The O:JA&L Masters Series: Flash Fiction
An Essay on Craft
Featured Writer: Pedro Ponce
UNDERGROUND: A FLASH MANIFESTO
To explore or download selected offerings from Pedro Ponce,
click on the title A Map of the Underground
to access the latest chapbook in the O:JA&L Masters Series.
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In Spain, I spent a lot of time underground. While working abroad, the Madrid metro was my primary means of transportation. When we think of travel, we tend to think in terms of what we experience aboveground—monuments, landscapes, vistas sent to friends and family that attest to our presence elsewhere. Travel may be a form of art, but not all art consists of travel, and much of the art I’m talking about here takes shape underground.
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Exercise:
Sustain a regular artistic practice while working full-time.
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My first metro experience was in DC, after college. I was masquerading as a journalist while writing fiction on the side. This combination might have worked for other writers, but it wasn’t working for me. Journalism required accuracy, concision, and speed. The fiction I admired was none of these things. The accuracy of a Ray Bradbury short story can’t be conveyed in a snappy headline. It took C. S. Lewis seven volumes to tell the complete story of a single game of hide-and-seek. The stories of Amy Hempel might have been short but reading them was an invitation to slow down rather than speed up, lingering over single sentences and even words until the accumulation of images coalesced into a narrative.
One of my jobs at the paper was summarizing reports of disciplinary proceedings against lawyers. If a lawyer was found to be delinquent in their professional responsibilities, the DC disciplinary system could impose a range of penalties, including disbarment. Every week, I would turn each report into a few inches of copy. With their procedural format and jargon, most of these reports lacked the structure of a news story, at least according to the paper’s house style. I had to find the story holding together all those pages of facts.
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If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.
—Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”
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The longer you spend on the metro, the more its spaces proliferate with possibility. A corner turned is a threshold crossed—from escalator to car, from stair to street, from fact to story. The woman across from you rolls a cigarette. Despite the train’s motion, the jolt of stopping or starting, nothing disrupts the delicate transfer of tobacco to paper. The man who gets on at the next stop brings his own musical accompaniment, turning the car into a stage, the passengers into a reluctant but captive audience.
You begin to ask yourself questions, a way to pass time between trains. How long did it take to dig all these tunnels beneath the city? How deep do these passages really go? If you went deep enough for long enough, would you finally cross the threshold not just into another space but another time?
You carry these questions with you to the surface, feel the pull of depths behind you as you walk the rest of the way home.
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The aesthetic of flash is modular. A flash fiction stands on its own as an episode. But the episode only makes sense because of the lingering traces of a larger history from which it’s pulled. This history branches out from the flash like the rails extending in either direction from a metro stop. The stop itself can be the story—a moment exposed by burrowing down through layers of space and time.
But for readers and writers of flash, the story is also the connections evoked in the act of digging. These connections can be followed to other stories, or to different facets of the same story. They can also work by association, linking one episode to another through image or resonance. One story connects to another, and then another, and before long you’ve mapped an entire line. Follow this axis far enough and you will reach the convergence where perpendiculars intersect as the dimensions of another world.
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Exercise:
Think of your most ordinary habit, your most onerous chore.
Instead of seeing it as an obstacle to your artistic practice, imagine it as your muse.
Write your story as a shopping list.
Compose a poetics of laundry.
At your next stop, ignore the escalator going up.
About the writer:
PEDRO PONCE is the author of The Devil and The Dairy Princess (Indiana University Press, 2021) winner of the Don Belton Fiction Prize and a finalist for the 2021 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. Ponce is also the author of Stories After Goya, Alien Autopsy, and Superstitions of Apartment Life. His short stories and flash fiction have appeared in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Witness, and other journals. His work has been recognized with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and with residencies at Ragdale, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He teaches writing and literary studies at St. Lawrence University, where he was recently appointed to The William L. Fox Professorship in Public Health.
Image: At the Coal Face by Henry Moore OM, CH (1898-1986). Watercolor, gouache, ink and chalk on paper. 279 x 381 mm. 1940. Public domain.
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