Short Fiction Tuesday

We missed this last week, didn't we? I, that is...

I love Bruce Holland Rogers' series of teaching/example pairs in Flash Fiction Online, where he has an essay about a particular flash fiction approach or advice and then has a story (or two) to illustrate what he means. The most recent was on the prose sonnet, which I thought would be fun to try sometime. Then I went back and found that I'd missed his essay on the prose villanelle, and the accompanying story, "Border Crossing" is stunningly beautiful. The repetition is just enough to give the piece unity, while the variations on those themes really deepens the whole thing. Besides, crossing borders is just a rich theme that brings all kinds of layers into the story.

On the theme of missing something when it first came out, I somehow neglected to check in at Clarkesworld when the August issue came up. It includes a Valente story, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time," which rather beautifully weaves together alternating sections of mythic, creation-type stories told with playfully scientific language on the one hand and seemingly autobiographical stories about a science fiction writer on the other.