Issue 27 / 2005
27 / Writing It Short
True stories, well told, in 750 words or less
This issue features highlights from the online journal Brevity, which challenges writers to do their best in fewer than 750 words. Writers including Robin Hemley, David Shields, Brian Doyle, and Brenda Miller tackle (briefly) topics like moth-collecting, gun shows, green plastic buckets, and much, much more. The “Best of Brevity” is anchored on both sides by some terrific new writing by prestigious and highly respected writers, beginning with “New Century,” by Natalie Goldberg—poet, novelist, essayist and author of the impressive and popular Writing Down the Bones. “Money for Nothing,” by Kevin Holdsworth, is a meditation on risk-taking. “The Slashpile Inventory,” by David Oates, tells the story of a summer spent splitting rails out West and trying to make money. In “Rock Hounds,” David Rompf traces a lifelong obsession with rock collecting. “Going, Going, Gone,” by Floyd Skloot, combines the themes of the Dodgers, Brooklyn, moving, playing baseball, writing, and growing up.
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FROM THE EDITOR: Writing It Short
This is the Brevity issue, so (to paraphrase Tom Wolfe’s introduction to “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby”) let me take time to write it short. Wolfe is a major figure in modern literary nonfiction.New Century
I have so many good memories: swimming in the Atlantic Ocean as a young girl; sleeping under the stars by the Chama River in New Mexico; eating cherry pie with my ninety-year-old mother at Hamburger Heaven in Palm Beach, Fla.;Money for Nothing
They’re still doing it but without him: adding to our lists, trying to get ourselves good and scared, bagging peaks in all kinds of weather. He’s still with us, too, with us enough to make us turn around on a late-day trail and check the environs, because we carry him around as a memory, a legend, a lesson.SPECIAL SECTION: The Best of Brevity
We’re sorry; we’re currently unable to make this work available online.Introduction: On Brevity, and Parachuting into a Literary Brush Fire
Let me keep this brief. Brevity began in Spring 1998, and I’m pretty sure the first issue had ten readers, counting the five authors and me. Though I imagined, at the time, a run of three or four issues before a gentle exit into digital oblivion, Brevity took on a life of its own.Winter Count, 1964
When Sherri Luna rammed Jerry Kruger’s crew-cut head into the handball-court wall at Kester Avenue Elementary School on Feb. 15, 1964, I knew she loved him with a swirling, butch, embarrassed sort of love that denied itself even as it was expressed.Genesis
I am sitting in the sanctuary, a few rows from the front: to my left, my mom, my dad and my little brother, Timmy, in Mom’s lap, sleeping; to my right, my older brother, Brad.Her Numbers
First there is the number I found affixed to the sole of her foot one summer night as she slept, her hair cascading, her face calm in repose, the faraway hollow ringing of a bay buoy in the night air: 75365, printed on a tiny slip of paper.Romancing the Light
Nancy and I drive in her truck down Hardscrabble Road to Hollis Barrens. The sun casts an orangey-blue light as it sinks behind the adolescent mountains of western Maine as if it lives there.Hochzeit
I remember circles—the swirling cuff of my father’s pant leg, the layered hem of my mother’s skirt. A neighbor lady polkas by, the one who yells so loud at her kids, every night when she walks to the barn, that we can hear her across the still fields.A Brief History of Sex Education
In the summer of 1979, I was Mark Merlini’s girlfriend for four hours. He lived down the street and suddenly seemed cute, so we kissed for about a half-hour on the hill behind his house, facing the Route 11 bypass in Gilford, N.H.Prince Valiant
We lived on Riverside Drive then, in the apartment once occupied by Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale. I imagined a bird from a faraway land, fluttering through the big open rooms of our apartment, hovering by the window that looked out on the Hudson, yearning to be free.Sam at the Gun Show
The kid I stand next to at the gun show and ask about pistols—which ones he likes, what he’d buy if he could, if he were 18—starts telling me about firecrackers.Alive
There is a serial killer at work in Baton Rouge, and so, as I drive into the city on this rainy, mid-August afternoon to visit family, I move from simply alert to hyper-alert.Green Plastic Buckets
There’s a particular tint to the plastic buckets in Calcutta that you can’t find anywhere else in the country. A green plastic bucket in Calcutta is not the same green that you will find in Delhi or Bombay or even Madras, close as the South Indians are to the Bengalis, brothers in intellect under the skin.A Bilingual Halloween
For 35 years she’s been speaking English. At a Korean orphanage, at age 9, she began learning English by memorizing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” learning that, in English, puppies woof woof, rather than mong mong, and that cats meow rather than yayong.Planet Unflinching
It used to be an axiom that an object cannot occupy two positions at the same time, but now, of course, one may argue that in cyberspace it is possible to do just that.You’ll Love the Way We Fly
I’m in the galley, making coffee. I try to look busy, not in the mood to talk or help. This is the fourth leg of a six-leg day, and already I’m tired.Thumb-Sucking Girl
Look at me. At me, over here. Look and shake your head all you want. At my uneven bangs, these broken-down shoes, my momma, all us kids and all our belongings shoved into just one car.My Mother’s Touch
When my mother tries to touch me, I flinch. I don’t like her to touch me at all, ever, and I don’t remember a time when we cuddled or hugged or she took me “uppy,” although it happened.Singing Like Yma Sumac
Standing on a termite mound, face-to-trunk with an elephant, I place the flat of my hand against Morula’s fluttering forehead, a forehead as cool and rough as tree bark. She’s burbling, a contented rumble that has the sound of water gurgling in a drainpipe, but she is also making sounds that I cannot hear yet can feel.Melting
I am passing the library when I see them. Fourteen men walking down a side street, all dressed alike, all stepping to the same steady rhythm. They wear black-brimmed hats with black ribbons, the kind all men used to wear before Jack Kennedy made the bare head appealing.Boat People
The women here put on their makeup like rust-proofing. Preschoolers toddle through the trailer-park mud puddles, splashing and pimp-cussing. Teenage girls in sweat pants and ratty NASCAR T-shirts smoke over parked strollers, hips set at a permanent, baby-propping cant.The Ugly Friend
In Prague my attractive friend and I meet two Swedish men at a vegetarian restaurant. We share a communal table. Outside it is raining, as is the case all this summer in various locations around Europe.A Preview of Coming Attractions
I’d hold the strap attached to his ears and mouth, lifting myself onto the leather saddle. One glass eye shone out of the right side of his head; his mouth, once bright red and smiling, had chipped away to unpainted putty.Split
My heart, these days, is much too dense to break. It would require a difficult configuration of tools—mallet, wedge, hatchet and maul—to make that kind of severance possible.Drink It
Coffee?” Mrs. Coates asked. A peculiar, grown-up question. I said yes, the grown-up thing to do, and she poured the dark liquid into a paper cup marked with squiggly lines and set the cup in front of me.Dumber Than
A box of rocks. That boy—oh, you know the one. Dropped his cat from that second-story sleeping porch just to see if it was true, what they say about cats always landing on their feet.Chop Suey
My mother was a champion bowler in Thailand. This was not what I knew of her. I knew only her expectations of me to be the perfect Thai boy. I knew her distaste for blond American women she feared would seduce her son.Free Tibet, Man!
I drive all morning, fervent and focused, finally stopping for coffee at The Waffle House near Plain City, Ohio. My car sports a “Free Tibet” bumper sticker that I picked up in Atlanta, and as I lean against the left fender, sipping my cup of mindfulness, a young man spills out of a purple school bus and starts running toward me.Loving Bald Men
Months since my nephew slid otter-slick into the doctors hands, I anoint his head with baby oil, Brailling his fate: Is baldness in his future? The first time I touched a bald man’s head, I was a grown woman, and I read in the elegant bones of his skull my future, for the next few hours at least.Fish
The fish jumped a ladder built of electricity and concrete. Swimming up the Columbia is a lesson in progress.The Paranoid Nurse
I’d spent the afternoon polishing the hull of my sailboat, which sat on a trailer in my front yard in Phoenix. Now it was night. I was standing next to the boat in the moonlight, admiring its pearly sheen.My Mother’s Toenails
As her memory darkened, I did not see my mother. What hold time held upon my mother loosened and, like a shawl, slipped. My father worried that she would walk out the front door in her nightgown, with an empty black purse slung over her arm, into traffic she would not see, having forgotten her glasses on the nightstand.Dessert
In Alba, Italy, rain and a market. In my hands, the white, greased paper that once held an entire rotisserie rabbit. Its bones clack together like hooves, a horse in the distance.The Slashpile Inventory
Two 16-pound sledges with green, fiberglass handles, which we had been told would reduce arm fatigue. Getting shreddy by the heads, from missed blows.Rock Hounds
On Kauai, the loveliest of the Hawaiian Islands, I’ve come to see a beach lined with steely industrial silos, barbed-wire fences and chained gates.Going, Going, Gone
I was standing in the bedroom of our Brooklyn apartment with my ear pressed to the radio. It was dark outside, a spring evening in the mid-1950s, and through the open window, I could hear people talking in the courtyard, four stories below.Interview with Alexis Wiggins
An interview with Alexis Wiggins, writer of "My Mother's Touch"Interview with David Shields
An interview with author David Shields, author of "A Preview of Coming Attractions"Interview with David Oates
An interview with David Oates, writer of "The Slashpile Inventory"Interview with Brenda Miller
An interview with Brenda Miller, writer of "Split"Interview with Cheryl Merrill
An interview with Cheryl Merrill, writer of "Singing like Yma Sumac"Interview with Patricia Ann McNair
An interview with Patricia Ann McNair, writer of "Drink It"Interview with Lee Martin
An interview with Lee Martin, writer of "Dumber Than"Interview with Sonja Livingston
An interview with Sonja Livingston, writer of "Thumb-Sucking Girl"Interview with Stuart Lishan
An interview with Stuart Lishan, writer of "Winter Count, 1964"Interview with Lynn Kilpatrick
An interview with Lynn Kilpatrick, writer of "The Ugly Friend"Interview with Lori Jakiela
An interview with Lori Jakiela, writer of "You'll Love the Way We Fly"Interview with Kevin Holdsworth
An interview with Kevin Holdsworth, writer of "Money for Nothing"Interview with Robin Hemley
An interview with Robin Hemley, writer of "Prince Valiant"Interview with Matthew Gavin Frank
An interview with Matthew Gavin Frank, writer of "Dessert"Interview with Kate Flaherty
An interview with Kate Flaherty, writer of "A Brief History of Sex Education"Interview with Laurie Lynn Drummond
An interview with Laurie Lynn Drummond, writer of "Alive"Interview with Kelly Cherry
An interview with Kelly Cherry, writer of "Planet Unflinching"Interview with Greg Bottoms
An interview with Gregg Bottoms, writer of "Sam at the Gun Show"Interview with Anjana Basu
An interview with Anjana Basu, writer of "Green Plastic Buckets"Interview with Marcia Aldrich
An interview with Marcia Aldrich, writer of "My Mother's Toenails"