Make Your Flash Deliver Large (Lesley Intro) (09/28/2019)

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Perhaps you’ve already been able to enjoy the wonderful winning essays in Atticus Review’s 2019 Flash CNF contest, judged by Ira Sukrungruang. For me, spending time with all the contest entries was not only a joy (thanks to all who sent in such powerful work) but also a potent reminder of flash’s versatility. I learned yet again that there is something in flash that invites treatments of whole epochs of time in some pieces and singular moments in others. You would probably agree with me that we cannot live without either kind of essay. Intense world-building against the restriction of the short form can be exhilarating for the reader. And there is also something quite irreplaceable about the rendering of a small episode that releases a unique resonance. Among our contest winners, Dorian Fox’s Hibernation Triptych manages to gracefully encompass almost the entire history of the narrator’s body, our current politics, and encounters with a strange, fuzzy creature. Signe Land’s Bones for the Telling provides another world-building essay that generously offers the reader a powerful vicarious experience of living in geologic time on the North Dakota plains. And in How to Lie Awake: a recipe, Jennifer Brown takes the experience of insomnia down into the very crucible of her narrator’s being in an evocation of what could be one sleepless night or a thousand. In my own writing, I often consider the implications of having fallen upon one length or another in a particular piece. What am I giving up, I wonder, by rendering something in 1,000 words or 4,000 words or 150 pages? It’s a question that’s hard to answer. One thing I know for sure: short pieces can deliver on a very large scale.This fall, consider sending your own flash to our 2019 Atticus Review Flash Fiction Contest judged by Danielle Evans!Thanks for reading. We’re glad you’re here. Lesley HeiserAssistant Creative Nonfiction Editor

ATTICUS NEWS

BEST OF THE NET NOMINATIONS, 2019We're pleased to announce our nominations for 2019 Best of the Net.Congratulations to these writers! READ ON

Deliver Large with your Flash!Enter our Flash Fiction contest,judged by Danielle Evans.READ ON

AUTHOR NEWSCongratulations to: Callista Buchen, Kate Finegan,Kim Henderson, and Jose Sotolongo! READ ABOUT THEM HERE

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

BOOK REVIEWWHAT CAN MEMOIRS DO?A Review of LAUREL by Tyler Mendelsohn from Ink Press ProductionsReview by Maria C. Goodson"This book is a structured stream of consciousness storyabout so many things, about ghosts, names, language,addiction, family, non-binary identity, self-love, and numbers.""Fiction challenges us, poetry is lyrical lifeblood,but memoirs hold a special place in the world of literature."GET THE BOOKREAD THE REVIEW

FICTIONYELL LOUDERby Megan Pillow Davis"...the after is lovely too, and here they are in it again,soft and sweet and stuck in this bed in the warm of theroom with the roiling summer boil of Miami just outside..."READ ON

POETRYLITTLE AIRPLANEby Wesley Sexton"Some of them woke up at 5 AM to a chickadeealarm clock & did 50 sit-ups on the floornext to their bed, & some of them feelvery guilty about the orange cats they leftpawing the front window this morning."READ ON

CREATIVE NONFICTIONWHEN I WAS UNDER CONSTRUCTIONby Patricia Henley "A lumpy mattress on an iron frame where wezipped together our sleeping bags. We did notlet this hardship keep us from having sex."READ ON

INTERVIEWBRIAN BIRNBAUM ON PERSEVERING WITH A DEBUT NOVEL"I feel like I wrote something true, despite the factthat I was kind of destroying myself..."READ ON

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