More Than Ephemeral Flashes of Light On A Screen: An Interview with B.J. Best

B.J. Best, seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee and author of previous poetry collections State Sonnets and Birds of Wisconsin, takes a step into the risky literary unknown with his new collection of prose poetry, But Our Princess is in Another Castle. Drawing heavily from the kaleidoscope imagery of videogame worlds, But Our Princess is in Another Castle explores not games themselves, but the real lives of their human players. Journeying from “Beginning World” to “Heart World,” “Do World,” “Mind World,” and many others, Best’s collection traverses romantic relationships, childhood friendships, fear, death, and love – all the best things about our truly strange real world.In this interview, we discuss not just the craft of writing itself, but also the difficulties of producing serious literature around the pop-culture theme of videogames.

ELS: Your website says that But Our Princess is in Another Castle is “a book of prose poems inspired by videogames.” Did you go into it knowing that it would be centered on videogames, or did a pattern in your writing give you the idea to write about them?

BJB: I did go in thinking that’s what I wanted to do. I took a long writing retreat weekend and I wrote ten of them (something like that) up there as a means to explore and see if it would actually hold together. I liked the process and the ideas enough that I thought maybe it could work. You know, of those first ten, maybe two made that final cut into the actual book. In fact maybe it was only one. So obviously my writing changed a lot. I thought a lot about what it should actually be. I actually prefer working that way, because it helps eliminate some of the choices you need to make early on. If you told me to sit down right now and write a poem, I would be terrified by that because I would have no idea where to go. But if you said “Okay, well, write another videogame poem,” I would have at least some sort of grounding to base what I’m thinking about, and it would give me a much clearer direction to get that poem, especially in that poem-a-day kind of thing, as opposed to “Well, now I just have to sit around and think about something completely unrelated to anything else and see what it turns into.”

ELS: How and when did you get that idea to write a poetry book about videogames?

BJB: Those first poems were written in November of 2004. I don’t know where the original idea came from. They’re all prose poems, and they started life as prose poems, too. I think part of it was just that I wanted to explore that form because I hadn’t written many of them up until that point. My main thought (if I can even recollect what it was) was that it was something worth writing about (and at the time not a lot of people were writing about it) and there might be some possibilities for turning something that’s mass produced and very pop-culture-y into a different art form. I saw the opportunities there so I thought that would be a cool area to explore because I didn’t see it happening. When I started in 2004 I think I could point to two books that I had that were using videogames in a literary sense. There have been more since then, but that was the main genesis of the project.

ELS: It seems like a risky move to publish a serious work that openly admits to being about videogames. Were you afraid that the literary community (especially) would ignore your book?

BJB: Definitely. There were several times during the process where I just threw up my hands and asked myself, “What on earth am I doing?” The idea that it may very well be 100% frivolous was never lost on me. But the poems are serious; they’re not intended to be frivolous, so one of my goals with the book was to show that videogames can be treated seriously and to show how they can move into other aspects of people’s lives. So I knew I had that much to stand on, because it wasn’t about how much I love Pac Man or Tetris. But I knew it wasn’t a typical, serious university press kind of book, so my gut said I needed to approach more indie publishers with it. That’s where I wound up going because I didn’t figure I would win a contest judged by some other eminent poet, but I figured there would be enough people out there who would find it to be an interesting approach. The small press thing seemed like a more logical place to make that happen.

ELS: You mentioned a couple of times in your blog that it was important to you to make the book accessible to people who don’t play videogames or didn’t have experience with them. Don’t you think they lose some of the richness of the references, or was that not the point?

BJB: I’m not entirely sure, and it’s hard for me to answer because I know exactly what I’m talking about in all of those poems, but really my goal was that to not get any of the references wouldn’t matter, and it would still be a good poem that would hold up on its own. I definitely think you could argue that it’s just like any other ekphrastic work: If it’s about a work of art, it’s useful to be looking at the painting, photograph, or whatever. All of a sudden the connections start to make a little more sense. So there is an advantage to knowing the games themselves, but the actual details are pretty small – they’re in the poems, but they don’t necessarily influence the poems very much. So someone who knows the particular games could go through and say “Oh, I know where that’s from, and I know where that’s from,” but I’m not sure (with the exception of a very very few cases) that actually knowing the game inherently enhances the understanding of the poem, because one of my goals with the poems was to take them to places other than where the games happened to lead.

ELS: Why was that one of your goals?

BJB: I didn’t want to write a book gratifying for people who know all this arcana about classic video games. I did want it to appeal to as large of an audience as possible. There’s already a lot of writing out there on the web about the games: what they are, what they do… There’s enough commentary on the games as they currently exist, and to me that operates more in the review world, which is perfectly fine, but it doesn’t really transform the material into anything new.

ELS: What was your writing process with But Our Princess is in Another Castle? Was it different or similar as for your previous works?

BJB: Well, I mean, this was different because it was ekphrastic. Basically, I made several lists of fifty so videogames I would conceivably want to write about. Halfway through the project I made another list, and I have a feeling I maybe even made a third one. And then it was just brainstorming to settle on one that maybe seemed interesting, and literally I would go and play the game. It’s weird to think about playing video games for research, but actually that’s exactly what I did.

Most of the games in the book are small, especially compared to modern games, so it didn’t take long to do it. It’s not like I played any of them through to beat them. I played them long enough to get a sense of details that interested me. I would literally keep my eyes open and try to pay attention to things that simply seemed weird about the game, or unusual, or things that even though I’d played this game a million times, I’d never noticed before. Those were the details that were impressed on me, and those are often the ones that wind up showing up in the particular poems. Because ultimately, videogames are weird. If you sit back and objectively look at them, the things they ask you to do, and the worlds they create are just strange. I really like that, I think that’s really interesting. Compared to other books I wrote, I had to sit down and get the videogame in my head enough so I knew I could pull from that wealth of images that the game happened to have, while also limiting myself by not playing it over and over again, because I usually find if I know something too well it actually makes it more difficult to write about. You lose the sense of wonder and the idea of what makes it interesting and important versus “Well, here’s my encyclopedia of knowledge about something.”

ELS: Had you played all of the games before, or did you try some new ones also?

BJB: Most of them I had played before, from what I remember. I think there were some that I had never played before or some that I had always wanted to play that seemed interesting that I had never gotten around to, but no, they’re not inherently my favorite games, or anything like that. I cast a pretty wide net in thinking about what was valuable and what was intriguing. And there were also plenty of games that I wanted to write about, but just didn’t work for whatever reason. I wish Sonic the Hedgehog was in the book, but I tried three different times to write a Sonic the Hedgehog poem and they all blew up in my face, so I’m like “well I guess that’s the way it goes.”

ELS: You published a Sonic the Hedgehog poem on your WordPress blog that I really liked, and I was actually wondering why you didn’t include that one in But Our Princess is in Another Castle…

BJB: I published three: that one, “Minesweeper,” and “Mappy.” What I realized about those three particular poems is that they just seemed a little stranger, and that they didn’t quite seem to hit the same notes as far as the overall tenor of the book. You always have to draw lines. Those three were just on the edge and fell.

ELS: That’s unfortunate for Sonic.

BJB: Yeah, that’s right!

ELS: Did you have a problem poem when you were writing But Our Princess is in Another Castle? One particular poem that gave you more trouble, or something that you worked on longer, or edited a million times…?

BJB: Many of the ones that I did have problems with wound up not being included in the book to begin with. There were a couple that flat-out got rewritten because the first time they made it through, they did not work very well. The first one’s in the first section of the book. It’s called “Gauntlet” and it was actually one of the first ten. What I remember about that poem is that it was mostly an exercise of seeing how often I could alliterate words that began with the letter Q. I distinctly remember that because Gauntlet is this game in which you die very frequently, so if you’re playing this at an arcade you just keep pumping quarters into the machine. I don’t think that version of the poem even made it to the very first draft of the book.

ELS: Not sure you could have gotten too far with Qs.

BJB: Yeah, exactly. Once you’ve got a version of a poem, it’s difficult to go back and say “I’m going to write about this game again” and do it completely differently, so the version of “Gauntlet” in the book was written in 2010-2011. I tried again once enough time had passed that I honestly could forget about what that first poem was about.

ELS: Do you keep copies of your first drafts?

BJB: Oh, I’ve got them somewhere. I’m not quite sure what draft of the book finally got published, but I’ve got a feeling it was draft number twenty or something like that. Just out of curiosity one day, while I was going through the final edits, I pulled up draft #1 and it was fascinating to see how completely different the book was compared to what was finally there. My first draft was written in 2005 and I thought there was a book there, but it’s very clear there was not.

ELS: Did you include any favorite childhood games?

BJB: A lot of them were favorites. My first videogame system (that I remember) was the Nintendo. I played Super Mario Brothers until all hours of the night. I was so proud when I finally beat Super Marios that I took a picture of the screen with my mom’s camera (this was just before digital cameras), and I went up to tell her that I’d just beaten Super Mario Brothers. At this point I’m eleven or twelve. She just looks at me, and all she says is “Go to bed,” which in retrospect was a completely reasonable suggestion at the time…

So the system I’m fondest of, because it was my first, is probably the Nintendo. There’s Mario in there, and Legend of Zelda in there, and Kid Icarus in there… I tend to have more nostalgic memories with those particular games, but I tried not to let that influence what I chose for the book.

ELS: What was the editorial process like?

BJB: The book was accepted in 2011 and actually I was still writing some new poems at that point. I had sent off a copy of the manuscript even though I had some new poems I was working on, and they accepted the manuscript, so the first thing for me do was figure out which, if any, of those new poems were going to belong. I went through about nineteen drafts on my own – when I say “on my own,” I mean me and a couple of trusted readers that I give virtually anything tobecause they give me all sorts of good feedback. But then we went through three rounds of edits with the editors. Very detailed, very thorough, and very much appreciated. We worked back and forth up until the last draft. In the final draft I actually cut four poems out of the manuscript, “Mappy” being one of them, just because I didn’t think at the time that they quite fit. Even up until then we were still making major changes to it to make it as strong as possible.

ELS: Poor “Mappy”! Almost made it.

BJB: Exactly.

ELS: What kind of edits did the publishing house make – mostly stylistic, or…?

BJB: It was everything and anything. Sometimes it was making sure things were spelled correctly, sometimes it was suggesting cutting poems, sometimes they recommended a new ending, definitely a lot of trimming of language, which I almost always agreed with, like extra adjectives, adverbs, some details that didn’t seem like they went anywhere or were needless at that point.

ELS: You had two “Heart Worlds”; was there a reason for that?

BJB: Yeah. The first one is not a very positive “Heart World,” and in fact talks mostly about a relationship breaking up, all negative falling apart, whereas the second one is more a positive, developing, lasting relationship and in many ways autobiographically based on me and my wife. I like the idea of two “Heart Worlds” because it’s mnemonic of videogames in a certain way. Videogames (either because they were lazily designed or cleverly designed, one of the two) often have you go back to a place where you’ve already been and make you do something else with it. But the goal was for each poem to stand on its own, even though together they’re thematic. I tried to be pretty clear about the themes, by virtue of the different worlds that each poem winds up in, like “Heart World” or “Map World.” The goal was to keep them apart and not try to necessarily rely on narrative, or for one to rely on another one, because that becomes one rickety house of cards pretty quickly.

ELS: Is there a specific line or image that you’re particularly proud of in this book?

BJB: Oh jeez, that’s a tough question.

ELS: I figured it might be.

BJB: What I like – and it almost becomes my own little cliché during the book – is poems that close strongly. I have so many poems that end with basically a single-sentence paragraph at the very end. For example, the end of “Mega Man”: “Being an electrician is different than being a doctor of light.” It even includes a reference to the game, because you’re fighting on behalf of the character Dr. Light in there. Another one that I really like is the end of “Legend of Zelda”: “We become the stories we tell ourselves.” That carries throughout the book too, and it’s also true about videogames. You’re the one enacting the story, so you become the story as you go through it. That strategy particularly does it for me. I don’t know if it winds up irritating other people because it happens so often, but I feel that they’re like daggers at the end.

ELS: Did you pick the title at the end or did you have it in mind from the beginning?

BJB: No, I had that from the beginning. The old manuscript in 2005 had that as the title. It just seemed to me like it was a pretty famous videogame phrase and that no one at the time was using it for anything, and honestly since I’ve been doing this and talking about the book, I’ve had several people either tell me or it gets back to me that they think it’s a great title. But I was terrified that between then and now someone else would come out with something called precisely that and I would have to change as a result. There is a “Mountain Goats” song called “Thank you Mario, But Our Princess is in Another Castle,” but I figured I was just far enough away from that that it would still hold up. I chose it because it’s a videogame phrase and I like the idea that it suggests, what so many videogames suggest: that you need to keep trying, you need to keep searching, you need to keep working, because you’re not quite done yet, and I think thematically that addresses a variety of the poems in the book, too.

ELS: The phrase has become a pretty popular meme; not sure if was back in 2005.

BJB: Memes didn’t really exist in 2005. It was one of those things that was sufficiently familiar that I hoped it would pull people in. It definitely has become meme-ified.

ELS: Do you still play videogames, or was this a thing of the past that you revisited for this project?

BJB: It’s weird. I began this project in 2004, almost ten years ago. I had no kids then, so I had time to play games and do what I wished. Now I’ve got a son – he was born in 2010 so he’s three and a half. Honestly, playing videogames is one of the things in my life that has fallen by the wayside. I still enjoy doing it, but I have a hard time justifying it, especially since so many modern games take up so much of your time if you actually play them. So I don’t spend much time playing games anymore, and I’m actually fairly comfortable with that idea. I balance that out by saying that I actually teach a videogame course at Carroll University in Wisconsin, so I get my fix that way. I assign all sorts of games: some classics, some contemporaries, and a bunch that the students have never heard of. So I’m still playing and thinking about them, just in a more academic context these days. When it comes down to it, my free time is fairly small, so when it gets to 9:30 at night, I would rather read or do something else than spend half an hour playing a videogame.

ELS: Does your videogame course focus on literature, mechanics, design, or…?

BJB: It’s called a “Cultural Seminar” – that’s the big touchstone for many of the general education courses. We want our students to learn about culture through different lenses, so mine is videogames, and believe it or not there is actually a textbook about how to study videogames. We talk about the academic theory of videogames, how they reveal culture by what they reveal within the games themselves, and how they impact the larger culture. We look at why Pac Man was so popular, why Tetris was so popular, and we also deal with the question of “Do violentgames cause violence?” We look at how the games are situated within American culture as well to see what their impacts are.

ELS: Do you think some of that came through in your book?

BJB: I don’t really think so. It wasn’t something I was necessarily thinking much about during the writing. So many of the poems are not inherently autobiographical but they’re autobiographically based, so I was writing more from personal perspective than from a broader perspective. It’s definitely more of a lyric voice in this particular book as opposed to trying to teach– because the poems are ultimately about experiences other than the game themselves and the comment is the game itself.

ELS: So you don’t think you had any messages about video games in mind for your readers when you wrote?

BJB: Other than that they’re worth serious inquiry. And I think that’s important. That they can be treated seriously, that they’re more than ephemeral flashes of light on a screen, that they do have meaning and can have artistic meaning either through transforming them or even in and of themselves. The question I’ve been asked a couple of times is “Are videogames art?” People wrestle with it, so it’s something I’ve tried to comment on. My answer is very clearly yes. More specifically, it’s my goal to show that videogames can be a generative source for other artistic endeavors.

What Makes These Five Chapbooks All Belong Under One Cover?

Early in his short story “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allan Poe has his unreliable narrator declare, “And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of Perverseness.”

“Who,” he asks, “has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”

This spirit of perverseness -- this counter-intuitive yet irresistible impulse toward the icky, the ridiculous, the self-destructive -- is at least part of what cannot be contained in the collections that make up the anthology They Could No Longer Contain Themselves.

In each of the five chapbooks that comprise this book, various characters find themselves engaging in activities which might make the reader agree with Poe that “perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart -- one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.”

To wit: In John Jodzio’s Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever, the narrator of “The Two Malls” says, “Sometimes at the expensive mall, I buy a cup of soda from the hot dog stand and then balance it on the aluminum railing.  I walk away to the other side of the mall and I wait until someone below is about to walk underneath the cup.  I hit the railing as hard as I can and the railing vibrates and the cup dumps onto the person below.”

In Mary Miller’s Paper and Tassels, the narrator of “My Old Lady” says, “Mama likes it when you slap her, I said, and his eyes narrowed like he didn’t remember mama liking that but he reared back and did it anyway.  My eyes leaked into her pillow.  Then it hit me: the pillowcase had been washed in Gain.  When he finished, he pulled out and said daddy didn’t really like that and I said mama didn’t really like it either, she just wanted to see what it felt like.”

In Elizabeth Colen’s Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, the narrator of “Rule of Thirds” says “Today my girlfriend and I had sex while a man took pictures in the back yard, I start, in a letter to my mother. This letter is not really intended for her, though when I start I pretend it is.”

In Tim Jones-Yelvington’s Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There, the narrator of “Slime Me” says “Abner was a child who wanted to get slimed. He hungered for the spread of slime across his skin, his favorite the viscous kind that crept to cover, coat, encase. He oozed homemade do-it-yourself Mad Scientist slime though his fingers and hoped someone would cover him in goop.”

And finally, in Sean Lovelace’s How Some People Like Their Eggs, the narrator of “Wal-Mart” says “‘I don’t know a girl named Kristen!’ I shout. (I do.) ‘I never touched her!’ I shout. (I did.)”

The pleasure of reading each section of this book is inextricable from the pleasure of knowing what’s good and choosing what’s bad, of knowing the right thing and doing the wrong one. Poe called this compulsion “the imp of the perverse” and the characters in these stories are certainly driven by this demon. But in the hands of Jodzio, Miller, Colen, Jones-Yelvington and Lovelace, this impulse is revealed to be an inseparable piece of what makes humans so human.

Story Focus: "Watermelon" by Mary Miller

I was a choir geek in high school. Our show uniforms luckily bore no sequins (I'm not as partial to wearing sequins as Tim Jones-Yelvington), but none the less, every year the show tuxedo, the bright red and black stripes of the vest shimmering, the jazz hands, the choreography. It was really nothing like you see on Glee, and for that, I'm glad.

My choir teacher was the stereotypical effeminate male choir teacher. He was not afraid to get involved in the lives of his students, to care about them, to invite them over for voice coaching. In high school, my shoes tended to be on the shaggy side. I would wear Chuck Taylors until the canvas was in tatters. Not because I was poor (though we were), but because that shit was punk rawk in the mid-late 90s. I remember once my teacher, we'll call him Mac since his last name was particularly Scottish, quietly took me aside one day after class and asked me if I needed new shoes.

"Oh. No," I said, "I actually have a new pair at home. I just like these."

Mac looked doubtful, so I wore them the next day to prove the point, and promptly returned to the old and tattered pair until they completely fell apart.

That's just the kind of guy Mac was. But of course, when you have that kind of guy teaching at a high school, you get the stories. I was once told buy someone that they'd gone over to Mac's house for something and saw him in the pool implicatingly close with a boy. I was told by another someone to keep my guard up during my conversations with Mac in an independent study class I had with him for music theory.

You get stories like Mary Miller's "Watermelon" in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, that begins:

Mr. Fuller was the new choir teacher. He had a round face and a love of boys.Before we sang, he had us lie on our backs and breathe in the icy waters.Feel the waves lick your neck, he’d say, the sting of peppermint in theback of your throat. Your boat’s collapsed and you didn’t think you’dneed a life preserver. Feel the pressure build. It builds and builds, likewhen you love someone so much your heart could burst, your heart could fucking burst under the weight of it.

After he drowned us, he’d make us form a train and rub each other’s shoulders. This went on for months and nobody saying anything.

Miller never goes so far as to say any concrete details about Mr. Fuller, and the story takes a turn to focus more on the relationship between the narrator and another troubled boy. But it's the implication in that last line that brings back all these memories of high school and Mac and how he straddled the teacher/student relationship. "Straddled" was probably a bad choice of wording there.

Mac saw my mother's obituary in the paper a couple days after she died. He made the hour drive to the parlor where her body was shown. He hugged me. He hugged me then, and he hugged me in high school--important moments like after not placing with a solo at Regionals, my breakdown in the hallway after, like after graduation. I never thought anything of it then, and I don't now. Before he left the showing, he extended his hand to shake, and when I took it, there was a $50 bill in it.

"Don't spend this on bills," he said. "Don't spend it on groceries or tuition or anything responsible. Spend it on something that'll help you forget for awhile."

He hugged me again, gave again his condolences, and left the parlor. That's the last time I saw Mac. With the money, I did what you'd expect me to do, what he probably expected me to do. I got to forget everything for a night, and I'll always thank Mac for that.

I know you're probably thinking it. You're probably thinking I'm going to turn this post on its head and tell you next how I saw him in the news a year or 2 later, accused of sexual misconduct or something of the sort. But that's not what happened. Mac is still alive, and perhaps retired now. I could pay him a visit. I probably should. Mac meant a lot to me when I needed a mentor to mean a lot to me.

I'm not sure why we were so cruel in high school, to ourselves or to those who truly want to help us become more than who we were then. I'm sure if Mac is still teaching, he still gets all the same stories told about him in hushed tones. I hope he never hears of those stories. I hope he never finds this post. I hope he stays the way he is, and continues to affect the lives of students like he affected my life, students willing to believe in him more than in the cruelty of classmates.

Flash In All Its Blinding Possibility (Part 1?)

I was a little hesitant to choose They Could No Longer Contain Themselves to feature for July, not because I'm hesitant about the writing in any regard. The book astounds on so many levels in that regard. Each writer brings something really incredible to every page of this book. But because it's yet another collection of flash fiction, and I don't want to pigeonhole myself. Next month, I'll likely snag a novel or if another short fiction collection, then longer form. But, while we're on the topic, I wanted to talk about flash a bit.

Flash seems to be new to a lot of people. Even I didn't really know of its existence as a "thing" until later in undergrad, around '04-'05. To me, it was a natural fit. As a writer, I've always hovered between fiction and poetry, so when my professor introduced me to flash fiction as a form, it was simply that I had finally found a space in which I felt comfortable. It was a form that let me stretch and blend and write the sort of cross-genre play I've always known as a sweet spot.

When people come to my Vouched Books table, I get asked "What is flash fiction?" a lot when I point them to a book like Easter Rabbit by Joseph Young, We Know What We Are by Mary Hamilton, or Cut Through the Bone. I start basic, "It's writing, usually narrative however loosely, usually under 2,000 words. The word count shifts a bit depending on who you're talking to--some believe 500 is the limit, others 1000, etc."

After that, it gets murky. One of the things I really love about They Could No Longer Contain Themselves is how well it highlights the possibility of the form. The book's jacket copy says it best, "The uncontainability of the writers and characters in each of these remarkable collections suggest the exuberance of the flash fiction form itself, including the way in which, despite its small size, it pushes past its own borders and into the territory of something larger and impossible to confine."

And its true: in this book, you have the singsong, surrealism in Lovelace's "Coffee Pot Tree," to the simple, sparse realism of Mary Miller's "Misled." People often ask what my favorite kind of flash fiction is, and I never really know what to say. Last time someone asked, I told them if you don't know what you're reading flash fiction or prose poetry, you're probably reading good flash fiction. But that's not necessarily true either. I would never consider Miller's work "prose poetry," but her work remains some of my favorite of the form. I don't know what constitutes "good" flash fiction. What constitutes a good novel? What constitutes a good poem?

I've come across a lot of people the past couple years who seem to think flash fiction needs a definition, something by which to judge it against not only other flash fiction, but by other genres. This whole concept baffles me. But usually, these people don't really even seem to know they're calling for this definition. To me, it exists as subtext beneath other conversations regarding how much "bad" flash fiction is out there, how people are growing tired of the "fad" of flash fiction.

Yes. Both of these things are true. There is a lot of bad flash out there. There's a lot of bad poetry, too. A lot of bad novels. These people indict the entire form based on its demerits, but yet refuse to see its enormous possibility. No one challenges the novel anymore, nor do they attempt to box it into some tidy definition. Despite their enormous differences, Blake Butler's There Is No Year is considered just as much a novel as Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice; there is no great debate regarding the form.

People seem uncomfortable by flash because it exists to them as something new, but of course, it's nothing new. Sean Lovelace at times quips about the late Jesus Christ being one of the forerunners of the flash fiction form, citing his parables. Hemingway played with flash. Widely regarded as a prose poet, I've heard debate about Russell Edson's role as a flash fictioneer.

Which is perhaps another reason why there is debate, this underlying uncomfort. The need for clear lines, clear labels. The question hangs loose: why is Edson considered a prose poet and not a surrealist flash fiction writer? With such a wide definition, what's to stop a novelist who writes with a particularly poetic flair from writing a "novel-length narrative prose poem?" Why is this poetic piece that doesn't necessarily have a clear narrative arc considered flash fiction? The form hovers on this strange plane that seems to upset prior systems in a way that makes people want to put it in a box.

Of course, to put it into a box, like all forms of art or writing, is to kill the form altogether. Where would the novel be if public outcry declared Ulysses something else? Where would poetry be if the world called bullshit on vers libre?

I guess I'm out of thoughts. I mean, I have more thoughts on the subject, but they don't fit neatly into this ranting.

I want to say how sick I am of people blaming the current "fad" of flash fiction on people's attention spans. I want to say how sick I am of people seeing flash fiction as a fad. I want to say how sick I am of writers who seem to think flash fiction is an "easy" form to write. I want to say how sick I am of the publishers who are willing to publish scrap-rate flash fiction. I want to say how these things ruin the form, but that's of course not true. Just because publishers publish shitty novels doesn't mean the novel is a shitty form. And the same goes for any genre or form, really. Why such scrutiny for flash?

But now, I'm sick of what I have to say. I want to hear what you have to say. How do you define flash fiction? What do you think of it? Do you have a favorite style of flash--more poetic, more narrative, more surreal? Do you think it is a silly thing, a playground for half-baked short story ideas? Do you think people should just write what they want to write without thought of form or label?

I Can No Longer Contain Myself

Today is July 5th, which means I'm am full stuffed on meats, salads of various potatoes and pastas, and America. It is morning. I am in my underwear, the after images of fireworks still dancing in my corneas. And, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves sitting next to me at my desk, waiting to be talked about, to talk to us, to be binged and purged.

Just look at that pretty little book over there, the cover a windswept barren, the quiet hue of blue, the tree stump of possible forest fire or maybe tired and newly-homed beaver, or newly stuffed, as beavers actually eat wood. Did you know that? I never knew if they actually feasted on trees, or just made their homes from it, but Wiki confirms they fill their bellies with it. Just imagine if we humans made our homes of what we fill our bellies with.

This month, I make my home of these words, and I hope you will come party with me.

Here's a quick story about They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, what it is, how it came to be, straight from the fingers of its publishers:

"In 2009, celebrity judge Sherrie Flick chose Sean Lovelace’s How Some People Like Their Eggs as the winner of our Third Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. Flick said of the book, “Lovelace’s little stories seek out these big-guy concepts and bring them down like in an old movie filled with gangsters, trench coats, cigarettes, and tough-talking women with nice legs—using smart dialogue and wit.” Lovelace’s chapbook spoke to more than just Flick: By spring 2010, the run of 300 specialty letterpressed copies of Eggs was on the verge of selling out.

Around this same time we heard from our Fourth Annual Contest judge Dinty W. Moore that he’d chosen Mary Hamilton’s We Know What We Are as the 2010 winner. We were thrilled, but found ourselves loath to give up the other four finalists—Elizabeth J. Colen’s Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, John Jodzio’s Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever, Tim Jones-Yelvington’s Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There, and Mary Miller’s Paper and Tassels—to other publishers. All five of the finalists that year stunned us with their precision and heart, their longing and skill. It was the most stylistically diverse group of finalists we’d ever had, and yet all the manuscripts hummed with the same kind of energy and deep humanness. We had to publish them.

And so we decided to bring the four finalists from our Fourth Annual Short Short Contest and the celebrated and sold-out winner of our third together under one cover."

So there you have it. This little anthology of 5 chapbooks, brought to you simply because the ladies at Rose Metal Press simply could not stand to let someone else publish them; they wanted them for themselves, to bring them all to all of our selves.

And last night, while holding this book in my hand, turning it over and over, reading it page and page again, I realized one of the reasons I most like this book, beyond the incredible words inside: exposure.

I'm a victim of name recognition, I'll admit it. When I first came upon the small press community a couple years ago, I knew no one, and it was perhaps one of the most exciting times of my life. I devoured book after book of authors unnamed to me. These new words invaded me and shaped me in ways I've not been shaped in years. They fed me, fed my own words, I grew in them like bones awash in milk.

But now, I've grown to know who I can trust. I harbor to names like Aubrey Hirsch, Matt Bell, Adam Robinson, xTx, and a couple/few dozen others with whom I feel I can trust to bring a thrill to my skin and a warmth to the belly of me with their words. I gravitate to these authors when I see their names in new issues of journals and reviews. This book contains a couple of those names: Sean Lovelace and Mary Miller. Tim Jones-Yelvington as well, though until now I had known and trusted him more as a person than as his words.

So of course, I still gravitate to them, see their work packaged together, and immediately think, "Yes!" click "Add to Cart!" Get this book in my hand, the tactile weight, the smooth gloss of cover, and ruffle of page. I readreadread.

I read first those I know and trust. We stand in something like a circle, sipping and talking and sipping and laughing. Sean is leaning against the counter, beer in hand. Mary smiles warm, her laughter coming out her eyes. Tim owns the room, Tim alight with feather and glitter, everyone notices Tim, wants to touch him, wants to see him shimmer. We talk and we catch up, we tell stories of what we have known since we last met, last shared words.

I become aware of these other couple of people invited to the party, Elizabeth Colen and John Jodzio, standing on the periphery, they sip their gin and tonics, their mint juleps. They wait politely for their turn to speak. And then, without warning they burst on to me, their words move and captivate, and I spend the evening with them, talking about daughters, monsters, mothers, warlocks, glaciers, and panty thieves. Spending the evening with them, reading them I found that same feeling of wonder and discovery I felt a couple years ago. The feeling of finding new voice, of making new friends at a party, that up all night talking and talking feeling.

I hope the same happens to you. Perhaps you snagged this book because like me you recognized Mary Miller, trusted her words to feel true and earnest on the page, and in doing so, at least 1 or 2 of these authors packaged alongside her work in this little number are authors completely new to you. I hope this book opens us all up to someone new, opens us all up to something new.

Let's make some discoveries together. Let's have a party. Let's invite all our friends, and our friends's friends, find people we don't know, fresh faces awash in glow and drink. Let's no longer contain ourselves. Let's talk and talk.