New Books Network

In 1997, writer Dinty W. Moore launched a literary journal on a then-novel platform: the World Wide Web.  The journal, which he called Brevity, created a forum for works of nonfiction under 750 words in length.  Since it’s inaugural issue, Brevity has published hundreds of pieces that thrive on the concision and compression demanded of this genre, its almost haiku-like crystallization of literary art.  Brevity has also become the central voice for the genre, one that has its roots in figures such as Heraclitus, Seneca, Montaigne and today includes some of the most interesting writers working in nonfiction.  On Brevity’s blog and in its book reviews and essays on craft are discussions and debates about the nature of what, by turns, has been called the mirco-essay, flash nonfiction, or, in William Makepeace Thackery’s term, an “essaykin.”  Whatever it’s called, it’s a vibrant and fascinating genre, as Moore himself has shown in his own essays on George Plimpton, Frida Kahlo, and the haunting faces of old men on the streets of Edinburgh.
Moore has brought this expertise and excitement to a new anthology: The Rose Metal Press Guide to Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers (Rose Metal Press, 2012).   It includes contributions by twenty-six writers, who each discussion some element of craft–point of view, for example, or the use of research–along with an exercise for practicing this element and an example of an essay that demonstrates it.  (And here, by way of full disclosure, I should say that I’m one of the 26 contributors.)  The result is both an introduction and exploration of a genre that Moore compare to a forest fire, where, as readers, we’re like smoke jumpers, “one of those brave firefighters who jump out of planes and land 30 yards from where the forest fire is burning.”


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