Flash Fiction World - Volume 4: 70 Flash Fiction and Short Stories

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All genres are included - thrillers, romance, comedy, horror, fantasy, crime and more. If your taste is for fiction that leans more to the commercial side, with fast-driven plots and action all the way you won't be disappointed. At the same time many of our stories are literary in style. They deal with the inner conflicts, fears and dramas that take place within the human being. Let's take three examples. Simon by Elizabeth Angus is a haunting story about a woman and her dog sitting by a lake. Later the dog makes its way home - alone. In That Night by Elizabeth Cunnane a group of youngsters take a midnight dip in the ocean.

What takes place leads to questions asked years on. Swan Lake by Alastair Keen shows what happens when a confused animal rescue officer is called out to rescue a swan at night. This tale will have you roaring with laughter. Flash Fiction World - Volume 1 is packed with stories about all the concerns, traumas and dramas of life, as well as the joyful and humorous times. I love the ecology of writing, the way it turns nothing into something, generally without too much damage to the environment. My writing is in constant often unconscious conversation with the books I read. It made me want to write something worthy of that conversation.

I left home at seventeen to live in another country, married and had children young, taught, and wrote. When I was 12, a teacher encouraged me to write daily, and because I was a little in love with him, I did. Having someone by my side who never faltered in supporting my desire to write helped tremendously to create, if not smooth, the path.

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There is no smooth path to becoming a writer. My children required me to be strong enough to be both a mother and a writer. In order to teach, I had to read carefully and find ways of conveying a passion for language to young people who were sometimes more interested in other endeavors. Sometimes, though, the intensity of their focus made class worthy of a story!

Graduate school gave me fine teachers, a sympathetic audience and wonderful, supportive writing friends. This community was both preparation for and launch toward the book that would garner a small audience.

I recently read a biography of the artist Joan Mitchell and was fascinated by the descriptions of the way she saw—she had an eidetic memory and synesthesia, to boot! David Markson, David Malouf. Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson. I could go on. The work they produced against their days helps sustain me—as a human being and a writer. Also, some of these writers have created works that seem to lend validity to certain less conventional aspects of my own writing.

You will most likely always be working alongside it, so best to have some useful way of repelling it. I write against it, a little like diving into a cold pool of water—scary but invigorating. Generally, it does the trick. Forget about it for a while. Be gentle with yourself—you will find so many reasons not to be. And one more thing: The act of writing itself gives you a way to be in the world and is its own reward.

It is no accident that slaves were forbidden to read and write, or that women were long kept out of universities. Knowing this so early on made me believe that being a writer was the best thing one could be and that writing literature was the most revolutionary, dangerous, powerful, empowering and important thing a human being could do.

Gautier is the second African American writer to win this award in its thirty year history. Gautier is a writer, scholar, and professor. Following in the footsteps of the late nineteenth century African American intellectual Charles W. Her background as a scholar of 19th Century American literature and, more generally, African American literature combines with her training as a fiction writer such that she is both a critic and a creative writer, fully engaged in the analysis and creation of literature.

More than seventy of her short stories have been published, appearing in Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review and Southern Review among other places, and her fiction has been extensively reprinted, appearing in several anthologies, including Best African American Fiction , Best African American Fiction , New Stories from the South: Visit her web site: Read more by and about Amina: At Risk Story with audio: Thanks to Amina for saying yes!

I came of age during the anti-apartheid movement in the US; I was an adolescent when Stevie Wonder recorded his anti-apartheid song, when the play Sarafina! I was surrounded by adult and peer discussions of apartheid, which also led to conversations wherein which it was easy to draw parallels between the restrictions placed upon native black South Africans during apartheid and on African Americans during slavery and after the Reconstruction, one of the most obvious being restrictions upon literacy and education.

This atmosphere impressed upon me the importance, power and danger of literature. When factions attempt to create oppressed societies, one of the foremost ways they go about doing so is by banning thought-provoking literature. I played with dolls and listened to music. When I was a child, I imbibed many elements of craft without any conscious effort on my part, learning quite a bit about writing stories from playing with my toys and listening to music. Any child who has played with toys—be it Barbie or Transformers—has the makings of a fiction writer. Playing with dolls went a long way to helping me learn the intricacies of plot.

The first stories I ever recognized as stories were actually songs.

There was no way to live in my childhood home and not be exposed to music. When I was younger, I was part of an extended family and I had only to walk from one room to another to hear a different song i. The songs I heard: They had beginnings, middles, and ends. If you took away the musical accompaniment, you would have short stories. In the more formal sense, I began with writing poetry, in the way that most elementary school kids in Brooklyn begin with writing poetry. My language arts teacher exposed us to poetry around the fourth grade and made us kids in the gifted class enter a variety of poetry contests.

My poems won a bunch of these school-wide, district-wide, borough-wide, city-wide contests. One particular win allowed me to meet the mayor Koch, at the time and shake his hand. All of the contest wins came with trophies and savings bonds. When I got to Stanford, I majored in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis the precursor to the minor which the university now offers. The creative writing courses were all taught by Jones Lecturers former Stegner Fellows who stayed on to teach and entry into the courses was by lottery only.

As lottery would have it, my number came up for the fiction workshop first, though I continued to write poetry. My fiction instructor shared an office with one of the poetry instructors and one afternoon I brought some of my poetry to Chris Wiman for some feedback. After showing him my poems, he promptly shot me down. I realized that I had no desire to be a poet if I had to train to do it.

I would have ignored him, marched to my dorm, written ten brand new stories, and made him choke on his words. After only weeks, I was fully invested. There was no one in the world that could discourage me. In order to be a fiction writer, I was willing to be in it for the long haul, to work as hard as it took, to write as many hours as it required, to dump as many boyfriends as it necessitated and to lose as much sleep as I could afford. Who helped you along the way, and how? Odd as this may seem, my Latin teachers helped me to become a good writer.

I started studying Latin in fifth grade and continued with it all the way through high school to AP Latin my junior year, after which there was nothing left to study until college. The rules of grammar, which I found confusing or irregular in English, made sense to me when I viewed them through the lens of this non-native language. Since no one expects secondary school Latin students to prepare for lives as theologians or priests, much of the material students learn to translate is secular rather than ecclesiastical.

Thus, Latin exposed me to rhetoric and poetry.

Although I learned first through another language, I was already well-versed in scansion, metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, irony, litotes, caesuras and all of the other rhetorical devices long before I ever got to AP English. My study of Latin made me hyper-aware of language, syntax, diction, and rhetoric earlier than I might have been expected to care about the formal qualities of language. Thank you—ago tibi gratias— Mr. If, by some chance, I am roped in to reading a novel that dies midway through, I make it a point to never read anything else by that author ever again.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. I am, however, inspired by lines and passages in stories. That is not to say, of course, that the writer who has no personal experience of pain and terror should try to write about pain and terror, or that one should never write lightly, humorously; it is only to say that every writer should be aware that he might be read by the desperate, by people who might be persuaded toward life or death. It does not mean, either that writers should write moralistically, like preachers. And above all it does not mean that writers should lie.

It means only that they should think, always, of what harm they might inadvertently do and not do it. If there is good to be said, the writer should remember to say it. If there is bad, to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. Literature has certainly saved my sanity. It reminds me that my reader has many faces.

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He or she is not just a person with leisure reclining on a sofa. Knowing this prevents me from cutting corners and taking shortcuts as a writer, it deters me from writing gimmicky material, veers me away from sentimentality, forces me to write however many drafts the story requires. Give me an hour plus a pen and a pad! In terms of accoutrements, all a writer needs in order to write is pen and paper. All of other the niceties are a bonus, like sprinkles on ice cream, nice but not necessary. Real writers can write anywhere, anytime, anyplace.

These esoteric needs are actually self-imposed obstacles and roadblocks aspiring writers place in their paths. If you spend your time awaiting optimal conditions to begin writing, you are setting yourself up to fail. Writers are not picky. When we need to write, we will write on whatever is handy. I have written on computers, typewriters, and word processors. I have written by hand. I have filled spiral notebooks, Trapper Keepers, legal pads.

I have written on index cards, construction paper, receipts and cereal boxes. I have even written on myself. I am a writer. Same thing goes for writing the story in the form of a photo album, homework assignment, map, radio broadcast, telegram, or PowerPoint presentation. These days I take rejection as validation: Rejection of a piece should never be taken as rejection of the whole writer.

Read more by and about Eric: Thanks to Eric for saying yes! And I made stories and poems as soon as I could write sentences. Even before I knew how to hold a pencil, I moved through the real world and the worlds of my imagination simultaneously and more or less constantly. As a child, I was my own mobile 3-D cinema experience. Later, when I dropped out of high school football, I detoured into acting, took theater classes, auditioned for plays, and began an independent course of study in cinema.

But by college, I found acting classes less engaging than English and philosophy. I kept acting but ultimately switched to the English major not because I intended to leave theater but because school was a pastime and lit classes amounted to an interesting hobby. I wrote a lot of terrible poetry in those years, which I mistook for great.

But no one ever published it. After college, I fell into journalism to pay the bills. Over time, I grew less satisfied by acting in plays.

Even when I acted professionally, acting began to feel like the equivalent of playing guitar in a covers band. I was a writer without a genre, I suppose. In the eighties and nineties I churned out mountains of bad poetry and volumes of intense personal journal entries. There, I fell in with a lively, committed group of flash fiction writers. We spurred each other on, and I discovered I had a knack for compression and vivid imagery. I sent out a few flash fictions, got published, and gradually expanded my work into short stories.

Even the longest pieces are broken into fragments that have their own shape and momentum. Hopefully they work cohesively, as well. I learned a lot from that book. And from Ernest Hemingway and Yasunari Kawabata, too. In my more-or-less daily practice, I got up early, before my wife, and tapped out story after story. I read a lot of magazines and online journals. I started following writers I admired. I went deep with a few the usual suspects: I still do that. That almost always works to get me going.

I have to somehow trick myself into writing. As for getting published, I sent out my best work as many as thirty, forty, even fifty times—starting with the top tier magazines and working my way down through print and online journals.

Flash Fiction World - Volume 3: 70 Flash Fiction & Short Stories.

I did that until each piece got published or I became disenchanted with it. I learned from running my own online journal that a rejection really should not come as a blow to the ego. Closely studying published writers I admired helped. I had one close reading relationship with a peer in grad school, but that faded when I moved away. I was certain Kevin Canty would become that for me when I went off to grad school, but he went on sabbatical for my first year and we never quite clicked when he came back. I admire his work. And he may be the published author out there with whom I—well, my stories—have the most in common.

But whatever makes for a good mentor -and-writer relationship, I have not found that. It feels like a myth to me now, one that I may never live. I may not be easy to get along with. Kathryn Rantala at Ravenna Press has proven very supportive these past few years, and the book has begun to reach a few readers. My acting experience feeds into my writing career in a productive way. We writers are often, by nature, quiet, shy, reclusive.

But when I go on stage or walk up to a mic, I know how to perform. My high school forensics coach, Gaye Brasher, has probably done as much for my writing career as anyone else. And the great, under-appreciated theatrical director Murray Ross in Colorado Springs cleared the way for me to find myself over and over again in the plays he directed. I understand characters and character development and even dialog thanks to the theater. Oh, and I had a good friend, Paul Vaughn, who collaborated with me on a few super-low-budget movie projects see below.

He kept me honest. And I did my best work when I wrote with Paul firmly in mind as my reader. Unfortunately cancer took his life a few years ago. His mode of communication with the world was an eyelid. Someone would read the alphabet, in the order the letters most frequently appear in the French language, and Bauby would blink when he heard the letter he wanted next.

In fact, I suspect taking inspiration from that struggle is one of the crude luxuries of able-bodied privilege. In a good way.

• Trace Metals in Aquatic Systems
• Jean Genet, le poète travesti (essai français) (French Edition)
• A Surprise for Sigmund
• La proposition dun don Juan (Azur) (French Edition)
• Writing Good Plain English: A Straightforward Guide (Straightforward Guides)
• Die Frauen und das Netz: Angebote und Nutzung aus Genderperspektive (German Edition)
• Wardroids