Flash Memoir – Hugh's Blog

In that kitchen

In that kitchen I learned about alchemy – the practice, if not the word.

If I close my eyes, I can see the light filtered through the handmade green gingham curtains that move with the breeze. I can hear the news being read over the small radio to the left of the sink, next to the snuff box.

It was on those worn linoleum tiles, peeping over the edge of the counter, on my knees on the green vinyl chair, that I watched it happen – the battered aluminum bowl, the scoops of flour, the sweet milk, the knob of Crisco the size of an unshelled walnut.

Done without measurement, the muscle memory made deep by years of daily practice making biscuits, feeding your family for pennies.

In the old days, it was believed that if you knew the right words, you could turn base metal into gold, but in that kitchen, I learned the deeper truth, the even older magic: That with time and intention, you could turn flour into food, scraps into sufficiency, and ingredients into love.

No Relation, by Paula Carter

As I said yesterday, I’m playing with flash writing. I struggle, because I love words. But that is probably because the writers I have been most informed and shaped by also loved words. I love a good story.

In other words, I need to read more writers who tell stories with economy.

Several websites pointed me to the memoir No Relation, by Paula Carter (https://bookshop.org/p/books/no-relation-paula-carter/12167871). It’s 147 pages, and it’s a small format book – slightly smaller than a trade paperback. The synopsis, from the publisher:

When Paula first met James, she was 26, in graduate school, and not ready to be any kind of mother to his two young sons. But, years later, after caring for them and watching them grow, she finds herself unsure of what to do when her relationship with their father ends. In a collection of striking flash essays, Paula reveals the complexity of loving children who are not her own and attempts to put language to something we have no language to describe. No Relation is a deeply personal, beautifully rendered account of a seldom-remarked on kind of love and loss.

I did not expect to like this book, being someone who doesn’t generally read relationship memoirs, but it was a pleasant surprise. It turns out, I had a lot of resonance with the author, being someone who was once in love with someone who came with kids.

But the reason I bought the book is because while it’s a full memoir, it’s made up of ~85 very short (all under 250 words, I think) standalone flash essays, and I wanted to see how she did it.

It was well done, and it had that feeling like you are watching a magic trick, and you know you are watching a magic trick, but it doesn’t feel like a trick – it feels real. Put another way, the technique faded into the background, as it should.

Recommended both as a memoir, and as an example of the flash-essay-as-book technique.

Flash writing

In 1964, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, when attempting to define obscenity, that while he didn’t know how to define it, he knew it when he saw it.

I’ve been playing for the last week with Flash writing, specifically Flash Nonfiction, and as I’ve attempted top explain what it is to other people, I keep running into the same problem Justice Stewart had – Flash is easier to recognize than to define.

That it is short seems to be a thing everyone agrees with – but just how short is the question. Some say 1500 words, while others say 150. Arguments are made for everything in between.

It also needs to be a complete story – a beginning, a middle, and an end. In that way, it’s not an excerpt, or a snippet, or a vignette.

I was introduced to it in a memoir writing class taught by Janice Ray, and I fell in love with the format.

I like that it has constraints – similar to how Robert Frost is said to have said that free verse is like playing tennis without a net. One thing I loved about Twitter when it came out was the 140 character limitation. It made me a better writer, and communicator. This feels like that.

But one thing I really like is that I can do a first draft in like 15-20 minutes. Not a good draft, or even an adequate draft, but enough to see if the project will work.

I posted, without context, the first one I ever wrote last week. This was entirely written and edited in less than 30 total minutes. It’s not amazing, but it’s good, and encouraged me to keep trying.

Expect to see more Flash writing here in coming weeks. (Members got another piece of Flash Memoir this past Saturday.)

No takebacks.

The late afternoon light streamed through the large windows of the Starbucks. We had not spoken to each other in weeks. We were here to euthanize our relationship.

“How are you?” she asked. She smiled, paused, and then looked down at the table to break eye contact.

“I’m fine.”

I rotate the cup in my hand while it sits on the table. She and I both stare at my hands as the cup spins, silently, to my right.

“Where will you go?” she asks.

“North Carolina. I have some friends there.”

There. I’ve said it. No takebacks.

“What will you do there? Do you have a plan?”

If I were the sort of person who had a plan, I would not be in this Starbucks.

“I do. I will get a part time job somewhere, and work on my writing.”

She laughs. I notice the chip on her eye tooth.

“That’s cute,” she said. “Now I remember why we broke up.”

I feel that in the pit of my stomach, like an injection of ice.

No takebacks.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.