Two craft books that have come out recently, Michael Loveday’s Unlocking the Novella in Flash (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2022) and Kendall Johnson’s Writing to Heal (MacQ, 2024), have made explicit what flash fiction and flash nonfiction writers have known about flash intuitively. Both explain how flash is in many ways a healthier approach to understanding ourselves and our lives than other more traditional forms of prose because in the process of constructing flash, the writer deals with the smaller concepts, the moments between moments. This concept is not the major concern of either of these books, but it is a point that both of them make. Loveday asks the poignant question, “Are we stories or are we moments?” My answer to that question is that we are both and we are more, but the danger he is pointing out is that writers often have a tendency to see themselves in terms of narrative arc, because they work in that mindset so often and that mindset can be an emotional and psychological trap.

Johnson points this out as well in Writing to Heal, a book about ways to use writing to help heal after psychological trauma. If we see ourselves through that lens, we tend to think of ourselves as only good or only damaged. Seeing our lives as a series of interconnected moments that we are allowed to embrace or to move on from is a much healthier way to proceed. The process of writing and its effect on the writer is what both of these writers promote. The genius of these craft books is that they give writers a way not only to connect with readers but also to reframe their own lives in terms of healing and hope.

Like many people, I watched Bill Hader’s television series Barry, and I think it is a work of genius, but I knew how it had to end from the first moment of the series. Barry’s end had to be tragic. If you haven’t seen it, Barry is the story of a hitman who wanders accidentally into an acting class and starts to open himself up emotionally. He wants to move on from the reckless violence and evil that he has brought to so many lives. However, once he has released this evil, he can’t control it and it inevitably comes to consume him. This uncontrollable violence is symbolized by an unseen panther in season three that one of the main characters listens to as it kills his helpless friends. Barry has unleashed this unreasoning and merciless force, and Barry must inevitably be taken down by it. Anything else would feel like a betrayal to the audience. I could write the same kind of evaluation for King Lear or The Great Gatsby or most of the great works of literature. The narrative arc helps to define great literature.

However, both Loveday and Johnson point out that because flash and the novella-in-flash resist strong narrative arcs in their approach, writing through this form is a good way for writers to understand and integrate their experiences without being fully defined by them. Loveday writes:

[T]he novella-in-flash is a unique vehicle for showing how the human experience adds up to a meaningful life ... its piecemeal mode of storytelling reflects something important that contemporary writers feel driven to express—a fragmented quality in human experience and identity (24).

The truth is that life is fragmented. A single identifying narrative arc does not dominate us unless we allow it to. One of the bits of genius in Loveday’s conception of our working lives is that we can come to the deeper meaning of ourselves through the act of creation and that those moments that constitute the major portions of our lives, those moments that are important to us but would not necessarily make it into a memoir or novel, can become the focus of the novella-in-flash so that they become not forgotten but explored. Johnson points out how we can reframe our mindset through art generally and flash specifically. He says we can fight horror in ourselves by writing in a way that avoids cynicism, sensationalism, and a pornography of violence, in a way that understands that optimism might not be logical, but that it is the only strategy that works and allows for hope and light in the worst situations (87). This becomes the mission of the book, to allow a way for the writer to find the optimism needed to proceed in a world that is seemingly designed to drag us down and overwhelm us. The act of creation in both of these writers’ approaches becomes an act of self-preservation.

Novella-in-flash and flash writers, of course, know this instinctively. These are not writing approaches that must be hopeful, but so often they are. Sarah Ferligh’s recent novella-in-flash Hereafter, for example, is the story of Pattylee, who watches her son slowly die and then deals with the aftermath of his death. On the surface there doesn’t seem to be much possibility for hope in such a work. Pattylee is working class and struggles with a system that forces her into a moment of prostitution to pay for her child’s medicine and then denies her counseling afterward. However, these moments are just that, moments. Ferligh is able to see Pattylee as more than tragic. She is complex. Moments are simply moments to be integrated into a larger experience of life. She lives through them and moves on.

The body of work from Abigail Thomas, someone who has always written memoirs-in-flash, sees life in much the same way. Nothing seems tragic in her work, even that which is sad, because she keeps moving on as life does. In her recent Still Life at 80, she mourns the loss of her dogs, but she also celebrates day-to-day moments. She is recreating and celebrating a life that might be described as ordinary but is as complex and beautiful as any other life. She is making the point that life is not only about great achievement.

None of these writers is arguing that the novella-in-flash or flash is or should be the one way forward in the twenty-first century, only that it is a way forward, that it’s important. They are offering a new approach, a new way to write and see ourselves. These books should be read and understood and then read again. What they are offering us is a way to understand ourselves in the chaos.

Publisher’s Note:

See also the book announcement for Kendall Johnson’s Writing to Heal: Self-Care for Creators (MacQ, May 2024), as well as Johnson’s review of Michael Loveday’s book (August, 2022).

John Brantingham

was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (east of Fresno, CA), and now lives in Jamestown, New York. The founder and general editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder, he is also the author of 23 books of poetry, memoir, and fiction, including his latest, Days of Recent Divorce (Arroyo Seco Press, 2023); Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020); and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), the latter a collaboration featuring artworks by his wife, Ann Brantingham. John is also co-author with Kendall Johnson and Kate Flannery of Prayers for Morning: Twenty Quartets (MacQ, 25 December 2024), a collection of prose poems by the three authors, plus artworks by Kendall Johnson.

John’s poems, stories, and essays are published in hundreds of magazines and journals. His work has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s daily show, The Writer’s Almanac; has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize; and was selected for publication in the Best Small Fictions anthology series for 2022 and 2016.

He co-edited The L.A. Fiction Anthology (Red Hen Books), and is a fiction editor for Chiron Review. He currently teaches online through the Inlandia Institute and in person at Chautauqua Gallery in Jamestown, New York.

Author’s website: www.johnbrantingham.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Walk Among Giants by Kendall Johnson, a review of John and Ann Brantingham’s book Kitkitdizzi: A Non-Linear Memoir of the High Sierra, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 16, January 2023)

⚡ Finnegan’s (Fiancée Goes McArthur Park on His Birthday) Cake, flash fiction by Brantingham in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 9, August 2021), which was subsequently selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology

⚡ Objects of Curiosity, a collection of his ekphrastic poems (Sasse Museum of Art, 2020)

⚡ For the Deer, one of two haibun by Brantingham in KYSO Flash (Issue 8, August 2017)

⚡ Four prose poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 7, Spring 2013), including A Man Stepping Into a River and Poem to the Child Who I Almost Adopted