Flash Fiction
After exploring the past in the memoir Clear Springs and the novels Feather Crowns and The Girl in the Blue Beret, I wanted to settle down in the twentyfirst century. It was a time shift.
In fiction of the eighties the popular use of the present tense offered the immediacy of watching movies. The writer seemed not to know what was going to happen any more than the reader did. I might note that in the present tense, making progress from A to B, or from one room to another, is a challenge. It is tricky for the writer, immersed in the moment, to skip ahead a year, or even an afternoon.
Now, in the throes of attention deficit, we may experience a different kind of immediacy—the sudden splash of light or explosion, a flash of dynamite, a flashlight in a dark corner. I’ve never found poetry to be suitable for my sensibility, but flash fiction, what might have once been called prose poetry, is appealing, and in the last few years I have dabbled with this form.
Ideally flash fiction attempts to be a poem that reads like fiction, or a story that has the intensity of a poem. Flash seems quick and easy, but it should be penetrating and difficult to shake loose. There are no precise definitions, and the form lends itself to experimentation and often absurdity.
—BAM