#2: flash fiction, goals for this space
Hello again!
I’ve been reflecting on what exactly it is I’m doing here or want to do here. I can name things I don’t want to do here, but that’s different from saying what I do want.
I’ve been writing fiction for a long time—I’m writing a novel now—and recently I’ve had a craving to make things, to make and create work and put it out in the world, on my own terms. A thing: a short story, a chapbook, a novel, a zine, a website, a game, a handmade book.
I want to keep pushing myself to find new ways of capturing the world around me and thinking through my ideas. The critical essay, which I wrote so frequently for so many years in grad school, feels exhausted to me now. I contemplate writing such an essay and I feel like I can see all the moves on the chessboard and how I would play them out—but the feeling I want to chase is curiosity, the sense of not exactly knowing where I will go when I begin, of who I will be on the other side of having done the work.
So this newsletter is a way of documenting that process of discovery and artmaking, and finding other people on the same journey.
Making
New projects
This week marks a year since I was laid off from my last job, and I wanted to find some way to capture the swirling thoughts I had about it. I’ve been reflecting both on my own personal experience, and about corporate life in this particular moment, and I wanted to put it in some creative form that would let me look at it from a different angle.
At first I thought, ooh, a humor zine that decodes corporate jargon. Then I started to play with the definitions and how I ordered them to tell a story, and so a new flash was born. I wrote a draft quickly—in an hour! which never happens—and made a terrible prototype of a zine, just to feel the frisson of having made something.
Now to revise it properly. I want to keep the energy of the flash, but the frustration that fueled the flash is shading over into contempt. Whenever I see contempt leaking through my writing, it usually means I’ve taken an emotional or intellectual shortcut somewhere. I did write the first draft in an hour, after all. I think there are places where I invoked what’s In The Discourse (it’s never been easier to find examples of corporate “garbage language”) instead of paying closer attention to the specific details of my own experience. The weird thing isn’t really the jargon—as an ex-academic I’ve used plenty of it—but the weirdness of the relationships created within the corporate hierarchy, which are communicated through and with this strange, often limited vocabulary.
I’ve been dipping a toe or two into the world of zine-making, riso printing, and bookbinding (more on that soon), and I would love to put this flash story in zine form—I think there’s some interesting things I can do with the layout and white space. This size (A6) that I prototyped is a bit too small, though.
Continued projects
I finished a draft of another flash, and worked on the novel. I’m hesitant to call it writing the novel although the word count is ticking up. It’s more like architecting the novel at this stage, assembling all the pieces and storylets and storybits that later I will remix and rearrange until I reach a story shape that pleases me, and then I’ll actually start all the way over and rewrite.
Reading
There are so many recommendations these days, especially on Substack. When I went to the bookstore earlier this month, I found it difficult to sort out what I actually wanted to read from what had been recommended to me to read, what I knew was “good,” what I knew “people” on social media were reading. I realized I had, actually, too many inputs, all crowding out my own innate sense of what I desired. Now I try to be a bit more mindful about not subscribing to too many recommendation-focused newsletters all at once.
So for that reason I’m sharing just one thing from my reading life that sparked my inspiration and curiosity: “Bee,” a choice-based story by Emily Short. An interactive story about a homeschooled girl practicing for her spelling bee, it genuinely took my breath away with how good and immersive it was. I want to go through it again, to see more of how it works—this article on the process of making/republishing it was fascinating—but I feel like doing so might break the magic that I felt the first time.
Have a lovely weekend, and thanks for being here with me!
Catherine