Why I Love Writing Flash

By Pamela Gay  

Many years ago at a conference after reading a “little story” I wrote called “The Angry Woman,” two women came up to tell me how much they enjoyed it. “But we have a question. Is it a poem or a story?” I smiled. “It’s a poetic story,” I replied.

I began writing poetry and shifted to “little stories” that often had a poetic ring.      

I’ve always been drawn to the short form because of both the feeling of immediacy and intimacy. I like to move in on a scene, to zoom in like a photographer but going where a photographer can’t go. 

I started writing what is now called flash memoir in 1998. The following year I received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) award in creative nonfiction, a brand new category that includes memoir. My first memoir HOMECOMING is in the form of an e-book before there were e-books and won an Independent e-book Award (2000). It includes text as well as images and even sound. 

My new memoir I’m So Glad You’re Here (She Writes Press, 2020) opens with “Turkey Day,” a flash memoir that in a slightly different form lingered in HOMECOMING and was published in the Paterson Literary Review (2001). “A Conversation with My Father,” originally published in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction (Fall 2014), was inspired by Grace Paley’s story (same title, different story) from her collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974). Paley’s way of storytelling has always resonated with me. 

I chose to focus on the last months of my father’s life when my mother asked me to stay with her. I had other plans for my sabbatical from teaching, but I heard her call for help and also yearned to re-unite with her, the mother of my childhood. “I’m so glad you’re here,” my mother said. But she wasn’t acting like “my mother,” which became even more confusing the weekend of my father’s funeral when this sundered family could not gather together. My mother acted differently around my three much older siblings. It felt to me that we didn’t share the same mother. As memoirist Carolyn Steedman in Landscape for a Good Woman (Rutgers UP, 1986) points out, “Children are always episodes in someone else’s narrative.”

I also include journal entries, letters, poems, literary epigraphs, and my mother’s Very Vermont Indian Pudding recipe. My mother comes across as quite a character, not the mother I remember growing up. I wanted these “pieces of life” to work together to create a narrative. I have included flashbacks like we all have in our lives: my father asking me to make a movie about my mother, my mother sending me a letter about her life story. I trusted what philosopher Lev Vygotsky once said, “Writing will take you where you need to go.” I wrote my way through to an ending that led to an opening about having compassion, including self-compassion. “It’s a story alright,” I say, quoting a line in a story by Scottish writer James Kelman, a master of the short form.  

EPILOGUE

It’s time to bring back Grace Paley: “I don’t like…the word ‘fiction.’ I think it’s a false word, and it’s led to ‘non-fiction.’ I mean, you’re either a storyteller….or you’re not….A person telling her own story is also storytelling.” Here’s a “little story” I wrote about a fly.

 Sentenced to Death

In the morning as was her ritual, she carried a cup of espresso and her Mac Book Air to the old oak library table next to a sunlit window of plants ever-reaching higher, higher, causing one visitor to exclaim “I like your trees,” when lo and behold, just as she was about to land her MacBook, there lay a fly, a sight that caused her eyebrows to rise and her sleek lap­top to fall fast&furious, crushing the fly, and it was then after that heightened instantaneous moment of being that she heard some echoes: her yoga teacher starting class with some sentence about how we must respect every living creature, which echoed varieties of this commandment by Buddhists, which then made her think of the story Buddhist nun Pema Chodron told about how she once spent four hours of her day trying to help a bug out the door, and then she remembered asking her yoga teacher at the end of class if fleas were included, as her Maine coon cat had recently suffered a flea attack and she admittedly had been drowning fleas one-by-one in hot, soapy water, which she would not have done with this fly, and then she began thinking about the national debate about whether the death penalty should be banned as a form of punishment, which led her to ask herself what had this fly done except lived its life as a fly, and then she thought she’d better get on with her day, that thinking about sentencing had gone on too long–like this sentence.       

Published June 2012 in Monkeybicycle, an online literary journal that features one-sentence stories

Do visit my website https://pamela-gay.com to learn more about I’m So Glad You’re Here: a synopsis, some reviews, the flash memoir “Turkey Day” and where to order this book!  For HOMECOMING, click on “Other Work” where you can also find some flash prose samples. I would love to hear from you. Click “Contact Me.

I’m So Glad You’re Here

I’m So Glad You’re Here (She Writes Press, 2020) is the story of a family disrupted by ramifications of a father’s mental illness. The memoir opens with a riveting account of Gay, age eighteen, witnessing her father being bound in a straitjacket and carried out of the house on a stretcher. The trauma she experiences escalates when, after her father has had electroshock treatments at a state mental hospital, her parents leave her in a college dorm room and move from Massachusetts to Florida without her. She feels abandoned. Both her parents have gone missing.

Decades later, when Gay and her three much-older siblings show up for their father’s funeral, she witnesses her sundered family’s inability to gather together. Eventually, she is diagnosed with PTSD of abandonment and treated with EMDR therapy—and finally begins to heal. I’m So Glad You’re Here is Gay’s exploration of the idea that while the wounds we carry from growing up in fractured families stay with us, they do not have to control us—a reflective journey that will inspire readers to think about their own relational lives.

 

PRAISE!

 “Gay is a perceptive and compassionate narrator who manages to explore the gaps in everyone’s stories, including her own.” ~KIRKUS REVIEWS

“In I’m So Glad You’re Here, Pamela Gay takes us on a psychological journey through which she heals her own trauma while discovering compassion and empathy. Gay’s prose is lyrical and moving. I guarantee once you start reading, you won’t be able to put this book down.”

~Maria Mazziotti Gillan, author of American Book Award Winner All That Lies Between Us

“In this psychological travelogue, Pamela Gay fractures the surface of memory to peer into the depths of a family in all its complex dysfunction: shock treatment, alcoholism, feuding siblings, hissing turkey dinners, home burial, and yes, recipes—a surprising semiotic assemblage masterfully crafted at the crossroads of tragedy and comedy.”  ~Mindy Lewis, author of Life Inside: A Memoir

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Pamela Gay is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) award in creative nonfiction and an Independent eBook Award for her memoir Homecoming, which combined text, image, and sound. An installation based on this memoir and sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) included artifacts. Gay’s writing has been published in Brevity, Iowa Review, Paterson Literary Review, Midway Journal, Monkeybicycle, Grey Sparrow, Vestal Review, and other literary journals, as well as two anthologies. Gay is a professor emerita at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where she taught courses in flash memoir and flash fiction. She lives in Upstate New York. Her memoir, I’m So Glad You’re Here came out May 26. See more at her website pamela–gay.com.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing