Microfiction, Monster Hunters, and Old Girls
Let’s have a go at microfiction!
Hello Friends,
As I mentioned in Friday’s post, I’m going out of town for a few days (Riverside County Office of Education’s Arts Lift Conference), so I’m setting this up early. Actually, I’m writing this at the same time as Friday’s post. On Wednesday. I hope Thursday-Saturday is calm.
Sorry about the state of the state
So, another week, and the world’s still on fire. I worried over putting up my flag on July 4: should it be upside down to represent distress? Would my MAGA neighbors have no idea this means distress and egg my house for ‘disrespecting’ the flag? Then the news about the floods in Texas broke and the positioning of my flag didn’t feel important. At night, the MAGA neighbor lit lots of illegal fireworks, scaring my dogs, especially Curiosa, even though they were inside the house. The same neighbor was screaming and banging God-knows-what in the street late on the night of the election. In two houses across the street from him, new families with school-age children had recently moved in. I wondered how they and their parents liked being woken in a fright on a school night.
On the Fourth of July, spurred by the neighbor’s actions, I was reminded of that election night. And that brought me, in my usual roundabout way, back to my efforts to write very short work—flash pieces (under 1,000 words) or even micro pieces (under 400 words).
I've been in a long writing slump. If there is such a thing as writer’s block, then I must have it. But I think a more accurate term is ‘depression.’ So I have been able to write a few essays that have found an audience and some short fiction, which doesn’t fit neatly into an audience space. The stories poke fun at some religious traditions, but their characters also find spiritual renewal through engagement with those traditions.
On the eve of the 2024 presidential election, I jotted a few notes that I thought could become a micro story.
You wake me with a reminder that you’re here, in my house,
streaming through the transom window.
Practical you. “You’ve done what you can do,” you say.
“Be a lily of the field, just for me.”
“You made the pumpkin bread and the apple cake, too.
Have a piece. Have two.”
“The fabric store is open. Go touch patterns and color.
Feel a warm flannel or a cool silk.
Indulge and do both, let the unspooling bolt run through your fingers.
Take up the whole nine yards.”
But the outcome of the election ended that writing exercise. Not only was I not getting the full nine yards, it felt that the fabric of my life was, once again, being torn away.
I’ve written a few drabbles (stories that are exactly 100 words) about my mother, about my grief not only over her death, but over her dementia, which took her a dozen years earlier. I thought the pieces were very good and sent them out to a few journals. The responses I got could be summed up in ‘I think there’s a much bigger story here.’ Well, yes.
I keep thinking I will write little stories in response to prompts from
who delivers weekly at (Writers, you should subscribe!) Subscribers post their stories, which can’t be more than 400 words. (Or, at least, the post are no more than 400 words. I suppose the story could go on.) Last week, she had a prompt on ‘numbered stories.’ That gave me an idea: “Things to Do before Going to Home Depot” or “The Home Depot List.” Because I had been thinking about my Mexican American husband going to get some parts for minor repairs, and I was worrying about a brown man in a possible ICE round-up location. But he’s old, right? They don’t take old people. He has his ‘Real ID.’ He’s a citizen, the son of citizens. The son of a WWII veteran. But maybe he should order the repair parts online and wait. If someone knocked him down to handcuff him, it might kill him, his back so bad and all.All this made me angry, and instead of putting these thoughts into a list story, I posted some news stories about what is happening in So Cal on my socials. Like the MacArthur Park fear-mongering in Los Angeles—yes, while central Texas children went missing.
And yet good things exist in the world
But it’s still summer, and I can read microfiction even if I’m not ready to write it yet. You might also enjoy the short breaks from the world these stories provide.
It seems odd to introduce you to someone I don’t know—our only interaction has been me commenting on her Substack to say I liked her chapbook Kissing the Monster Hunter and her thanking me. But, full disclosure—I know her publisher because he brought out my chapbook, The Mortality of Dogs and Humans. I subscribe to Bamboo Dart Press and receive each chapbook they print. I thought my story of grief and renewal—too short to be a book, too long to be an essay—might work for them. While it’s not like anything else they had published before, they said yes. And that was fun. It was the #1 seller in the ‘pet grief’ category on Amazon for a hot minute.
So subscribing to Bamboo Dart chapbooks introduced me to
. (You can guess what her Substack, , is about. 😉 If you’re a writer, you might want to subscribe.)I don’t always read the chapbooks in the order they arrive, but I believe the first by Pokrass that I read was The Dog Seated Next to Me. It’s a collection of flash fiction that invites the reader to consider the ways that the landscape alters when animals enter, a topic I love. I passed it on to another dog-loving friend. Then I read:
Kissing the Monster Hunter by Meg Pokrass
One of the delights of subscribing to a trusted press is that you don’t know what you’re getting, but you know you’ll enjoy it. Little surprise packages in the mail. When Kissing the Monster Hunter arrived, I immediately enjoyed the title. It made me think of kissing a monster, but that’s not the story title, is it? Isn’t kissing the monster hunter sharing a romance with the person who might bring the monster to heel?
And then there is the specific monster of the stories within: the Loch Ness Monster, who has been proven not to exist—but who lives in our imaginations, and so exists still. Whom people want to exist because somehow it has become a lovely dream of a living prehistoric presence, an embodiment of the frightening thing that resides within us all. The thing that we have worked to make into cute gift shop trinkets.
So the monster hunter can have a bit of a monster in him after all, as can the woman who kisses him. I read to see how that monster manifests in the characters—scaly creature from the black lagoon or sweet Nessie? Or both? And more? The creature shape shifts from story to story. In “Elopement on the Loch,” the bride worries about her understating of love and of repeating past mistakes. “Usually, you feel and he doesn’t. You’re the one attuned to the submerged shapes that don’t exist: Monsters in anything and everything. … underneath the tourist boat, you imagine, are the bubbles of your mother's failed marriage, a deep loch creature, freshwater sadness in her eyes.”
The strange images of love and regret weave through the book. In the eponymous story “Kissing the Monster Hunter,” the first person narrator can feel her “wrinkles reaching towards him like fishing-lines in water.” In “Sound-Clusters Considered,” the female narrator says, “By then I wanted to be eaten by a beautiful, freckled animal. The name no longer mattered. My life had become an overripe peach, my flesh dripping and pecked at by birds.”
A wonderful thing about the images is that they often don’t land where you expect them to. Here’s one from “False Neutrality” which I thought would end with defeat:
there is a crack in our front porch
which has been there too long,
like something deep inside
our history is trying to hatch.
But there was that last lovely line “Our history trying to hatch.”
Since I loved this chapbook, I got a few more copies and gave them to my son, who had read some of Pokrass’s work in literary journals, and to a few friends. So I was happy that this month, I received another Pokrass chapbook in the mail:
Old Girls and Palm Trees
This is a dreamy consideration of all the things an old friendship might bring us to. Again, the title intrigued me—not ‘old women,’ but ‘old girls.’ How is a girl old? Well, the narrator and her childhood friend are going backward to relive girlhood in their old age, old skins. This is a lot of fun, though it might truly be just a dream. And there was a bonus for me: the old life of the friends—the palm trees and long drives on the Pacific Coast Highway—reminds me of my own youth, of my days at UC Santa Barbara (UC Sunny Beach, we said), and the friendships I made there. “In my fluid dreams, the two of us barrel down the highway in a rain-splotched station wagon, moths on the wing.”
How can we imagine our old friends now? With “eyeglass frames shining in the living room light.” (“Dandy Indeed”) People we can sit with and snicker at the snobbish neighbors who have “better-quality dog poop from the bottoms of better-quality animals.” (“Snobby”) There’s the nostalgia felt from looking at old photos, thinking of the cookies you were making while hearing Lovely Rita. “You, as a sexy meter maid.” (“Old Photo”)
In imitation of the Southern California palm trees, the past seems to lean forward, ready and willing to catch the narrator as she dreams.
An anthology of microfiction
The owners of Bamboo Dart Press also publish longer work under the Pelekinesis imprint. Pokrass, along with Gary Finke, is the editor of the Best Microfiction series from Pelekinesis. So I thought, ‘I’m going to read one of those’ and bought:
Best Microfiction 2024
For the Best Microfiction 2024, the editors read over a thousand previously published submissions from literary magazine editors around the world. Out of these ‘best of’ submissions, just over 80 landed in the anthology. I think guest editor Grant Faulkner says it perfectly in his foreword “The Art of Microfiction or Holding a Story in the Palm of Your Hand”:
What I love about these tiny stories is that they hold up a different lens to the world – they allow the rags and detritus of the everyday to turn into gems and jewels. Life isn’t a round, complete circle, after all – it’s shaped by fragments, shards, and pinpricks. It’s a collage of snapshots, a collection of the unspoken, a chest full of situations you can’t quite get rid of. … Sometimes it takes the smallest of things to open up the biggest of spaces.
Early in my reading, I found a story that was, in form, like my drabbles about my mother. This made me feel less odd. As I read on, there were a few more. Ah, I’m not so weird after all, I told myself. I enjoyed all the stories, folding back the corners of many pages so I can return to them. I loved the pieces by Myna Chang, which seemed to be processing grief in the same way I have after losing my younger brother. I felt a deep connection reading three stories in a row: “When the Cowbirds Come to Carry Your Sister Away” by Audra Kerr Brown; “The Angel Gabriel Says It’s Not a Booty Call if He Doesn’t Have Genitals” by Frances Klein; and “Genie” by Kip Knott.
These and other stories contain grief. In some, there’s a desire for, and sometimes an achievement of, closure. And there’s the work of redemption as well. Those are all things I look for in my reading. Such a pleasure. Check them out.
"I've been in a long writing slump. If there is such a thing as writer’s block, then I must have it. But I think a more accurate term is ‘depression.’" I can SO relate to this. Hey, thank you for the mention of my substack. As for Meg Pokrass, she is Number One in flash fiction, and also a fantastic teacher/workshop leader. Anyone interested in writing short should know about Meg! Lastly, I'm sorry about the stress regarding your husband. That's just terrible, to have that sort of worry. Oh--one more thing: I, too, have MAGA neighbors and always wonder what they think when i put up my flag on holidays. Like you, I wonder "how" to put it up! And then I just hang it the usual way, as it's my flag, too. (And my son is a major in the Marines--how can I not fly the flag?) Oh--even ONE MORE THING: You were right about John Green. I finished the tuberculosis book and he is simply the biggest mensch. Such a huge heart.
My husband also doesn’t move as fast as he used to which I’m afraid would make him easier to catch. I’m doing the Home Depot runs these days or ordering online.