Blogs: Posts Tagged ‘ SA Current ’

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We have a lipogram this week from DF Salvador. For those of you who don’t know, a lipogram is a piece of writing in which the writer omits particular letters of the alphabet. So far my introduction is a lipogram of “z” (oop, not anymore), but that’s no challenge. Salvador’s (strangely named, considering) Dancing...
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Six-worders. Lovely. I’ve touted them before. Here are some excellent ones by Don Mathis (a past contributor of other short works) who carries the six-worder forward into a linked progression creating a larger piece. And another (complete with further constraint: alliteration) by Gary Muenster. The ones I have for this week are a little...
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Dead Space 3 suffers, among a few other things, from an identity crisis. Amid another squadron of Necromorphs on the freezing (but gorgeous) surface of Tau Volantis, I found myself asking questions not unlike those pondered in the halls of a philosophy building–why are we here, where are we going, what is our ultimate...
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O.K., I’m a sucker for zombie stories. It’s the hopelessness of it all that speaks to me. The necessary humanity (or not) that must be the response. How to deal with such stress? The Walking Dead is sort of updated Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre. We are what we make ourselves, but there are...
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Science fiction is a laudable genre (though I’m not one to make black and white assumptions about genre). And I think flash fiction lends itself well to it. All good flash creates a world, so why not make it one that is clearly not one we live in — socially, culturally, politically, economically, what...
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Flash nonfiction is a fascinating, short format, and I do not exclude it from the more general idea of “short work,” which I employ here. As I’m sure I’ve said before, what I love about flash fiction/prose poetry/nonfiction is it is an extraordinarily dynamic form (defined, for me, by brevity more than anything else)....
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We’re all good at something (maybe I shouldn’t be quite so casual about that or vague). Sometimes that something translates into another area, sometimes it doesn’t. To get a bit more specific: chess is a game of foresight, but so is soccer. Players and pieces move around the field to their objective. It’s all...
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Relationships: horrifying and beautiful all at once. Nicole Provencher, whose excellent story Pop you can read here, explores the final event of such a relationship. The memories that are so specific to the people we have grown to love are ultimately painful reminders of what we all lose. Send in your woes of approximately...
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Twins share, they say, a bond stronger than most siblings. I can’t speak to the veracity, but this story certainly does a wonderful job of exploring that theme: “They’re not like puzzle pieces that always fit together; they’re the same shaped piece of different puzzles.” This is one of the most fantastically lovely lines...
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Among the growing pantheon of Mario titles, Paper Mario has always been a diamond in the rough of sorts. When viewed throughout his many iterations and forms, this paper-ized persona has come to represent his quirkiest, yet most dynamically unique adventures in many years. With excellent writing and a growing thirst to try new...
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As some of you may know, I’m intrigued by constraint. I love poetry and prose that construct some kind of artificial or natural rules (or boundaries) and then play the game. Oulipo is a group of writers and mathematicians (and musicians and artists and on and on) who insist on constraint. Raymond Queneau, one...
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