What Can You Do in Twenty-Five Words?

Now that Mountainair and environs has a growing writers group, The Manzano Mountain Scribes (meeting 10am today at Alpine Alley), I may eventually have to decide where to blog them: Poets and Writers Picnic or Mountainair Arts. Until then I am cross-posting to both blogs and upping writing related posts on Arts (as in Arts and Letters). Before there was a plog, poetry and writing related posts were regular features on Mountainair Arts. Decamping 100% to plog may not have been such a good idea and misleading to boot, implying a dearth of local interest in matters lettered.

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What Can You Do in Twenty-Five Words? via 3quarksdaily by Abbas Raza on 11/7/10

Ian Crouch in The New Yorker:

A hinting story, Swartwood explains, should do in twenty-five words what it could do in twenty-five hundred, that is, it "should be complete by standing by itself as its own little world." And, like all good fiction, it should tell a story while gesturing toward all the unknowable spaces outside the text.

The book is divided into three sections: "life & death," "love & hate," and "this & that." Several stories too fully embrace the gimmick, becoming tiny O. Henry tales complete with tidy setups and kickers. Something about the space constraints make the stories go for too much, rejecting intimacy for some trumped up idea of scale. The best, however, share an off-beat and generally macabre sensibility. Here are two good examples:

"Blind Date," by Max Barry.

She walks in and heads turn. I'm stunned. This is my setup? She looks sixteen. Course, it's hard to tell, through the scope.

"Houston, We Have a Problem," by J. Matthew Zoss.

I'm sorry, but there's not enough air in here for everyone. I'll tell them you were a hero.

Violence is a lingering theme, often conveyed with a power that lasts long after the short time it takes to read these tales. Take "Cull," By L. R. Bonehill, a compressed post-apocalyptic snapshot:

There had been rumors from the North for months. None of us believed it, until one night we started to kill our children too.

More here.