Microfiction

You CanLit nerds are probably familiar with Seen Reading, a blog run by Julie Wilson that documents instances of people reading in public. For those who aren’t, here’s the most recent post. Sadly, it was announced today that the site is no longer going to be updated – but the news isn’t all bad. The reason Wilson is moving away from the blog is that she wants to put together some of her microfiction.

Seen Reading, in addition to listing these sightings of people buried in their books, also frames each entry with a little ‘microfiction’. Often just a sentence or so, it’s an imagining of not simply who that person is, but rather, some entirely oblique and fictional happening, conjured by the intersection of seeing that person, with that book, in that setting. It’s a lovely idea. I’m a big fan of highly compressed, dense short fiction. It’s for that reason that Raymond Carver and Jhumpa Lahiri are probably my favourite writers, as, using simple, bare prose, they can say more in a sentence than I can often say in a page.

But more generally, there’s something neat to the idea of microfiction at this point – and I’m not just saying that because of my pathetic attention span. Something I’ve been thinking for a while now – often in relation to Tumblr – is that given the unending glut of images and ideas we’re subjected to, sometimes, it is the fragment that stops you dead in your tracks. Rather than in the stretched stillness of reading a novel, the times I find myself suddenly overwhelmed or inexplicably choked up are those moments when, caught off-guard, I stumble across a photograph or quote on Tumblr that, for an infinitesimal moment, shifts the ground beneath me. In the shock of the oblique, I am profoundly moved. For ages now I’ve wanted to write a post called “Tumblr and the Ache of the Fragment” but have never gotten around to it – but then, maybe this small graf is enough to convey what I wanted to say.