mind. Dialogue tags such as "he screamed," "she called out aggressively" or "he yelled annoyingly" slow down the read, irritate the reader, and overwhelm the story.

Most people use word contractions when they talk, so use them:

"I'm not feeling well," she said.

Keep dialogue realistic. Listen to how people converse with each other in the real world.

Prompt: Rewrite a story you have written by examining the handling of dialogue. Apply the above tips in the rewrite.
 

CHAPTER 27

The Verb "To Be"

Among excellent free tools available to writers is the "To-Be" Verbs Analyzer.

Copy and paste a story of any length into the analyzer and get ready for a surprise. You will not believe how much of the narrative contains "to be" verbs such as "is," "was," "had," and so on. A successful flash contains no more than 20 percent of such verbs. Many of these add nothing to a story and a writer can replace most of them with a meaningful verb.

The Analyzer tool checked "Agoraclaustrophobia." Following are the "to be" verbs it found, and the statistical analysis of the story:

Matched 'are': how many places there are out here to bury a body.
Matched 'be': be damned . . . better brace yourself, Girlie.
Matched 'was': Then he was gone.
Matched 'be': we missed the signs of sacred land never-never to be crossed at night?
Matched 'was': took hours to find a gum tree with sap, and when I did, I was so tired, I fell asleep on the ground.
        7.8% of your sentences have 'to be' verbs.

That's pretty tight writing. I could have revised "be damned" to "damn it," but the sentence would lose its drama. Use "to be" verbs only when another verb won't work.


Prompt: Copy and paste a story you are working on into the above website. Surprised at what you discover? Find substitutes for the "to be" verbs and rewrite.

Stay tuned for CHAPTER 28 ("Subtext/Implication/Backstory")

and CHAPTER 29 ("Myths and Tales")

See also, Kaye Linden's 35 Tips for Writing Powerful Prose Poems