In my Writing Short-short fiction class this past Tuesday evening, Tobin Terry and Kristina von Held came to my class to read and talk about their very short prose pieces. You can read some of their work in postings in this blog from earlier in the month. I am extremely fond of Kristina's work and the new pieces Tobin read may be his best writing yet.
In addition, Robert Miltner, who teaches at Kent-Stark, was generous enough to come to share his thoughts about writing and read a few prose poems as well as a short short fiction he said he had been working on for several years--maybe a year for each page. It was almost all dialogue, with a minimal but effective setting. The initiating object of the conversation was a birthday card the woman had received from her father, who had since died.
The dialogue was so perfectly made, the emotional reality it illuminated so vivid, that just a few pages have set in mind and memory--if those are different things--and have started me thinking all over again about the very nature of short short fiction. This is the third or fourth time I have asked Robert to come to my writing classes. I am always inspired by his visits, and I know my students are as well. He shows us, through his talk and his performance, what the written and the spoken word mean to us all.
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About Me
- Bob
- I write short stories and essays. I have published well over one hundred stories, essays, and flash fictions or nonfictions in magazines or anthologies, as well as a novel, Jack's Universe, three collections of stories, Private Acts, Killers & Others, and Not a Jot or a Tittle, and two chapbooks of flash fiction, Shutterbug and Dragon Box. I grew up in a military family, so I'm not from anywhere in particular except probably Akron, where I've lived for forty years. Before I came here, I never lived anywhere longer than three years.
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