Blogs: Posts Tagged ‘ san antonio current ’

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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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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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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Connections to the past are important (well, maybe not so much today, the last day of the world). Especially as you get older. But sometimes you prefer to have the connection, say a recipe, without the human interaction. Then it’s time to put your memory (a close relation to imagination) to the test. It...
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Death is always difficult to deal with, but sometimes only because of the life that went along with it, dragging behind the specter of the dead like the drying slime of a snail. Or sometimes it’s because we don’t know how to sum things up after such a finality. What’s the point? Memory? That’s...
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What I like about this story is the temporal shift. The subtle change from past to present gives the story, Regis and Kelly, a taut depth. There is sadness here (and, in fact, abject horror — this cannot possibly end well), but also humor: what we talk about when we talk about love. Habit....
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The Canícula and the Bard. Who would have thought they would make such wonderful bedfellows? Perhaps a touch uncomfortable with each other, hands awkwardly entwined, sweaty and slick. But that’s what makes for interesting reading (who wants to read about those two people sleeping perfectly wrapped up together and carefree?). Send your epiphanies and...
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