The Bookworm: Micro Fiction

Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories edited by Jerome Stern. 141 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. 1996.

This is a strange little form, demanding fictional strategies that are both ancient and yet to be discovered. Trying to write a serious piece of fiction in under 250 words sounds at first like being asked to perform a particularly perverse experiment, like being asked to paint a landscape on a grain of rice. But there are very old stories of enormous power that can only be called short shorts.

For a writer, 250 words isn’t much. But that was the maximum word limit for Florida State University’s World’s Best Short Short Story Contest when it started in 1986. English and popular culture professor Jerome Stern opens his introduction with an anecdote about a man who called and asked if there had been a misprint in the guidelines, if the word limit wasn’t supposed to be 2,500 — a word count also considered short for short fiction. Nope. Two-fifty was correct.

Despite the constraining requirements (the limit was relaxed to 300 in the ‘90s, and now stands at 500), Sterns and his staff received thousands of entries every year, and Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories is a collection of the best submissions and contest winners up to 1995.

Micro-fiction and micro-nonfiction — or short shorts, as I like to call them — have always fascinated me. Precise and succinct, they are the epitome of minimalist prose. Poetry is exponentially more modest, but poetry has never been my thing. (At times I’ve thought about experimenting with it, and someone in college once said the poetry I was forced to write for my creative writing courses was “fucking awesome. I had no clue what it was about.” Apparently good poetry isn’t supposed to be understood. Not my idea of good writing.) By nature I’m fascinated with vignettes and short scenes oozing with meaning and significance — just last night I wrote a friend and told him “[m]y writing operates in a slow, microscopically meaningful space-time continuum, and my reading interests are similar” — so Micro Fiction was just the little book for me.

Physically, Micro Fiction literally is little. In keeping with the micro theme, the book is about two inches shorter and an inch narrower than the standard size paperback. Yesterday, the Iowa transplant who rides the bus asked me what I was reading. I held up Micro Fiction so he could see the cover and he said, “Is that why it’s smaller?” I nodded. Yup.

Needless to say, Micro Fiction is also a quick read. Despite it’s smaller stature, none of the stories are more than two pages. Half of the first page is left blank by the title and author presentation and each piece still fits on two pages. The text is quite large, too, so you know some typesetter at W.W. Norton & Company was told to get the publisher their money’s worth.

As with all the other shorts anthologies I’ve read, the stories were an enjoyable mix of styles and subjects. One was about people falling in love after one of them had the flu, and another was centered on a woman’s memories of watching John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and later assassination coverage at the restaurant her father worked in. There was realism as well as a little modernist experimentation (“avant garde” as my friend would say), which was something I haven’t read in a while. Oddly, I unconsciously read most of the stories as if they were nonfiction shorts. Big mistake. Often I finished a piece and thought, “What the fuck was that?” I had to remind myself it was micro-fiction. But most fiction is autobiographical to some extent, and a few of the stories read well as short essays.

On a sad note, Stern, the editor, died soon after making the final sections for this book. I’m unsure if he lived long enough to see it in print. His included short, titled “Morning News,” was my second favorite in the entire collection. The last, Allen Woodman’s “Wallet,” was my favorite.

New word I learned: Hyperbole. I see this word everywhere and have no clue what it means or how to pronounce it. And just think: I have an English degree. Shame on me. My MacBook dictionary defines it as “exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.” Every time I saw it in writing I though, phonetically, “hy-per-bowl.” But thanks to merriam-webster.com I now know it is pronounced like “hy-per-bow-ly.” I’ve heard this word a million times and now I know what it means.