WLRN-Miami Herald News is soliciting writers of flash fiction, extremely short nonfiction, or prosaic poetry for “VERY brief” stories: “As in 305 words or less — ‘3-0-5’ being at one time the area code for entire state of Florida.”
Short Stories for the 305
The Problem with the Poky Little Puppy
“The problem is that young children have terrible taste and enjoy garbage. Another problem, which compounds the first problem, is that they want to hear the same books hundreds of times in a row. So for all the joys that storytime can offer, it frequently entails a kind of dismal self-abnegation that’s too excruciating even to describe as tedium—an actively painful sense of my precious time on earth being torn from my chest and tossed into a furnace.” Gabriel Roth writes about the terrible Poky Little Puppy for Slate, and his complaints pair well with Jacob Lambert‘s Millions series, “Are Picture Books Leading Our Children Astray?” and “Again, I Ask…“
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The Faces of War
Photographer Lalage Snow photographed Scottish soldiers before, during, and after their deployments to Afghanistan. The photographs show “the toll that fighting … takes on our troops.”
Leigh Stein Two-Fer
Here’s double-shot of The Fallback Plan author Leigh Stein courtesy of Full-Stop and NY Daily News.
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There Once Was a Girl
Recommended Reading: “There Once Was a Girl” by Katy Waldman at Slate. “Anorexia is the mental health equivalent of the red shoes that make you dance until you die. It is a performance—of femininity, of damage, of power—that turns into a prison.”
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“You hurry the day when Colum McCann serves you a chalupa”
“Hey, I noticed you checking out my tote bag. I’m sure you see a lot of totes on the train, all about food co-ops or public radio or theater repertory companies. But me, I use this expanse of unbleached cotton-canvas blend to say one thing: I love books.”
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Writing Mirrors
“Here is the trouble with looking for ourselves in the writers whose works we admire, at least if we are proposing to be their biographers. For if we are in search of ourselves, or in this case our own troubled teenaged selves roaming New York, then we are apt to downplay those parts of the life that don’t correspond with that need for recognition.” Anne Boyd Rioux writes about biography and the distance, good or bad, between subject and biographer for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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