With two of the most recent blog posts, “Bar Bones? A Story by Martone” and “What to do with a poem,” contributors and interns of Shenandoah emphasize the various forms of literature included in the magazine and the specific genres within fiction. In Professor Smith’s Advance Creative Writing Fiction class that I also take this semester, we read a large portion of the assigned stories from the “flash fiction” genre, or “short” short stories. In his latest blog post, Professor Smith begins with the inquiry: “What are the minimum requirements for a sequence of sentences to result in a story?” The question magnifies the ambiguity of the evolving genre. Literary scholars often debate on the loosely defined length of these stories. Is 300 words the minimum? 1,000 word the maximum? Regardless of the length, the motivation and stylistic structure of “flash fiction” is debatable. Fred Chappell argues the primary purpose of “short” short stories is to make the reader uneasy. Without the full length and duration to develop multiple motifs and characters, the story must appeal to the reader’s emotions in an effective and economical manner.
In Shenandoah issue, Alyson Hagy’s “Self Portrait as a Trailer Full of Mules” embodies both the brevity and style of flash fictions’ allusive definition. Although all stories do not exemplify Chappell’s theory, Hagy’s story does not necessarily make the reader uneasy, but apprehensive and speculative. “Self Portrait as a Trailer Full of Mules” packs a plethora of geographical and trade specific references into the short short, which creates a sense of the unfamiliar for the average reader. Although usually understanding every one of a story’s references is not essential, the brevity of the story calls for comprehension of these elements. Moreover, by beginning the story with a question (Where do they find these animals?), Hagy immediately addresses the reader and promotes some internal question and rendering of emotion. In particular, the second half of the story that focuses on the jenny conjures the most apprehension. She writes, “She looks hungry for something. Her pumpjack head primes the bony lever of her neck. I see how the tendons in her forelegs have been pin-fired, a piss-poor job of it too. Futile. She’ll never tread the straight path again.” Hagy emphasizes the plight of the jenny with such detail and length (relative to the overall length of the story). With the one word, “Futile,” the author encompasses the jenny’s problems, which the reader can infer to mirror the narrator’s own.
Although the story is only one paragraph in length, I read it multiple times and with each reading gained more insight on its potential motivations, but consequentially become more and more uneasy with the author’s intended meaning.