Flash Cracking: Randall Brown

When I took my first cracks at flash, not too long ago, chance led me to Randall Brown's five week course on Long Story Short on flash-writing. The best kind of learning happens when someone makes you see something you wouldn't otherwise have.

I'm grateful to be able to feature one of Randall's flashes here, first appearing in Right Hand Pointing. Also, to take the liberty to peer into Randall's mind as he created this flash, and to further seek his gentle pedagogic touch. My inclination here is simply based on how frequently I've wished for a follow-up with the author after I've read a particular work -- to be able to ask questions about specific word choices, cross and associative connections, the ploughing of imagery, the borrowing of legends or myths, the cracking of the unconscious.

Here, right after the text of Randall's flash, is a one-off Q&A with the author engaging that same text. I hope you like.

Busy...

I followed a white butterfly, discovered among the daffodils our busy Bichon, still. I lay beside his frozen form, my eyes closed--a spot of white, then black. I too grew rigid.
But I dreamed. I chased across a vast grass expanse a spot of something. It turned away from my guess of its path. I stumbled over my steps. Woke up. The Bichon, too. His cocked head held a question, something about the terror of unrest.

...with Death

My son can't sleep, thinks that the house will catch on fire, a burglar will come and take him away, he'll die. Dr. Lori's going to change that. They're on the floor and I'm on the couch looking at the pictures kids have drawn for the doctor, their long, outstretched arms.
"And what does your father do when you freak out?" Dr. Lori asks.
Jonah looks at me, twists his lip, then reaches for the fingers of his left hand, grips them. "Calls me a baby."
"It's not him," I say. "Not you. " I rub his head. Me. All me. Of course. "It's--I don't know."
He reaches up for me and his eyes grow wet and wide and I know he's scared, scared for me, that I'll get in trouble, that they'll take me away, that he'll be left here, that I'll decide I can't take it anymore.
I look up to the absent gods.
What have I done?

Q: Welcome to da house, Randall. Jumping straight in. Daffodils have cropped up famously in some poems – William Wordsworth’s Daffodils, Robert Herrick’s To Daffodils, and Ted Hughes’ Daffodils, just to name a few. How intentionally were you invoking these or other ‘daffodil’ poems to enhance a pastoral feel to the opening of the text?

A: As with all my stories/ideas, this one is "borrowed" from the great Robert Frost, this particular one from the end of "After Apple Picking":

"Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep."

So, definitely, the flower evokes that pastoral feel of Frost, but this specific flower--the daffodil--can, if ingested by a dog, bring upon sickness or even death.

Also, it's part of the Narcissus family, a neat little fact that I felt worked well with this piece. Of all "flower" poems, it's the end of Sylvia Plath's "Tulips" that haunts any flower image I use:

"The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health."

Q: What was somewhat shocking, and different, to me was that in the midst of a boy chasing butterflies in a field of daffodils, you introduce the possibility of a dead dog. Was it a conscious decision to shear away that pastoral image we begin with?

A: Yeah. I think that would be Frost also. I love the way Frost and other poets create tension throughout a poem using conflicting forces. I tried to do that in the opening sentence, with the flying butterfly and the busy Bichon contrasted with the "still." So I think it was more a conscious decision to set up contrasts, between starting/stopping, Bichon/boy, sleep/unrest, father/son, gods/meaninglessness.

Q: The Bichon was obviously a beloved pet, yet why did you choose not to refer to it by its name?

A: I love Frost's use of indeterminate pronouns--his somethings and someones. Like in the beginning of "Mending Wall": "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." For me, that nameless something creates both a universality and a kind of unrest. I'm not sure the nameless Bichon creates much terror, and the answer might be that I liked the alliteration of busy Bichon. But, if there were more to it, it would have to do with indeterminacy.

Q: I'm intrigued by this indeterminacy concept. Can you elaborate more on what you mean? Does it encompass a necessary distancing from death by the one who's still alive?

A: First, as always, some examples from Frost:

"Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something."
"Someone had better be prepared for rage."
"Whose woods these are I think I know."

Here's an example from Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" in which a man and a woman discuss an abortion, what he calls "an operation to let the air in." Notice the varied meanings of "it" in this passage:

And we could have all this,' she said. 'And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.'
'What did you say?'

'I said we could have everything.'

'No, we can't.'

'We can have the whole world.'

'No, we can't.'

'We can go everywhere.'

'No, we can't. It isn't ours any more.'

'It's ours.'

'No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back.'

'But they haven't taken it away.

Exactness, the opposite of indeterminacy, reflects a world of certain meanings and distinctions, "I know" rather than "I think I know."

In the "Busy with...Death" piece, for both the son and the father, it's death's uncertainty--the when and what of it?--that partially creates its terror for them. (The piece is chock full of various uses of "it").

Q: Hah, you just made me hunt through the entire flash again to see if I can spot all the different "it"s!

A. (Randall smiles?) While the gods perhaps know, they aren't telling any of us.

I think there are many words that evoke uncertainty, such as Frost's "the woods are lovely, dark and deep." That embedded "love" in lovely is so wonderful.

Poetry taught me the weight of individual words and the interesting things that happen when they are next to each other. So, to answer your question finally, I see your point about distance, how certain words personalize the abstract and others depersonalize it. That's the remarkable thing about writing, about using words to evoke something, how different that something might be for different someones.

Q: “The terror of unrest” – I love that. Do you feel that flash (as Richard Bausch says), in its very brevity, has to deal with weightier themes to be memorable like mortality, or in this instance, that deep fear within all of us that if life is too perfect, or if we’re too happy, something bad will come to shatter that?

A: I love the brevity of flash. Truly. There is no more to "Busy with...Death" than what is here. If it weren't for flash, it wouldn't exist. Brevity can get confused with lightness, meaning that perhaps some writers and readers see flash as unsuited for weighter things, as if the flash itself might be too fragile to hold such themes. So, no, I don't think flash has to deal with weight, but I think it can.

When my wife and I were writing our wedding, we came across ideas about the symbolism of the glass-breaking at the end of the Jewish ceremony. Someone said the act symbolized the nature of the world, shattered, in need of recovery. Another person said the ritual symbolized the idea that whoever would break the couple apart must first put the glass back together. So that's flash, perhaps. The breaking of that glass. In our ceremony, I missed the glass and smashed my wife's foot. That's flash too. The twisty kind.

Q: Let's talk contrast in flashes. Shifting angles. The boy has grown up. He’s a father now, still with the same terror of unrest. Here, it's done by a timeline, a life chronology via two instant snapshots in time. What are some of the best ways to use contrasts or shifting angles in flashes?

A: When I worked with the poet Terri Brown-Davidson, she talked about counterpointed poems.

Here's how she defined it: "'Counterpointing' refers to the technique of deliberately looping several subjects into a poem, i.e., filling the poem with as many divergent subjects as possible in the hope that--by doing this--you will somehow drag the entire world into your work."

So, with this piece, I thought I'd begin with the juxtaposition of two things, like two stanzas of poetry. Whitman does this with a stanza about a "noiseless patient" spider on a rock jutting out into sea, surrounded by oceans of space, endlessly spinning filament after filament. In the second stanza, he addresses his soul, and one sees that the soul is very much like that spider, endlessly searching for connection, like a spider on a rock surrounded only by ocean.

Poems often work their wonder through juxtaposition, by putting two objects side-by-side without explanation or transition.

Some readers like that a writer trusts them to get it; others might feel that a writer should have transition/explanation. It's like giving directions to someone. If you don't give enough, the person could end up lost.

For me the challenge of flash is how can I get the person "there" with the bare minimum of direction. And maybe there is more than one "there" to get to. So the danger of giving too much direction is that you end up with only one "there," which still might be better than nowhere.

Q: The $64,000 question. As a reader, there’s a little me who wants to know if I’ve interpreted a text in accordance with the writer’s intentions.

Here’s my interpretation (not the only one, I'm sure): A boyhood innocence is momentarily shattered by the possibility of the death of a beloved pet. It survives as a memory tingle, a patina of unease that pursues his unconscious. In his adult life, his son too faces the same shattering of innocence – the fear that happiness is often followed closely on the heels by tragedy, e.g. that he will die or that any number of catastrophes will happen. The boy reacts in irregular ways, so much so that the family has to see a psychologist. The father gazes at his son – his love overwhelms, confounds him. He understands that he’s bestowed his own legacy in a way he hasn’t planned at all.

How close am I? (smile) Or what did you intend for us to get?


A: You got it, kiddo. Seriously, Elaine, you are the type of thoughtful, reflective, close, careful reader every writer dreams about.

Q: Sheesh....my head is big enough. Ok, last question, your ambitions for flash. If you had a crystal ball, what would you like to see in the future of "flash"?

A: I recently saw a contest for (very) short fiction that ended with this line about such pieces: "They are fun, and fascinating, and anyone can write a good one." I think that would be a good future for flash. We are all writing a good one.

Thank you, Randall for the illuminating responses and for taking the time to do this. And thank you for the various keys you've so kindly provided with which we can now busily (no pun intended) unlock this wonderful flash.

Please feel free to leave comments for Randall here. Next week, I hope to be returning to Joe Young's Pt. II.


__________

Randall Brown is the author of the award-winning flash fiction collection Mad to Live (Flume Press 2008). He teaches at Saint Joseph's University and holds an MFA from Vermont College and a BA from Tufts University—along with an M.Ed. and a B.S. in Education. Numerous poems, essays, and short fiction pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals, including Cream City Review, Hunger Mountain, Connecticut Review, The Saint Ann's Review, The Evansville Review, The Laurel Review, Dalhousie Review, Cairn, upstreet, Clackamas Literary Review, Vestal Review, Stand Magazine, and others. His work has received nominations for the Pushcart, O. Henry, Million Writers, and Best of Web Prizes-—and his work has appeared in various anthologies, both here and abroad. His essay on (very) short fiction will be appearing in the forthcoming anthology The Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field (Rose Metal Press 2009). As an editor with SmokeLong Quarterly, he has had the pleasure of reading thousands of flash submissions each year and publishing short shorts by Dan Chaon, Steve Almond, Stuart Dybek, Sherrie Flick, Robert Shapard, Melanie Rae Thon, and many other exceptional writers.