Grant Faulkner

On the Publication of Fissures

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Today marks the release of my collection of 100-word stories, Fissures, so I thought I’d share the book’s preface to introduce it.

Grant Faulkner FissuresCoincidentally, while preparing for a reading I’m giving at U.C. Davis later this week, I stumbled on this quote from Baudelaire that describes the whole enterprise of writing these short little ditties, which exist in the blurry boundaries between short-short fiction and prose poetry:

Who among us has not, in his ambitious moments, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without meter or rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the jolts of consciousness?

I don’t know if I accomplished such a thing, but Baudelaire’s quote neatly sums up my attraction to the 100-word form. I like to say that writing 100-word stories allowed me to nurture my “inner failed poet.” The preface from Fissures, below, takes this idea a bit further. And, if you’d like to read some 100-word pieces, several stories are available online.

Preface to Fissures

I’ve always thought life is more about what is unsaid than what is said. We live in odd gaps of silence, irremediable interstices that sometimes last forever. A lingering glance averted. The lover who slams the door and runs away. Unsent letters. We all carry so many strange little moments within us. Memory shuffles through random snapshots. Sometimes they seem insignificant, yet they stay with us for some reason, weaving the fabrics of our beings. In the end, we don’t seize the day so much as it seizes us.

The idea of capturing such small but telling moments of life is what drew me to 100-word stories (or “drabbles” as they’re sometimes referred to). I’d previously written novels and longer short stories, forms that demanded an accumulation of words—to sew connections, to explain, to build an entire world with text. I wondered, what if I did the opposite? What if instead of relying on the words of a story, I relied on the spectral spaces around those words? What if I privileged excision over any notion of comprehensiveness, and formed narratives around caesuras and crevices?

We live as foragers in many ways, after all, sniffing at hints, interpreting the tones of a person’s voice, scrutinizing expressions, and then trying to put it all together into a collage of what we like to call truth. Whether it’s the gulf between a loved one, the natural world, or God, we exist in lacunae. I wanted to write with an aesthetic that captured these “fissures,” as I began to think about them.

Perhaps I could have accomplished such an aesthetic of writing in a longer form, but the hard borders of a 100-word story put a necessary pressure on each word, each sentence. In my initial forays into 100-word stories, my stories veered toward 150 words or more. I didn’t see ways to cut or compress. I didn’t see ways to make the nuances and gestures of language invite the reader in to create the story. But writing within the fixed lens of 100 words required me to discipline myself stringently. I had to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s mot juste in a way that even most flash fiction doesn’t. As result, I discovered those mysterious, telling gaps that words tend to cover up.

We all have a literal blind spot in our eyes, where the optic nerve connects to the retina and there are no light-detecting cells. None of us will ever know the whole story, in other words. We can only collect a bag full of shards and try to piece them together. This collection is my bag full of shards.

Puerto del Sol: ‘Blue Highways’

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Puerto_2013-fallYears ago, I was regularly honored and cursed by the responses I received from the lit mag Puerto del Sol. Honored because I always received a personal note from the editor about the strengths and weaknesses of my story (yes, this was before online submissions, and the notes were quite thorough and thoughtful). Cursed because, well, I received rejections, and I couldn’t figure out how to break through (perhaps because I stubbornly didn’t receive the feedback too well).

I didn’t submit anything to Puerto for at least a decade, so I was happy when my last submission was accepted for their Fall 2013 issue. Unfortunately, it’s only available in the print issue, so I’ve posted the story below.

Early review: last night my daughter Simone read it. She turned to me afterward and said, “I don’t get it.” The eight-year-old market will forever elude me.

Oh, and Puerto editor Emily Haymens interviewed me for Puerto‘s blog a while back as well.

Here’s the 100-word story…

Blue Highways

Sal often missed highway exits. Perhaps because he was dreamy, perhaps he just trusted that the road he was on would get him where he needed to be. He was surprised when he returned home one day and discovered his wife had left him. He called her cell phone, but she’d stopped her service. Her closet was empty except for the dresses he’d given her. On the closet floor was a collage she’d made titled “The Places He’ll Never Take Me.” For her 40th birthday, he’d put on a gaudy cape. He’d tried to pick her up in his arms.

Writing in Fragments

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Sometimes you can shape your life to the cadences of your creativity. Sometimes you have to shape the cadences of your creativity to your life.

When I first decided to become a writer, at the recklessly young age of 20, I embraced Hemingway’s preferred writing rhythm: to wake early, write for two or three hours, until the writing juices were spent, and then not think about what you’ve written the rest of the day–a strategy to replenish those precious creative juices, to let thoughts percolate in the unconscious.

I constructed my life so that I could write in such a manner for several years (waiting tables at night so that my mornings were perfectly pristine for writing), and I loved that life. I’d love to live that life now, in fact, but I have children now, and I have to work 9-5 jobs, the kind with health insurance, so my time to write becomes ever more narrow and unpredictable, a matter of fragments, or even fragments within fragments.

Instead of writing in my best moments, I write mostly in my worst moments, late at night or during the intermission of a child’s performance or in the five minutes I have before booting up the computer in the morning (I probably spend a little bit more time with my kids than Hemingway did).

This is all to say that I’m constantly scheming and rethinking my writing process, if not the actual products of writing itself.

I recently flipped through Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer in search of random writerly guidance and she commented how the best writers create their minor characters in just a few deft strokes. As an example, she showed how Jane Austen “speedily and almost offhandedly dispatches” Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood.

“He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather coldhearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed: but he was, in general, well respected; for he conducted himself with propriety in the discharge of his ordinary duties. Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was: he might even have been made amiable himself; for he was very young when he married, and very fond of his wife. Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself;–more narrow minded and selfish.”

Capturing a character in just a few lines is a difficult thing to do, but it plays into a writing project I just started. In tandem with the literary journal I began earlier this year, 100 Word Story, I’ve been trying to write one 100-word story each day. It relieves the tension and frustration of not being able to truly delve into the writing life, but it also does a number of things:

  • Makes me pause and notice things in a way that I ordinarily wouldn’t because I have to conjure a new story each day;
  • Makes me focus on a condensed, succinct piece of writing–no fluff, no extra words, no padding;
  • Helps me keep the writing momentum going–and even develop future longer pieces (I look to some character sketches as the foundation for future NaNoWriMo novels);
  • Allows me to have a number of prose poems and short shorts to be able to submit to magazines–so I can submit more frequently, instead of waiting months to finish a 20 or 25 page story (literary journals are more likely to publish shorter pieces anyway) or years to complete my novel.

I’ve been applying the Francine Prose quote to characters from stories I’ve written over the years to see how I can distill their characteristics into such a short space. I’m also occasionally taking characters from current longer pieces and writing miniature stories about them. Even if I never do anything with these pieces, they are a way to enrichen my longer stories and extend them in different directions.

It’s safe to say that I will probably never again experience my “ideal writing life”–life is rarely so kind–but circumstances often unexpectedly lead one to a better place. I think of Lydia Davis, who decided that she couldn’t possibly write a novel as a single mother, so she wrote all of the intriguing short shorts that made her name. Likewise, Toni Morrison, another single mother, finished her first novel by writing for 15 minutes each day after putting her children to bed.

Progress happens in the accumulation of increments. That’s where I find my writing faith at the moment. I bow to small things and hope they lead to larger things.

The Things I Like About 100 Word Story

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The second issue of 100 Word Story is out, and there’s much to love.

Here’s a list of my favorites:

I love that the poet Myra Sclarew was drawn to write 100-word stories because by condensing her poems, she can “get to the white heat of experience.”

I love how Tsering Wangmo Dhompa uses the word “pulchritude” in “The Self in One Part.”

I love that Patrick Williams wrote a 98-word song to his photo of that crazy blue 70s car—the photo that inspired so many stories in our monthly photo prompt.

I love how Roxanne Barber’s story shows how a scar is not just a scar, but a possible window to salvation in her story “Scarred.”

I love how Jim Fisher captures the damnation of “Wrath’s centrifugal force” in “Ezekial“—I feel the world’s righteous churning with such a force.

But thank God there’s some good, hot sex in R. Neal Bonser’s “Seasoning.” Thank God for hot sex.

And even though sex (or love, rather) might be wanting in R-Chi London’s “Good for Business,” there’s something comforting about the self-sufficiency she shows in a romantic woman who sees a different path to fulfillment.

But the thing I most like about 100 Word Story is how it’s opened doors to an artistic community for me, Monsieur Lonely Writer. I’m not only in contact and publishing old writer friends and professors, but I’m encountering so many new wonderful writers and artists, such as Joel Brouwer and Liz Steketee—our featured author and photographer for the next issue. Both of them inspire me so much, and that’s all I want to be, inspired.

I also want to give thanks to the many wonderful submissions we receive. Unfortunately, we can only publish a small percentage of what we receive. As a writer, I learn from each piece I’ve read. It’s a sign to me that none of us go it alone. It’s a sign that what matters is the making, not the getting published.

The Short, Short Story: 100 Word Story Magazine

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This review should only be 100 words long. Most things should only be 100 words long. After all, we live in an age where even the approximation of totality can seem exhausting. We inhabit glimpses. We remember shadows. We listen to a snippet of a song, then watch a flash of a movie.

Now there’s a literary journal, started right here in the Bay Area, that aims to capture such a fragmentary nature of life: 100 Word Story (full disclosure: I’m one of the founding editors).

If you’re still reading (after 80 or so words), consider this journal within an ever-evolving American obsession with the art of brevity, in both a literary and a cultural sense.

Hemingway started the trend with his famous six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” You could say that the sensibility behind those six words led to our Twittering culture itself.

Such a short, short story isn’t about the word count, though—it’s about what’s left out. Remember that Hemingway’s famous dictum of writing was that a story should be an iceberg: only ten percent of it should be visible.

The 100-word format whittles that figure down to one percent. Traditional “flash fiction” is generally defined as being between 300 and 1,000 words, so a 100-word story becomes more akin to a narrative haiku.

It’s “a limit that inspires compositional creativity,” says Paul Strohm, who sparked the whole idea with his stories in Eleven Eleven. After I read Strohm’s stories, I started writing and swapping stories with a friend and was quite taken by the genre. So I decided that the last gaping hole among lit journals was a mag dedicated to 100-word stories.

The genre is a narrative snapshot, which is why we offer a photo prompt every month and a theme to write to.

In practical matters, if you have writer’s block or are the type of writer who procrastinates before diving into a longer work, the 100-word format is a perfect warm-up, a way to capture a single intense moment within a longer piece, or condense that essay or story you might never quite have the time for.

Other than that, we have great t-shirts and mugs and trucker hats for sale. And more.

Read. Write. Submit. Buy. Repeat.

Paul Strohm and the Art of the 100 Word Story

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If you want to know about masculinity, music, and aging (and more), then Paul Strohm is the guy to turn to.

The Bay Area scholar, author, wit, and bon vivant has just published a series of exquisite shorts—stories of 100 words that perfectly capture the telling turns of his life, whether it’s styling his childhood friend Billy’s “carroty hair” or partying with the Pixies.

Each story acts as a snapshot, a pivot that defines the act of memory in dashes of details, episodes rising with cinematic and often ribald ironies. While there is a certain trendy novelty to genres such as the six-word novel/memoir or Twitter stories, I find that these forms often rely too much on a joke, a gimmick, or just make little sense (although I like Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never used.”)

With 100 words, Strohm manages to stretch out and truly evoke a moment, if not spin a yarn, while maintaining the nuanced hints that are crucial to such a short form.

Strohm is working on a series of 100 of the shorts, and having completed 99 of them, he published nine in the California College for the Arts lit journal Eleven Eleven.

Since the stories are short, I’ll quote the story “Meeting Girls” in its entirety:

My high school friends and I were afraid of girls but thought we should be meeting some. Wilbur (‘Stiff Sheet’) Coultis—a.k.a ‘Coitus’—claimed he knew how. Under his supervision, we went cruising every Friday night in Martin’s Nash Rambler. Seeing a girl walking, we’d slow the car so Coultis could roll down his window and shout ‘Yo, Snatch!’ before we sped away. Our friend Valentine pointed out after several weeks that this wasn’t working, and proposed ‘Hey, BeeBay!’ with no better results. Back at Martin’s we smoked cigarettes and complained about no luck. But that became Valentine’s nickname: ‘BeeBay.’”

Millions of words have been written about this topic, but what more do you need to know? Many a man has cherished such painful, anguished bonding (although mostly in retrospect), and we can only hope our techniques improve with age. But probably not much, as the story points out in the second, more tender, yet still misguided advance.

Strohm is most known for his scholarship. He’s Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has published books such as Social Chaucer. But let’s hope we see the other ninety 100 word stories from him soon.