Caroljean Gavin’s story “Endangered Species” is a master class in how to use filtering through a specific and unique point of view.
I love when a story enters the weird and fabulist without excuse or reference. It presents this skewed world as fact and develops this off-kilter world and its characters through a voice and point of view that isn't put-off by the weirdness around them. This is a hard act to pull off, but Gavin does this masterfully by creating a point of view character that we trust to direct us through the story and toward meaning.
"My five-year-old walks the sidewalks with me into town. There is no other place for him. He holds my finger with one hand. His other hand clutches a headless black bird. He nibbles on it from time to time."
We've already discussed how important openings are to establishing reader interest and trust. Gavin opens with something prosaic and normal but quickly dives into the weird. Giving character's normal actions with weird props shows us just how off-kilter this world is, and it makes us pay attention. There is an act of defamiliarization here, and we need this to break us out of our normality, to make us see past the mundane.
The process of making the familiar strange, fresh, resonant. And what is resonance if not a moment of revelation for the reader? Or as Randall Brown, author of A Pocket Guide to Flash Fiction puts it, "Defamiliarization is taking something that is familiar and presenting it in a way that is unfamiliar. Consider Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can paintings. This installation created a sensation that is still studied and copied more than fifty years later, and it's because Warhol took an object as familiar as a soup can and defamiliarized it by presenting it in a way that was unfamiliar."
"I cannot wrench it away from him. It wouldn’t matter. There are always more, dropping from the sky in scores. There is no protecting him. His eyes are wide open, nostrils flared, teeth gnashing and tongue lapping at the wind without boundary."
The central conflict centers around this mother's inability to protect her son, how she is powerless to keep him from doing this weird, probably unsafe action. The voice is so well established so quickly that we believe her, that we worry with her about what other dangers she can't provide protection from, how much worse this story will get. We're on the edge of our seats here, and all because of this voice filtering these very concrete, but weird details, this vulnerability we often don't receive in real life. All this from the opening paragraph. This is a great way of establishing a trusted but vulnerable point of view!
"The grocery doors slide open for us, my son runs through the cool air and straight to the produce. It is hard to stop him. An older woman coughs, coughs, coughs, and even through her coughing she glares at me. The little black birds spin out of her mouth. Keep control of your kid. The bananas are all black, the nectarines have rotted in their bags, the apples bruised beyond recognition. My son grabs a putrid, weeping mango and takes a huge bite."
I love the use and execution of the white space here, this skipping over of the moving from the sidewalk to the grocery store. The cutting out of all the unnecessary details puts pressure on the details given to us in this new scene. In flash, what's left out is almost as important as what is provided. Everything in flash is about pressure. And the unsaid applies a lot of pressure on the reader to make inferences, and on the characters to act while they're on the stage of the story.
But there's so much more here, too! Notice what she is noticing, the way it creates a dark and macabre mood. Nothing is safe, not even the produce in the grocery store. And I love the repetition of “coughing”, how it produces more birds, more ways for the boy to harm himself. The pedestrian, something we do every day has become dangerous. This kind of counter-pointing, a creation of opposite feelings or understandings really enriches this story. A character's perspective not agreeing with our own can cause great tension, and make stories with familiar themes fresh again. It's not the events, but the perspective that forces us to see things in a new way.
"My five-year-old walks through the parking lot with me, towards the school. He holds my finger with one hand. The drop-off line is a crush of cars. The birds are thick. Each car door that opens lets out a clot of them, that ride the air to join the birds hovering over the building or the birds pecking through the grass, waiting. I throw my arms over him. But there is no protecting him. Not once he gets inside. If he does not go inside, they tell me, if he does not see the other children play, he will not learn to play. If he does not go inside, they tell me, if he does not see the other children talk, he will never learn how. I cannot keep him inside, I cannot keep him safe, this is what they tell me."
The birds are more than a detail, they have sprung to life as a metaphor, the lurking danger that follows them everywhere, that gets worse as he goes to the one place he should be safe: school. Unfortunately, an apt metaphor for our current times. Here we are met with her breathless desire to keep him safe, to avoid this place that was once safe, that "they" tell her she must send him. I love the use of multiple lines to tell us what she is against, how her desires don't count, how the school, the system, and its rules are more important. I love how this is detailed through the use of the word "if" over and over.
Possibility isn't only a hopeful feeling, and our main character is stuck, is fighting a battle she can't win, and we hate this for her. Gavin has established a well of empathy for her narrator from the way this perspective is created and given to us through this unique and specific voice.
"My five-year old son is so hungry for the clamor, he breaks away from me and runs, runs, runs inside chewing on his dead bird in one hand, slurping up his rotten mango from another, and the classrooms are full of the corvids and there is nothing, nothing, nothing I can do."
And then we crescendo not with a resolution, but with a tying together of all the ways this perspective and voice have tried to warn us, through the repetition of “runs” and “nothing”, through that image of the boy chewing on the dead bird, and the rotten mango, and the flock of birds surrounding him as he is sucked into the school where she can't go.
I love how this ends with her completely stuck on the outside and with him on the inside, and how we know this story will play out, will continue for days and days and nothing bad may ever happen, but the fear, the possibility is always there.
Another way that flash can eschew normal narrative structure, how it can linger like the last image/line of a poem, and still be so full of narrative is by creating this feeling for the reader of being touched by the particular feeling and empathy and vulnerability of this event.
Prompt: Create a main character who is worried about another character’s safety. Start with a small danger and make it bigger by the end, something particular to to the characters and then something systemic. How can you make this danger grow and loom over the piece, over the main character without resorting to abstract feelings or fear or anxiety? What details help reveal the main character and their fear? What will they do to try to protect the other character? Can the other character actually be saved? Does the main character know this? Stay in the moment in the perspective of the main character filtering the necessary details and sensory experiences! Don’t be afraid to get weird or fantastical!
Flash Reading:
Hunan Homes by Eliot Li: “Hunan Homes, where my father devours platefuls of braised pork belly, with its layers of glistening fat, despite his cardiologist’s order to take it easy on the grease, and where Grandma produces green wax packs of baseball cards from her purse and gives them to me and my cousin while my aunt stares blankly at the giant bloated codfish floating upside down in the fish tank, the waiter trying to scoop it out with his net.”
Do or Don’t or Do by Jennifer Murvin: You need to leave your husband, and you do. When your son goes with his dad on Sunday, he takes different pieces of you with him; at first the tearing hurt, but now you have grown important callouses like when learning to play guitar, and on Wednesdays you welcome him and also yourself home, reattaching with pleasure, as you both appreciate puzzles and music”
Hurt Me by Sara Hills: “It’s Wendy’s idea to watch porn at the party, for us to squeeze together on the sticky-brown pleather sofas while her parents are away and study the in and out of it—flesh on flesh on flesh. The woman on screen arches her back, and I sense Wendy’s body stiffen next to me.”
Try At Home: Think of a place or object, a person that sparks joy or nostalgia. This thing you just can't stop thinking about. What might a character do to get them back? What's preventing them from getting them or connecting with it? Focus on this pursuit, and not the backstory...let the reader feel, intuit the importance through the language of the story.
Writing with Me:
Just 3 spots left!
Writing Flash Fiction with Depth and Urgency 8-Week Online Workshop, Starts October 24th, 2022
$495
Class size limited to 10 writers
Class starts October 24th, 2022
Course is fully ONLINE; students can work according to their own schedule within weekly deadlines. Once you have enrolled the instructor will send you a link to our online classroom, provided via Wet Ink.
Contact us HERE if you have any questions about this class.
November 2-14, 2022: Building Fictional Relationships through Dialogue, Ritual, and Objects
2/12 spots left!
Cost: $160
Asynchronous
Are you tired of your characters standing around, thinking, doing nothing in your flash? When creating characters in a story that’s a thousand words or less, economy of words and actions is the key. The writer must think specifically about how a character acts, talks, looks and use details that present a picture of a living, breathing person. There isn’t enough space in a flash story to write paragraph after paragraph of character description. This class will focus on building and revealing character in flash stories by focusing on building relationships through Dialogue, Ritual, and special objects!
The class structure is asynchronous, so you can log in as needed throughout the week. I’ll provide 1 prompt per day Monday-Wednesday-Friday for two weeks. Each learning day will also contain model texts and my analysis of how to use the model texts. You can write a flash for each day and post it to the learning environment (Canvas). I will then provide positive encouraging feedback for each flash piece you write. You will also get a chance to give and receive positive comments from your peers. We’ll use Saturday and Sunday to catch up on writing and commenting!
Coming up next month with The Writing Center!
Second Person Point of View in Flash
November 8 @ 7:00 PM EST - 8:00 PM EST
$25
This one-hour generative writing session will be focused on using second person point of view in Flash Fiction and Non-fiction. Love it or hate it, this point of view works powerfully and resonantly in the short short form. Participants will look at model texts and get inspired by quick writing prompts!
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