Jennifer Sinor | November 2020

Jennifer Sinor

When I was conducting research for my recent book, Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe, I spent a week at Ghost Ranch. The ranch offers a half-day tour of its 21,000 acres, specifically the land that O’Keeffe walked almost daily and that appears in so many of her New Mexico paintings. O’Keeffe’s work is often site-specific, so you can stand where she stood, see what she saw, and then understand what she did on the canvas both to render the landscape and abstract it. On the tour, Karen Butts, our guide, led us from one part of the ranch to another, pointing out Chimney Rock, the black-scribbled remains of waterfalls on the red cliffs, and the Pedernal mesa hovering, as it seems to in so many of O’Keeffe’s paintings, just above the earth. We saw the scarred juniper known as Gerald’s Tree, the slopes found in My Red Hills, and familiar lines of ridge against sky. Then Karen stopped us in front of, what seemed to me, a mound of dirt. The red pile, pocked and desiccated, rose only to shoulder-height, ribboned by water and wind.

“Here’s what she was looking at when she painted Near Abiquiu,” Karen said, holding up a photocopy of a painting I knew well.

Only I didn’t.

The painting, I had always thought, was one of a line of mountains, sentinel against pellucid air. The ridge ran from white to iron red, with a plank of blue sky above. In front of me was a pile of dirt.

“She moved in close,” Karen said, “took a little hill and made it huge.”

The form sleeps like a body on the canvas, ridges become hips, slopes, flanks. The viewer is pressed right up against the shape, so the painting feels dense, deep. Standing under O’Keeffe’s sky, not a stone’s throw from her house, I realized that afternoon just how radical her vision was. Perspective exchanged for intimacy.

I looked at O’Keeffe’s paintings differently when I returned from that trip; her letters as well. I understood the conversation O’Keeffe wanted with her viewer, one where depth is honored over breadth, the part over the whole. One only need dive into the folded center of her flowers to see the ways in which she employed magnification, cropping, and juxtaposition to, as she so famously quipped, make us “really see.”

The flash form in nonfiction works a lot like an O’Keeffe painting. It alters our understanding of space and time, asks us to see and experience the world differently. And like an O’Keeffe, flash nonfiction often relies on magnification, association, and juxtaposition to do the work. The flash form, generally essays under 750 words though some would say 2,000, crops a moment like the edges of the canvas frame an O’Keeffe, tethering our gaze. Longer forms demand attention. The short form, intention. As Charles Baxter writes of flash fiction, the form relies on “the quality of a person’s attention” (emphasis added).1 Readers must linger longer in a smaller space. There is simply less room for them to move around and fewer points on which to rest their eyes. O’Keeffe gives us the pelvis of a cow levitating before a throbbing sun and waits for us to bring the two together. Much in the same way, the short form can rely on juxtaposition or a sonnet-like turn—rather than exposition, summary, or narrative arc—to invite the reader into the essay, have them take a seat, and then consider how the mound of dirt they see before them contains both mountain and sky.

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

But how? Too often, writers make the mistake of thinking the short form is simply a shorter version of a traditional essay—that it follows the same conventions, values the same craft techniques, and simply consumes less space. But that is like reading O’Keeffe’s bone against sky as a tiny Constable. O’Keeffe is up to something else entirely. She has abandoned traditional landscape painting—in terms of subject, perspective, palette—and is creating a new aesthetic, with its own rules and principles. The short form is not a shorter form of a traditional essay. It is its own thing, whole, complete, and marked by identifiable conventions. In this essay, I want to name some of those conventions and provide examples of how the form “works.” But first, I think it’s important to consider where the flash form falls along the continuum of narrative structure—helping us to see that the question of form has less to do with length and everything to do with time.

In Narrative Design, Madison Smart Bell provides a useful way to think about narrative structure, creating a continuum of sorts, with all essays (Bell is concerned with fiction) falling somewhere along the continuum and no essay occupying either end entirely. Art is not science, so in many ways a continuum fails us, but I think it gives writers a useful way to think about the gains and losses made in moving toward one end or the other. On one end of the continuum is what Bell calls “linear design,” narratives that “start at the beginning, traverse some sort of middle, and stop at the end.”2 When teaching form, I often remind my students that we like linear form—innately. We feel satisfied by a story or an essay that arrives whole, stable, and integrated. Linear stories are the dominant stories we tell (“You would not believe what happened to me on the way to work today.”) and the ones we often consume (Beauty and the Beast, Star Wars, The Hobbit). We have wallowed in stories that move from “once upon a time” to “happily ever after” from the moment our parents read us our first board books, told us our first bedtime stories; linear structure, like macaroni and cheese, is the comfort food of form.

Linear narratives, Bell tells us, are chronologically bound. Events progress over time in a cause and effect fashion. They are timebound and sequential—if not entirely then at least in terms of how they gain their narrative momentum. Something happens because something else has happened—a domino effect. Linear stories build, climax, and then end. In Western literature, linear stories are the ones that have been honored and valued. Aristotle writes in Poetics that beauty in drama results from the “proper arrangement of the incidents,” an arrangement that creates a whole, “what has a beginning and middle and end.” Readers tend to like the control found in a linear structure, its tidiness, and the knowledge that all will be well (or at least wrapped up).

As human beings, we are timebound creatures. The first thing we think when we awake in the morning is “What day is it?” or “What time is it?” We orient ourselves in relation to time before we even open our eyes. Time is ingrained, even biological, to the point that if you put people in a room without clocks or windows within days they will wake when the sun rises on the equator and go to bed when it sets (no matter how far away from the waistline of the Earth they are).

But linear narratives are limited, as all writers quickly come to understand. They are predictable in terms of structure; they require large amounts of space to tell; and, because they are organized in relation to time, they fail to reflect actual lived experience. While we might tell the story of what happened on the way to work that day as a story with a beginning, middle, and end, our actual experience of going to work was not nearly so logical. To start, we are rarely only doing one thing. And even if we are, our minds are rarely focused entirely on that one thing. We are walking intersections of past experiences, current impressions, and future projections. Nothing in our day comes close to being linear. So, the linear as a narrative structure is, in many ways, a lie.

Bell offers as the other end of the continuum “modular design.” For Bell, “modular design allows the writer to throw off the burden of chronology as much as possible.”3 The writer no longer binds herself to chronology or a cause and effect understanding of her subject. She works by association instead, moving from, say, image to image, rather than moment to moment. The nonlinear, or lyric form, occupies the far end of the narrative structure spectrum, the moment before, I tell my students, prose falls over into poetry, no longer bound by sentence but instead by line.

Modular design is not wed to chronology. It does not seek to be whole or integrated. It cannot be held in the hand and known. Much like poetry, it honors image, uninterested in exposition, summary, explanation. Nonlinear or lyric forms require much more work on the reader’s part. They often arrive with white space, gutters of emptiness that the reader must traverse in order to make meaning. Lyric essays run like sand through our fingers. They are less meant to be caught and more meant to be experienced. Shapeliness matters, not progress.

As I say above, no essay is entirely linear or entirely lyric. They all rest somewhere along the continuum. But a writer needs to realize that the further from the shores of chronology they sail, the more they must consider what they are offering the reader instead. Time is in our blood. When a writer “desert[s] the narrative line,” as Brenda Miller states so well in her essay “A Braided Heart,” she must provide the reader another way to navigate the essay, a structural metaphor, an image, a refrain.4

The flash form lies in the middle of the continuum I have described above, and the one Bell lays out in Narrative Design. Like an O’Keeffe, it simultaneously values both representation (linear) and abstraction (lyric). It does not have the time and space to unfold linearly, so it must move in the direction of the lyric and its reliance on association. Yet, it centers on a what Lee Martin calls a “lyric moment”5 and Barrie Jean Borich the “decisive moment,”6 a memorable event that gets told, in part, through chronology. It is, then, both linear and lyric.

Dinty W. Moore provides what I consider the best metaphor for thinking about the flash form. In the introduction to The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Nonfiction, he tells us to imagine a fire burning deep within a forest. He points out that in a traditional essay, the reader might begin at the edge of the forest, smell the smoke, work her way ever closer to the fire, meeting with all sorts of mishaps along the way. In the flash form, Moore writes, “the reader is not a hiker but a smoke jumper, one of those brave firefighters who jump out of planes and land fifty yards from where the forest fire is burning.”7 You must begin in flame. There is no time to hike.

A writer chooses a form from the necessity of her material. Writers eventually learn to recognize subjects that call for a braided form, or a linear form, or a flash form, and they learn this mostly by reading other writers and by understanding the gains and losses provided by every form. It’s important to know what you are giving up when you choose to move in one direction on the continuum or another. In recognizing what is being lost, you can determine what needs to be added in order for the reader to enter the work. In flash nonfiction, length is being given up, but more profoundly a dependence on chronology. Because the writer cannot tell the story from beginning to middle to end, they must deepen the moment under attention. In writing and teaching flash nonfiction, I have come to understand that this deepening is most often achieved in three ways: metaphor, narrative turn, and/or juxtaposition.

METAPHOR

The fiction writer, Richard Bausch, has said of flash fiction that “when a story is compressed so much, the matter of it tends to require more size: that is, in order to make it work in so small a space its true subject must be proportionately larger.”8 In flash, a writer cannot create more scenes or provide more summary or musing to expand her true subject. She must work small. And one way an author gets more from less is by the strategic use of metaphor. By its very nature, metaphor moves vertically rather than horizontally. It takes us deeper by lassoing the concrete to the abstract. Possibilities for meaning are multiplied by metaphor. When Toni Morrison gives us a “menu of regret,” she leaves her readers to contemplate not just what might fill her character’s menu but what fills their own. Metaphors, then, are risky because the writer gives up control of reception. Once the reader enters the vehicle of metaphor, she can drive anywhere she wants. So, metaphor multiplies and expands—even when it is compressed and concise. In that way, it is the perfect convention for the flash form.

Debra Gwartney has a beautiful flash piece that relies on metaphor. Appropriately entitled, “Cake,” the essay begins with a piece of chocolate cake imprisoned in plastic but offering “sodden coconut” and “crushed nuts bound by nectar.” Within the first three lines, the narrator is comparing the pull of the cake to the “honey drop” she once sucked “from a trumpet shaped petal of a columbine.” The language surrounding the cake is pulsing and sexual. Along with the narrator, we desire to take a bite.

But the piece of cake is not meant for Gwartney. It has been set aside on the counter by her hosts—maybe to enjoy on their own later. Gwartney is alone in the kitchen, her monthly dinner group chattering in the next room all dressed in costumes for their German-themed evening. Gwartney wears a costume as well, a rented dirndl that binds her waist, works to contain what only wants out. She imagines the horror of the hosts, her husband, her friends, were they to find her in the kitchen devouring the cake. But she also realizes that she has already been stained; a dark spot of gravy on her rented blouse soils her. She stands in the kitchen, hovering over the very thing that she wants, desires, and, most significantly, she stands there alone. The party carries on without her, life carries on without her. It is here that she makes the turn.

Two-thirds of the way into the essay, Gwartney reveals that she is pregnant with her fourth child, a baby that will, like the others, slide from her body “coated in vernix the shade of Elmer’s glue, as if charged to stick their parents together.” She wants out and this new baby will keep her in, wrapped in plastic, imprisoned. Any thought that we are reading an essay about a piece of cake gets overturned, though savvy readers will have recognized from the beginning that Gwartney is exploring the fallout from desire. It was her first pregnancy—back seat of the car? only a teen?—

that pushed her into the very marriage she had thought she was about to escape. On her wedding day, she wore a different costume, a white wedding dress telegraphing purity and innocence, stained already by wanting what she shouldn’t.

The narrator devours the piece of cake, takes it in “like a swimmer gasping for air,” then tries to hide the evidence of her desire by stuffing the plastic wrap into her blouse. In less than 750 words, Gwartney not only describes how we become worn before our lives even begin, but she also speaks to the larger question of how, largely, women are punished for being embodied human beings—for wanting—whether sex or food—for daring to claim something for themselves. And the way Gwartney gets to her deeper subject—proportionately so much larger than the physical space her words take up—is by cleaving to the metaphor of the piece of cake. She does not tell us how she met her husband, her decision to keep her baby, the early years of marriage, her decision to leave. She gives us a piece of cake. And we never ask for a beginning or an ending, we never ask for context or background because we are standing with her in that kitchen, grief pulling us to the floor, wanting to run a finger through the frosting, take it in.

NARRATIVE TURN

As I write above, two-thirds of the way through “Cake,” Gwartney makes a turn. She moves from the scene we have inhabited since the beginning (pressed in close like O’Keeffe’s hills) and takes us to a new place—the knowledge that she is pregnant and that she is unhappy in her marriage. It is very common in the flash form for the writer to make a turn about two-thirds of the way into the essay. Below I am going to discuss juxtaposition (where two or more completely disparate moments are set side by side), but here I am talking about a more fluid turn—rather than a complete disjunction. I think of this movement like the movement made in a Petrarchan sonnet between the octave and sestet or between the first three quatrains and the final two lines in a Shakespearean sonnet. In a sonnet the turn is called the volta, Italian for turn but also, not to be overlooked, for time. The first part of the sonnet presents a problem (say, unrequited love) and the second part then comments on that problem or complicates it. A volta is a dramatic change in emotion or tone. The subject remains the same (love, here) but the terrain shifts.

Flash nonfiction often uses a turn as well, again as a way to move vertically rather than horizontally. The turn is more than what Anne Panning calls “sliding,” when a flash writer transitions “between scenes in a way that allows the reader to connect objects in the essay in an accumulative way.”9 Sliding, exemplified so well in Panning’s own essay “The White Suit,” travels from one object (in the Panning essay her father’s white suit) to the next object (her father’s dark suit, then her father’s orange suit) in an act of accretion, one object layering atop another similar object to convey through weight what cannot be conveyed through narrative (here, loss). The turn in nonfiction is more dramatic. Readers should be startled, unsettled. The turn often involves a time shift as well as a scene shift and meaning gets thickened because what comes after the turn makes us reread all that came before.

In Lee Martin’s essay “Dumber Than,” the narrator begins with “A box of rocks.” “You know the one,” he tells us, the one who dropped his cat from a building to see if it would land on its feet, the one who responded that “I” was the capitol of “Illinois.” The narrator is speaking directly to us (“You know the one”) drawing us into his confidence, his community. On the outside of him and us, stands this boy, the one “dumber than a post,” “dirt,” a “bagful of hammers.” The narrator gives us several examples of this boy’s inanity, his inability to function “normally, ” as if making his case, winning an argument that we, as readers, are not privy to—an argument, it will turn out, that he is having with himself.

About halfway through the essay and deep into describing the ways this nameless boy “was already gone,” Martin slows down to describe a moment in which the boy, who has by now “shed his baby fat” to “become a muscled man,” soaped Martin’s car, and Martin responded by physically dragging the boy outside to clean up the mess. The boy “laughed like an idiot” even as Martin bent and twisted his arm. Martin’s anger is visceral; he becomes incensed by the boy’s laughter. We are made to understand that the boy is the one out of place in the moment—transgressing social norms—even as Martin bends his body, demands satisfaction.

And then the turn: “How was I to know.” If we questioned whether Martin was making his case for innocence, we are no longer uncertain. We become the jury; he, the defendant. “How was I to know,” he asks, “that one day when he was a grown man he’d take a golf club—a five iron—and beat his wife until she was dead?” This is not a piece about the boy, the one dumber than a box of rocks, this is an essay about the ways in which we are all complicit in the violence that surrounds us. Martin doesn’t hold the five iron in his hand, but he is certainly asking himself how small acts of aggression—verbal even more than physical—might lead to larger acts of aggression. He is wondering about the part he has played in the death of the wife, in fact the death of “women across three states.” For the majority of the essay, the definition of intelligence has been evaluated along traditional terms—facts and practical skills—but after the turn it is less clear what it means to be smart or to be dumb. The last line ends in irony: “Dumber than a bagful of hammers, we said. Now that’s one thing we always knew for sure.” The narrator knows nothing for sure. Just as we can never know how our actions result in other actions, can never know when our grace results in other graces, he will never know the part he played in the murders. He is, though, aware of the part he played in the boy’s early life. Do they connect? Martin is clearly haunted by the idea that they might. And he is struck as dumb as the boy who would not confess, both unable to find words.

Without the turn, “Dumber Than” is an essay about the narrator’s firm conviction in the certainty of the past and of his actions. With the turn, “Dumber Than” plunges into complicity and our inability to explain, no matter how many words we have or how “smart” we are, why humans do bad things. Again, Martin could have started at the beginning—where he met the boy, the boy’s name, the family. He could have given socioeconomic context, narrated the specific role he played. But he doesn’t. Using “dumber than” as a refrain, he moves from one moment to the next, wandering ever closer to the “I” rather than the “we,” until he makes the turn at the end: “How was I to know?”

JUXTAPOSITION

In each of the examples above, we can see strategies a writer employs to move deeper rather than longer. Flash writers understand that the words on the page cannot hold all the meaning. The gap between the concrete and the abstract in metaphor and the gap between before and after in the turn open a space that is invisible in word count but dramatic in meaning. Juxtaposition makes this gap even more apparent—usually by literally indicating an emptiness with white space on the page. In juxtaposition, two or more unlike moments are laid next to one another on the page and then the reader must bring the moments or ideas together. It cannot, of course, be any two moments. Juxtaposition is not a call for randomness. Whatever is being juxtaposed appears, at least initially to the reader, as unrelated, but must have already found relation for the writer. Indeed, they are inseparable for her.

For example, a year ago I found myself wanting to write about a moment when I had gone to the county jail to teach a weekly meditation class and had been placed by guards in a dark room during a lock down for my “safety.” Listening to the screams and cries coming from outside the room, it was not clear to me who was most in need of protection. The lockdown happened in the weeks following the Las Vegas shootings, and an untended computer in the room displayed a website declaring, “Don’t Let Nevada be excuse to disarm us.”

I knew I didn’t want to write an essay about prison reform, or about teaching meditation in the jail, or about gun law, mass shootings, or the Second Amendment. I didn’t want to write about police brutality or race or the possibility of inmate rehabilitation. I wanted to write about how helpless I felt inside that dark room, knowing that I would walk outside within the hour feeling anything but free.

For weeks I let the story roll around inside of me, trying on possible versions like pairs of jeans: no way, no way, no way. Then one morning I was out running in the dark. The smell of fall felted the air, rising from the leaves piled along the edge of the road. All at once, out of instinct more than anything, I leapt over a small pile on the ground. Only when I landed did I hear the small meow, and think, in a flash: kitten, hit by a car, unable to move. And then I just kept running. Did not turn around. Did not invite that pain into my life. Chose to look the other way and keep moving.

For the essay, I placed these two moments side by side, along with the words from the deputy who defined in an early jail training the “priority of life,” who would be saved and in what order, were there an emergency at the jail. The inmates, lest the point be missed, were at the very bottom, while I, the deputy told me, as a good civilian, was the very one she had sworn to give her life to protect, the one at the very top. In placing these moments, these seemingly unrelated events, next to each other, I wanted to suggest that while I do not own a gun, that doesn’t omit me from the chain of violence. And the only way I could see to do that was to move smaller and deeper, give the reader a physical chasm on the page and let her pour what she needed in order to make it across.

Juxtaposition is a powerful force in flash nonfiction. A great example is Nicole Walker’s essay “Fish,” in which we are given three different moments—all indeed involving fish—but absolutely no exposition or scene stitching in between. We have, in section one, a salmon making its way up a spillway; in section two, the narrator at the age of eleven sport fishing with her father and his two friends; and, in section three, advice on preparation for cooking fish filets. Fish appear in each section but that is all that we have. Readers must work to wedge the sections closer together—largely by paying attention to the physicality of Walker’s language (the bruised flesh, the broken skin); the subtle threat of violence conveyed through verbs like “bear down,” “press,” “strain,” “reduce,” and “battered;” and finally by a single sentence that floats at the navel of the essay: “I must have been beautiful then.” In wedging the sections closer, we come to understand that Walker isn’t writing about fish, she is writing about gender and transgressions and what women will do because they have to. In less than 750 words, we arrive at a cultural critique that is devastating in its subtlety and powerful in evoking all it does not actually say.

Of course, the more white space you open for the reader and the more you rely on metaphor and association to do the work for you instead of chronology and linearity, the greater the risk that the reader will find meaning that you never intended, perhaps never invited, maybe never even imagined. The flash form creates a tight space full of possibility, but it sacrifices some control to get there. Most writers are willing to take that risk because they are invested in collaborating with the reader, untethering themselves from singular interpretations of the truth. In the end, as Walker’s essay so brilliantly demonstrates, the bolder the risk undertaken by the writer, the greater the pay-off for the reader. You can simply do more with less, once you understand how the flash form moves.

FLASH AS THE FORM OF THE MOMENT

In the past two decades, the flash form in nonfiction has come into its own. Brevity, the online literary magazine dedicated to concise literary nonfiction and edited by Dinty W. Moore, just celebrated twenty years with the publication of The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction. Their website receives more than 10,000 unique visitors a month. We are also seeing more book-length linked flash nonfiction appearing as alternatives to traditionally structured memoirs. Abigail Thomas’s Safekeeping, Norma Cantú’s Canicula, Peggy Shumaker’s Just Breathe, Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary, and Deborah Tall’s Family of Strangers all influenced my understanding of how the flash form can be stitched together when I was structuring my memoir Ordinary Trauma. And more contests and literary journals are making calls for flash nonfiction specifically.

Living, as we do, in an age of tweets, likes, posts, and sound bites, it is very easy conclude that the flash form is the form of the moment simply because it satisfies our increasingly shorter and shorter spans of attention. And you wouldn’t have to work hard to make the argument that, since the rise of the novel in the 18th century, book-length fiction has been growing ever shorter. But I think such arguments miss the point of the flash form entirely. If anything, the flash form requires greater attention, the intention I described earlier—which is not about endurance but about the quality of our seeing. The flash is the form of the moment, you could argue, but not because we have lost the patience or the ability to read.

For me, the fiction writer, Charles Baxter, has the most thoughtful response to that question—and it has nothing to do with social media. In fact, he writes in the introduction to Sudden Fiction International, “No one has ever said sonnets or haikus were evidence of short attention spans.10 For Baxter, the power of the contemporary flash form is found in the way it challenges a literary history that believes “length is synonymous with profundity,” and that has long favored the horizontal over the vertical. He argues the flash form is freeing us from a tradition that has relied on “a convention that runs parallel to expansionism, empire building, and the contemplation of the heroic individual.” In his hands, length becomes evidence of “the writer’s interest in domination.”11 The short form, then, arrives sustainable, green, and a response to the very literal reality that there is simply less space in the world. Our sense of “reduced geographies” has moved us, Baxter argues, away from the individual and toward the communal. With its lyric insistence on an active reader, the flash form naturally invites collaboration, and with its exchange of breadth for depth it is asking writers to do less with more, not unlike larger efforts of sustainability around the planet. In the end, the flash form may have found its immediacy and relevance in this moment because the form itself replicates the decisions we can make as artists but also as human beings.

Jennifer Sinor’s books include a memoir that is a series of linked flash nonfiction, Ordinary Trauma, as well as the essay collection, Letters Like the Day. Her latest book is Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World. She teaches creative nonfiction at Utah State University where she is a professor of English.

Notes

1. Charles Baxter, “Introduction,” in Sudden Fiction International: Sixty Short-Short Stories, eds. Robert Shapard and James Thomas, (New York: Norton, 1989): p. 23.
2. Madison Smart Bell, Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft and Form, (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 27.
3. Bell, p. 216.
4. Brenda Milller, “A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay,” in Writing Creative Nonfiction, eds. Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard, (Cincinnati: Story Press, 2001), p. 18.
5. Lee Martin, “Communal and Personal Voices,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, ed. Dinty W. Moore, (Brookline MA: Rose Metal Press, 2016), p. 66.
6. Barrie Jean Borrich, “Writing into the Flash: On Finding Short Nonfiction’s Decisive Moment,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, ed. Dinty W. Moore, (Brookline MA: Rose Metal Press, 2016), p. 9.
7. Dinty W. Moore, “Of Fire and Ice: The Pleasing Sting of Flash Nonfiction,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, ed. Dinty W. Moore, (Brookline MA: Rose Metal Press, 2016), p. xxiii.
8. James Thomas and Robert Shapard, “Introduction,” in Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories, eds. James Thomas and Robert Shapard, (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 12.
9. Anne Panning, “Paper Clips, Sausage, Candy Cigarettes, Silk: “Thingy-ness in Flash Nonfiction,” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, ed. Dinty W. Moore, (Brookline MA: Rose Metal Press, 2016), p. 38.
10. Baxter, p. 23.
11. Baxter, p. 18.