Memoirous

Leading up to the Fourth of July weekend, Meridian Township here in Michigan just celebrated Meridian Days. To their credit they didn’t call it Founder’s Day or Pioneer Days or Patriot Day—which speaks to a sensibility of the multi-cultural make-up of the community. And, for good grief, the original people’s, even the name Okemos all speak to indigenous people. So an overlay of white supremacy wouldn’t have gone over well either. Simply Meridian Days. There was a Green Fair of which our bike shop participated, a Farmer’s Market, the obligatory food trucks, and in the evening: FIREWORKS!!! I love fireworks. Always have. One of my earliest memories (and, remember, this blog is about memories—collecting and archiving them as writers for future work or distilled into smaller flash pieces) is watching a fireworks show from a rooftop. Now I’m not sure where this was as even as a baby we lived on Hadley Ave. in Kettering, but nevertheless I remember Mom handing me over and all of us getti...

Where Foster Beach becomes Omaha Beach, where the shock and awe of Baghdad rocks Lakeshore Drive, where everyone in the city not only owns a gun but an arsenal of fireworks. Where the sky lights up and the buildings reverberate the chest-thumping KABOOM, where all night long m80s punctuate the city soundscape, and the pop-pop-pop of Blackcats compete with infrequent gunfire. Where Roman candles sizzle and burst setting off car alarms and where children chase falling sparks as if they’re fireflies. Where screamin’ meemies spin and whistle while overhead pinwheels of color blossom and dissolve into a shower of stars, once alive but now extinguished, leaving behind contrails of vapor. We shake the numbness from our ears. Where even the moon smolders behind a haze of red, green, and yellow and sulfur clouds hang suspended, making the apparitions below seem as if they are moving in slow motion. Where each concussive blast answers with yet another explosion, louder than the last. Where ...

Promotion: we've all heard about it, but in today's Internet world full of Twitters and Tweets and multiple Facebook personalities, many authors are having a hard time keeping their message on track. I belong to several professional writer groups and a current conversation at one of the listserves is about the real-life effect of using social media to promote an author's work. There's only so many people or "friends" we can reach and the questions revolve around how to cast a wider net. After publishing last month Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir I sat down to plot a strategy. One of which was to contact blogs and on-line sites dedicated to flash. That's how I stumbled upon Flash Fiction World . At the site are definitions and examples of flash--specifically fiction. I was particularly struck by the various definitions given for flash.  snip-- I once asked an avid FF reader friend of mine "what is flash fiction to you?" With a smi...