"I Came Back to Flash Through Poetry"

by JOHN BRANTINGHAM

Founder and General Editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder

John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac, and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has 19 books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction including Life: Orange to Pear, Kitkitdizzi, and Days of Recent Divorce. He is the founder and general editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder. He lives in Jamestown, NY.

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That morning the class was running late to the museum, and my friend Matt had been left out, told he’d never get

That’s as far as I got, and it would need a good deal of revision to fit the form. I stopped there because I was flooded with memories of a field trip that only some of the kids in my school were allowed to go on. Others were excluded based on their grades. The kids who were struggling were punished and forced to stay in the class doing worksheets. I remembered being shocked that those kids were singled out as being bad students. Now that I have been an educator for 30 years, I’m shocked by the bad pedagogy as well. They might have been inspired by the trip. Instead, they were told they weren’t smart enough to learn the way we did.

What does any of this have to do with writing flash fiction?

The sonnet in this case gave me a flash fiction piece. The sonnet is a gift giver, and because of its length, 140 syllables, it translates easily into dribbles and drabbles. My latest flash fiction chapbook Days of Recent Divorce (Arroyo Seco Press) is a collection of dribbles and drabbles all started as sonnets and revised into fiction.

I have strong emotional memories of divorce even though my parents are still married, and I have been happily married for 27 years. However many of my friends have gone through this. As they grieved, I grieved with them, and the sonnet form pulled that out of me.

Anyway, try it. Start working with a poem form. Do not try to write anything of great brilliance. Instead, try to make the form work. Get the rhymes sort of right. Get the meter pretty close. Have fun playing around with it. Chances are you won’t get much of a poem, but you’ll have an incredibly good place to start your flash piece. My guess is that it will be some of the most powerful writing you’ve done.