The Best of Brevity: Twenty Years of Groundbreaking Flash Nonfiction by Zoë Bossiere

The Best of Brevity: Twenty Years of Groundbreaking Flash Nonfiction Reviews

• 
  Mia

  I was unfamiliar with “flash nonfiction” until I read a short review of this book in The New York Times. Having been overwhelmed by the news of the day and doubtful that I could focus on anything more weighty, I picked this up. Although essays are no more than three pages in length, each is a unique and powerful personal statement on topics and experiences that describe the intimacy of human experience.
• 
  Denver Public Library

  Curious about flash nonfiction? This collection features broad examples of form and subjects found in flash nonfiction published over the last twenty years in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. I appreciated the additional resources for teachers and writers at the back.
• 
  Jan Priddy

  Most every one of these essays is wonderful, some are brutal, a few are funny, and the back matter suggesting how to use them is useful for any writer or teacher of writing. I disliked one of the essays. One. On the other hand, even though I had read most of these already, and used them in my own writing classes, I enjoyed reading them here. "Things I Have Lost" suggests a list of "Things I Have Found" as a counter to one very hard year.
  
  What I Have Found: A man I can stand to share a house with for nearly a year in isolation, the missing sock, the dog our neighbor lost, self-acceptance and denial and heartache and hope. A daughter-in-law. I have found friendship with neighbors I still cannot approach but keeping our distance has made us close. I have found how to make better sourdough loaves and mango chutney because I was so excited to buy an entire box and then had to use them up. Artists I admire, new authors, glass on the beach in blue and green and orange and colorless, and Korean fantasy romcom. I found I was right about some things I wish I wasn't right about and wrong about too many things. I found a new way to type because my space bar didn't work properly. Sunrises that smear pink all the way over the sky to the ocean. Rusted iron, agates, and expectations for 2021.
  
  This book stays. [I am getting more particular about what I keep on my shelves.]
• 
  Zoom

  Brevity's a magazine of flash non-fiction. it was founded by Dinty Moore, 20+ years ago. Each piece in the magazine has to be less than 750 words. It's harder to write good brief pieces than to write good longer pieces. It's an excellent magazine, so as soon as I heard they were coming out with a Best-of-Brevity book, I pre-ordered it. It's supposed to contain the very best pieces from the magazine's 20-year history.
  
  Overall, I'm a little disappointed in the selections, though. Some were terrific (my favourite was the one about finding a mouse stuck to a glue trap). Some were good. A surprising number were just okay, at least for me. I'm looking forward to reading other reviews.
  
  I'd be curious to know what criteria the editors used in selecting entries for the book.
• 
  Bethany Jarmul

  I’ve never written “Wow!” so many times in the margins of a book. Each tiny essay packs a powerful punch.
• 
  Nancy Jorgensen

  I read this book hoping to someday write with the emotional depth and meaning that these writers accomplish in their own 750 words. And each one was an inspiration.
  
  Not only are the essays wonderful, but I found the material at the back especially helpful. Essays are categorized by theme as well as form. When I wanted to look at several braided essays and compare them one to each other, that was easy to do. Other information related to a second flash nonfiction resource was also helpful.
  
  This is a book for those looking for inspiration but also plain enjoyment. Each commentary on life or love or loss or learning contains thoughts to digest and consider and return to. Highly recommended!
  
  
  
• 
  Cheryl

  “Your heart is big enough for both of us, so that there is no room for mockery in me. Anyone willing to strip themselves this bare this fast this way deserves our breathlessness and our hearts’ attention. Let us spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation. If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else there’s nothing here at all.” Ander Monson
  
  “I have been here before, in this place where losing myself is the same as finding myself. I return whenever I can, to be in this place and, before I leave, to restore this place within me.” Robert Root
  
  I am not sure I have ever even heard of flash nonfiction, and this was a treasure trove of it, and I really enjoyed it. I love long, rambling essays more than anything, but I love poems to which can be succinct statements of life and truth and wonder, so this fits in neatly, with almost a feeling many of these could be poems and landed that way, some a visceral gasp of horror at the human condition, some a more soft brush of grief, what seems like a diverse sampling of authors, and some fairly mundane, but taken as a whole, a little vignette of what it means to be human in this world of ours. Carl Sagan asked what intelligent life from another galaxy would think if they set down here and watched our shows and movies, read our books and news stories, implying that the violence and obsession with youth and drugs and wealth was something to regret.
  
  I hope they stumble on this one.
  
  I also might look into their archives, the only lack I saw was the representation of nature, and even environmentalism so I hope there might be more there.
  
  The Shape of Emptiness by Brenda Miller
  
  His mother dies three weeks before the end of the quarter.
  We’ve been talking about white space. About the necessity of pause, of absence. The power of the gap. Of what is unsaid and unspeakable.
  The boy has brought in playdough, small cans of it that he drops on each desk. He asks us to take the lump and squeeze it in our fists. That’s all, just squeeze, then he gathers them up and puts these little sculptures on display at the front table. Each lump looks different, unique, modeling the individual shapes of our palms, the ridges from our inner knuckles.
  He asks us: What is the shape of emptiness? Then he pauses, allows the question to remain unanswered. We gaze at our playdough impressions, see how we all have different ways to hang on. He made visible the air we never see. The shape of our holding, our hollow spaces pressed into clay. The form of the word, please.
  But for now, when he finishes reading, he gathers our hands and gives them back to us one by one. We take them from him carefully, so we can carry our emptiness into the day. We compare them, showing off the shapes of our grasping. Curled like prayers. Like anger. Like love.
  
  Forgetting by Abigail Thomas
  
  What if I get that funny feeling just before I make my final exit? Then what if I have to come back, because if I’ve forgotten something, it means I’m not done, and I don’t want to return, at least not as a human being. I’d rather be a tree, or a bunch of kudzu, or even a moth. I’d rather be a school of fish. “A whole school?” I can hear my sister asking. “Why not just one fish?” Because one fish in a school is the same as the whole school, but different, and I want to know what that feels like. Plus I love the way they swim in gestures.
  
  Letter to a Future Lover by Ander Monson
  
  They stare at your future, our future, maybe, lover, if we ever come together, if we’re ever more than ink and paper, chiaroscuro, one transparency transposed upon another.
  …when I fall, it’s Ditch Witch hitting electric line, the whole world alive and lit in amperes for a moment. It might be gone again a nanosecond later, the body aching with or for or from the jolt;
  Maybe we all are like those who had their laughs recorded into tracks for television shows years before, who continue to laugh now a lifetime a lifeline a phone-a-friend later, disembodied, at jokes that are no longer funny. Perhaps they never were.
  I salute your bravery, book-inscriber. Your heart is big enough for both of us, so that there is no room for mockery in me. Anyone willing to strip themselves this bare this fast this way deserves our breathlessness and our hearts’ attention. Let us spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation. If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else there’s nothing here at all.
  
  The Birthday Place by Rebecca McClanahan
  The knowledge I once assumed—that she knows who I am—exists in a faraway world. A world I am homesick for, that I grieve. I want my mother back, in relation to me. Thus, the repetition of Mother.
  “What are the odds?” That out of all the birthday places in the world, a mother and her daughter happened to arrive at the same one. At the very same moment. And that the daughter can carry that birthday with her wherever she goes, for the rest of her life…
  
  Fluency by Jamila Osman
  Silence was my first language. I am fluent in its cadences. I know the way quiet can pour out of a mouth like a rush of water in a season of drought.
  
  The Sloth by Jill Christman
  
  There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the body’s mercury where our blood feels neither hot nor cold. I remember a morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of Costa Rica four months after my 22-year-old fiancé was killed in a car accident. Walking into the sea, disembodied by grief, I felt no barriers between my skin, the air, and the water.
  I saw my first three-toed sloth… I thought I knew slow, but this guy, this guy was slow. The sound I heard was his wiry-haired blond elbow, brushed green with living algae, stirring a leaf as he reached for the next branch. Pressing my wet palms onto the rough wooden walls, I watched the sloth move in the shadows of the canopy. Still reaching. And then still reaching.
  What else is this slow? Those famous creatures of slow—the snail, the tortoise—they move faster. Much. This slow seemed impossible, not real, like a trick of my sad head. Dripping and naked in the jungle, I thought, That sloth is as slow as grief. We were numb to the speed of the world. We were one temperature.
  
  Place by Robert Root
  
  ...the waters of a great broad lake rush rhythmically across the beach, tossing sand and pebbles at my feet, dragging sand and pebbles from the shore until the tide grows shallow and weak. Perhaps the sun makes the sand too hot for my naked feet to bear, the air too heavy for my body to endure without being naked and submerged in the lake. The sound of the sand beneath my feet is like no other sound; the sound of the wind stroking the shoreline is like no other sound; the feel of the lake air against my skin is like no other feeling; the sensation of submergence is both bracing and sensuous. For a moment I want to merge my existence with the sand, become one with the water. For the moment I am the lake, I am the beach.
  I have felt my atoms reassembling. I have felt my isolation touching the boundaries of other isolations. I have felt my senses sharpen, known the keen alertness to other lives, to life itself. I have been swept up by the wind as a grain of sand and landed as granite; I have been blown away like a curled, crumbling leaf and touched ground as oak. I have shriveled into nothingness and swelled into entity its very self.
  I have plunged into wilderness in hopes of solidifying my separateness and evading bonds of community, and yet I have emerged from it more connected, more committed, more aware of my involvement in the cosmos than when I retreated. I have come away knowing better what matters and what doesn’t matter, what will grow and what will decay; I have understood that impermanence and insignificance are the allotment of all creatures, of all life, and have welcomed the understanding. To know at last what I am a part of—that what I am a part of matters—is to know what I am.
  I have been here before, in this place where losing myself is the same as finding myself. I return whenever I can, to be in this place and, before I leave, to restore this place within me.
  
  A Brief Atmospheric Future by Matthew Gavin Frank
  
  If we’re to believe the neuroscientist Professor Marcus Pembrey, from University College London, who concluded that “Behaviour can be affected by events in previous generations which have been passed on through a form of genetic memory…phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders… [even] sensitivity to [a] cherry blossom scent…” then the pigeon knows of its ancestors’ lives as Genghis Khan’s messengers, as carriers of Tipu Sultan’s poetry, silk plantation blueprints, and schematics for the advancement of rocket artillery.
  
  An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work by Ayşe Papatya Bucak
  
  My work is to tell you that without art we would be in a world without art.
  My work is to honor the glory of trash day, all of those cans lined up before dawn, an obedient nation in this one instance only. My work is to believe in everybody’s capacity for kindness. My work is to believe in everybody’s capacity for cruelty. My work is the bird of dawn, the tale of my grief, the thief of love, the city of beauties, the nest of snakes, the helping animal, the animated doll, the transformative power of love, the juice of a single grape. My work is to imagine a world without art so that there is never a world without art. My work is to tell you this: Years ago I was on the subway in Manhattan, and we stopped between stations, and the staticky voice came on the speaker and said there would be a delay of 20 minutes, and cursing ripped through the car, as if a tribe of the homeless mad had just swept into our presence. But then a young woman across from me took out a small pile of paper, and she started folding red origami swans, and each time she finished one, she handed it to one of us. My work is my origami swans.
• 
  div

  read all the flash nonfiction pieces for class — some were very good!
• 
  Allison Renner

  All of these pieces were amazing, and many of them really jumped off the page and moved me and have stuck with me since finishing the book. I really love how this volume was created to pair with the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction and to be used in classrooms and writing workshops.
• 
  Brooke

  Some of these were amazing. Some were ok. Some were interesting.
  
  Read for school.
• 
  Brian Watson

  Having read
  The Mindful Writer by Dinty W. Moore, when the recommendation came from a friend to read The Best of Brevity, a collection of flash non-fiction from the online magazine he founded, I happily agreed.
  
  I might be one of the last people to know about flash (fiction or non-). Essays? I’ve written a fair few over the years, and thought at first that flash non-fiction was merely an abbreviated essay. This beautiful book, however, quickly disabused me of that.
  
  The book’s format let me jump around, to alight on pieces that caught my eye whenever I picked it up. Maybe it was a name I recognized that made me stop on one page or another. Maybe it was a title that stood out. The book lent itself to casual discoveries.
  
  My favorites?
  
  
  Ira Sukrungruang’s The Cruelty We Delivered: An Apology has one of the most beautiful endings I’ve ever read: I can’t shake this image though: the time you stole holy water and dumped it over your head, the dripping glee on your face, your grin a half moon, your teeth blinding white. I remember that, my head hanging low, wishing forgiveness in the form of rain.
  
  
  Torrey Peters’ Transgender Day of Remembrance; A Found Essay initially took me by surprise for the silliest of reasons. I grew up in a time when rainbow-dwelling authors were almost always segregated into our own magazines and anthologies, and this sorrowful, beautiful piece, heavy with pain, reminded me both that times have changed—the writing community is more diverse than it once was—and that times have not changed—rainbow-dwellers are still murdered around the world.
  
  I laughed in delight to see Josey Foo’s So Little on the page. How short the sentenced thought. How long the parenthetical thought. A metaphor for my life of analysis and rumination if ever there was one.
  
  There is true rainbow-hued beauty in
  Krys Malcolm Belc’s When a 17-Year-Old Checkout Clerk in Small Town Michigan Hits on Me, I Think About the Girl I Loved at 17. How curious to find a reminder of my PATH train journeys in these pages, to think back at how Manhattan was a separate space for the more authentic me back when I too was 17. A gift of memory I was only too happy to accept.
  
  Another exquisite ending awaited me in Sarah J. Lin’s DevotionI held his hand until he fell asleep. I was not a monster, no. I mentioned my predilection for rumination, above, and this essay offered a glimpse of another’s pain at a past incarnation. There is both reassurance and regret: I am not the person I once was, but oh, what a person I once was.
  
  I found a dark gem of bitter insight in Dustin Parsons’ The Domestic Apologies. In a paragraph headed Apology to Dust, he shares a stinging sentence from, of course, Nietzsche: Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man. One of those sentences that makes me look for the original German, because surely it reads even worse: Die Hoffnung: sie ist in Wahrheit das Übelste der Übel, weil sie die Qual der Menschen verlängert. The evilest of evils? Yum!
  
  In a collection of work selected specifically as superlatives, it was hard for me to settle on one that I found to be my personal favorite. That said, there is significant resonance for me in Sam Stokley’s How to Discuss Race as a White Person. He has scattered footnotes across an otherwise blank page. If I understand him, and I hope I do, his suggestion for my fellow white people is to think and to learn, actions which are sadly rare. One footnote reads simply: Waiting isn’t listening. The person I once was, the person I sometimes see unvolitionally resurrect within me, and the person I see very frequently around me is that one who is convinced of his own thoughts and is therefore merely waiting, and usually barely waiting, for whoever else is speaking to finish so that those self-assured, self-aggrandized thoughts can pave over other opinions.
  
  At the very end of the book, there is a piece by the stellar
  Roxane Gay, There are Distances Between Us. Her metaphor of a map is one I have used before in my writing, and to see it handled with even more beauty by a master was inspiring. Her piece ends with We could point to a place on a map and say, we are here. This emotion is what I have often looked to in life. We are here.
  
  Thank you to Dinty and to Zoë Bossiere for this amazing collection.
• 
  Tim G

  In short, there was a very high-level of writing ability represented across all the stories. Some of the story’s contents were good, some were okay, but a fair amount were forgettable.
  What was most agitating with the story collection were the editors justification in selection and organisation in the book’s included stories.
  One of the editor’s introductions begun quite well, with a rich background and a decent alignment to the quality of writing, represented in numerous of the short non-fictional accounts. Ironically, this became laboured and longwinded. This was humorous, because such strict parameters for the 750 words of brevity were required, but then the editor assumed these rules did not apply to themselves and adhered to the opposite.
  What was most prominent in this editor’s introduction, and one which essentially ruined many aspects of this book was, DIVERSITY.
  Why is it that we cannot be in any pocket of society without diversity being insisted, prioritised, and shoehorned in?
  This was immediately apparent in story selection, with the justification being editor agendas and quotas were met, regardless of their content and writing quality.
  What a farce!!
  Honestly, the reader desires good writing expressed in broad, unique, and reflective experiences. However, as we were so fantastically informed through the editor’s foreword, equity was prioritised. Therefore, a sceptical lens was adopted toward many of the book’s stories. Distracting questions plagued the mind throughout the read, such as, ‘was this story selected for merit?’ or, ‘was the story included to fill the diversity quotas to represent a marginal discriminated group?’.
  The editors prioritised all the ‘awoken’ themes of recent years. Whether this was racism, sexism, LGBT, gender, or any area where a minority group has received discrimination, undoubtedly a story of theirs would be included, regardless of merit or quality of writing!
  Now, this is a very touchy subject, and rightly so, as society is learning how to navigate these uncharted waters successfully, but the issue and concern was that equity was forced in this book. So, of the thousands of stories which were submitted to the Brevity magazine, filters and categories were applied to include stories from these marginalised groups. Writing merit and content quality were considered as an afterthought.
  So much so, post the story collection, the book captured the subcategories of each of the story’s themes, as a teaching and educational aid. Almost unsurprisingly, the sub themed categories of gender and LGBTI, were the categories with the most representation.
  So, this latter section book’s educational points were humorous but sternly evident: for the best chance of publication of a brevity submission a woke theme was the advisable opportunity for selection.
  Well, aren’t these just fantastic teachings to be shared in the classroom environment….
  Besides this, some great writing quality existed in this collection and the odd story was enjoyable, including ‘The Shape of Emptiness,’ ‘Wings,’ ‘A most dangerous Game,’ and ‘Fish.’ Granted, these were minimal in comparison to the agenda, but all of this was overshadowed with the insisted upon editor’s agenda.
  Another shortfall was the disjointed sequencing of the stories all together. The book’s first quarter featured a nice cadence to the stories. Some standouts included ‘A shape of emptiness,’ and ‘A mother’s tongue,’ and were balanced with some forgettable stories which might have featured the occasional cultural appropriation theme. This story sequencing was palatable and a predictable and almost enjoyable rhythm occurred.
  Post this, ‘the message’ of diversity agendas was loudest. Observed through a complete mismatch of stories, over representation of discriminated story authors, and a complete unbalance. This occurred for most of the book, until the final section were an aspect of semi balance and a rhythm returned.
  Overall, the reader will likely feel agitated and consider the story sequencing disjointed. Understandably, some readers will enjoy other stories over others but the shoehorned story themes, coupled with the editor’s pronounced and abrasive agenda highlights a disregarded and unpleasant reader experience entirely.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Jack Rochester

  When Rose Metal Press asked if I would consider writing a review of a forthcoming book entitled The Best of Brevity, I thought, Why not? I favor brevity. After all, that famous line, “Forgive me for writing you such a long letter, for I didn’t have the time to write a short one,” is one of my favorite [mis]quotations, even if we’re not exactly sure who first wrote it. Was it Montaigne? Cicero? Machiavelli? Pascal? Wilde? Twain? Mencken? Does it matter?
  
  So the book arrived and I noted the cover read, “Twenty groundbreaking years of flash nonfiction.” Non. Fiction. Now I was intrigued; having written flash fiction for years and years, I was embarrassed to admit I knew little about this genre. First thoughts were, Hmmm, this might be boring. Then I began flipping pages, reading different works, and was confronted with the fact I had been quite wrong.
  
  "Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction" (brevitymag.com) is the name of an online litmag which has specialized in nonfiction works no longer than 750 words since 1997. After perusing at least a dozen of its pieces, I knew I had a very special anthology in my hands. So I sat in my favorite reading chair and began again with number one, Brenda Miller’s “The Shape of Emptiness.” The college professor is telling the story of a boy student whose mother has died and who needs to miss some classes. But the story quickly morphs into a literary-cum-philosophical exploration of white space, and that into a class exercise in the mindfulness of playdough, which inevitably curves back around to the shape of emptiness.
  
  We may write and write, but what is it we say? Or, what are we to think about our writing when we don’t realize how profoundly we have thought about an instance of life and subsequently understand how truly profound our writing about it was? See what I mean? That’s what happens over and over in Brevity.
  
  And equally important is, how best to say it? Would Ms. Miller’s story have had its empathic denouement had it not been written in the first-person present tense?
  
  I’ve read The Best of Brevity cover to cover three times. To call these works flash, to my mind, does not give them full credit for their depth, their humanity, their profundity, their wisdom. Nor enough credit for their writers’ skills in storytelling.
  
  I won’t tell you my favorites. They’re mine. They are secrets I share only with their authors. You’ll find your own favorites soon enough, and you will embrace them, sigh, concur, delight, dab at your eye without any encouragement from me. These works are slices of real life; you don’t have to wonder if the author concocted them from imagination or transcribed them from experience. They are incredibly interesting as well as entertaining. Don’t deny yourself. Buy this book of uncommon essays.
  
  The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction, Edited by Zoë Bossiere and Dinty W. Moore. Rose Metal Press.com, Paperback, November 17, 2020. 256pp, $16.95. Please buy your copy at your local independent bookstore.
• 
  Jacqueline Doyle

  This is a book that will appeal to flash readers, flash writers, and flash teachers, and many of us who are all three. … This is also a book for readers unfamiliar with flash. It’s fun to read. You can read it in small bits, and adapt to what’s required by each flash without advance preparation. There are plenty of cultural critics who argue that our attention spans aren’t what they used to be, and bemoan the rise of reading flash as symptomatic of our current inability to comprehend longer forms. (You’ll notice no one ever said that about reading poems.) But this is a unique art form, not just a shorter version of the essay or memoir that can be consumed and digested more quickly. Something new and exciting with considerable variety and range, from narrative to expository to lyric to experimental. It requires a different sort of concentration. Often a flash asks to be reread. Often it requires the reader to fill in the gaps. Often it resonates far beyond the closing line.
  
  See my full review at CRAFT Literary Journal here:
  https://www.craftliterary.com/2021/02...
  
• 
  Polly Hansen

  Stunning gems of spectacular variety. I found these flash pieces soothing as I read them at bedtime. Short flashes of wisdom, surprise, poignancy and grace. One of my favorites was by an author no longer with us, Brian Doyle's "Imagining Foxes," about the importance of play, and wandering about with nothing in particular to do, just going on adventures through the park, seeing what you can see, and what you don't. "We spend so much time mourning and battling for a world where kids can see foxes that we forget you don't have to see foxes." The fact that these stories are all real experiences is breath taking.
  
  I the back is an entire syllabus, if you will, on teaching the flash essay through excellent craft essays and where to find them on the Net. The editors, Bossiere and Moore, have also categorized each essay into not only topics (religion, race and ethnicity, etc.), but flash craft and style such as "the singular moment, where to begin, where to end," "Against the grain-alternative approaches to flash nonfiction," "Settling on structure--shaping flash nonfiction."
  
  This collection is a must-own for anyone striving to break into the published world of flash nonfiction.
• 
  Leanne

  This is a beautifully curated collection of astonishing and inspirational stories. As a writer who aspires to write better in this genre, I found so many essays to inspire me. Now that I've read them all, I plan to study them as self-teaching tools. Form, POV, structure, voice, language-- every essay has so much to explore.
• 
  C

  A really excellent collection of flash non-fiction.
  
  Particularly liked the pieces by Michelle Valois, Sarah J. Lin, Mark Stricker, and Brenda Miller but there were just so many truly strong pieces.
• 
  Spencer Washington

  This was part of my graduate school reading, very insightful for how to write flash fiction and informative with different authors writing styles, content, and poses.
• 
  Beck Seamons

  A lot of the human experience can fit into 750 words. Loved it
• 
  Kris W

  Some of the essays in this collection were powerful and thought-provoking. Others were just plain weird. Two favorites were “Openings” and “When We Played.” EBN23 Category: A book of essays
• 
  Jessica

  I'd read most of these before, but I often reread Brevity pieces. So much stunning work in here; flash cnf is one of my dearest loves.
• 
  Amorak Huey

  I've been teaching many of these essays for years from the online journal; it's a pleasure to have them all together in physical form.