A Celebration of Flash Fiction

A Celebration of Flash Fiction

January 14, 2023

A very short celebration of very short fiction.

Dear friends,

As we prepare to wrap up our 2022 flash fiction contest

, I’ve been thinking about flash fiction as a genre.

My very first fiction workshop in college was taught by a flash fiction enthusiast. This was 2012, when smartphones were just beginning to replace the BlackBerry and something called Twitter was becoming popular for condensing expression to 120 characters per post. There was a lot of talk about my generation’s shrinking attention span and what the tech sector was doing to our free time. Some of that has come to fruition—Jenny Odell’s

is a good example. But flash fiction has become so popular for so many reasons unrelated to a moral panic about millennials and speed-reading. There is something in the genre, something in the formal constraint, that lends itself to good storytelling.

Atticus Review

held its first official flash fiction contest in the

, judged by Carmen Maria Machado. In a

in the flash fiction journal

SmokeLong Quarterly

, Machado writes about one of the most famous works of very short fiction by Ernest Hemingway, which reads: "

For sale: baby shoes, never worn

."

, as overused as this six-word story may be, it also represents "a quick way to demonstrate one of my favorite properties of flash: its ability to reflect back on the reader. All good fiction has some level of flexibility: open to shades of interpretation. But the shorter the piece—the more spare the details—the more you, the reader, are required to rush in to fill the space."

In other words, flash fiction comes with some emotional assembly required. It gives the reader a chance to fill in more gaps than long-form fiction, and this creates more room for connectivity, if not collaboration, with the reader.

 

The flash fiction I admire the most is that which leaves a lot of open space, a lot of room to contemplate, like a sandbox of imagination.

This year, we have another talented author,

, as our judge. In an interview with our fiction editor Michelle Ross in

Lippmann describes her work in her most recent collection

Jerks

like this:

“...these stories are distillations of desire, and all the ways desire is met or not met or misplaced or transposed or projected or deflected or withheld or denied or mutated or multiplied, et cetera. So often the desire is placed upon us. So often the role is about filling, sating others’ needs and desires.”

While this is not unique to flash fiction, the form itself (as Machado lays it out) can enhance the way such desires are felt in fiction by forcing writers to compress, condense, and

distill

a single character’s desire within a tight room whose door to that desire will either open or prove to be locked. As Machado suggests, a flash story with such a precise kind of desire leaves the reader with few options but to feel, really

feel,

the tension between a character's desire and everything that stands in their way.

A good flash story has to be precise, has to contain more than it appears to on the surface, like a well-crafted watch. The reader can see it tick, but underneath the face, there are mechanisms that pull, prod, and push the story with absolute delicacy.

I hope that you continue to write in this fun, playful, discerning form. I hope you keep making watches full of secret mechanisms. I hope to read them someday.

Peace,

Keene Short

Editor-in-Chief

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

BOOK REVIEW

Acceptance through Definition

a book review by

BRITT MILLER

"the idea that Koenig has created a word in which everyone else who learns of it probably feels the exact same way I do is something special indeed."

NEW FROM THE ATTIC

The first in a series of dispatches from Ukraine, by Olha Svyripa Part One: The Warmest Hug Meant War

"I knew what to do. Laptop, chargers, documents, one warm sweater for a change. I was ready in 5 minutes."

 

SUBMISSIONS

We are

for CNF submissions! We are also open for book reviews and mixed media.We will be open for poetry and fiction submissions at the end of December. Stay tuned for more!

FLASH CONTEST

We are OPEN for the 2022 Atticus Review Flash Contest!

NEW FROM ATTICUS AFTER DARK

Author Sara Lippmann joins the pod. We discuss her story collections, Doll Palace, re-released by 713 Books, and Jerks from Mason Jar Press. Her work has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts. 

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