Hot Flash Friday: Order a copy of Freeze Frame TODAY
Read the headlines: ever wonder what’s behind them.
The newspaper is full of real
stories that at some point might alter or connect with
our own story. Think tsunami, school
closing, threat of e. coli in lettuce. Maybe not right
away, but in a year flotsam will hit our
western shores, the price of a BLT will go up, and the
nice lady down the street will lose her
job at the elementary school. A lot of what occurs in
our life might fall under the header of
observation, without conclusion or closure. Walt
Disney was right: It’s a small world after
all.
Ernest (the auto-correct keeps wanting to change it to
earnest!) Hemingway had a
background in journalism. In Our Time places
small vignettes between longer stories such as
“Big Two-Hearted River.” I’m not sure what he meant by
doing this. Perhaps they were
palate cleansers, you know like eating cheese or
grapes between courses. As a foreign
correspondent, he would eventually report on the
Greco-Turkish population exchange, The
Spanish Civil War, and, was embedded with the 22nd
Infantry Regiment during World War
II, present at D-Day and for the liberation of Paris.
Quite a few of the inter-chapter pieces
were vignettes of his war experiences written in the
journalistic-style without bias, comment,
or the hint of hindsight. Much like Frank O’Hara did
twenty-five years later, he composed
flash from what he simply observed.
EXERCISE:
What’s in the news? Using a headline as a prompt, write a flash. This can be
strictly memoir (See “Lana Turner has collapsed”
by Frank O’Hara, mentioned earlier) or you
can take any headline and place yourself there as a
reporter and write fictionally what you
see. Or, perhaps, a headline such as School Closures,
affects you—write your flash as an
opinion
(op-ed) piece. An artist after 9/11 created a word collage based upon the
weather
report
for that day memorable blue-sky day.
*The link takes you to Amazon, but also available through
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Apple
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Baker
& Taylor Blio
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Baker-Taylor
Axis360
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Barnes
& Noble
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Diesel
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Flipkart
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Gardners
Extended Retail
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Gardners
Library
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Inktera
(formerly Page Foundry)
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Library
Direct
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OverDrive
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Oyster
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Scribd
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Sony
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Tolino
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txtr
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Yuzu
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