Meg Pokrass

“Damn Sure Right” reviewed by Ann Bogle at Fictionaut’s new “Books” feature!

Meg Pokrass — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:42:24 +0000

Books at Fictionaut: Damn Sure Right

Feb 2, 2012 in Books at Fictionaut with 5 Comments

To publish: 1) to produce in a format so that a number of people can read it; 2) to produce in the proper venue for achieving authority and prominence.

-Mark Wallace

Flash fiction is finding a home at last through the free waves of the Internet. Its deployment as a genre-long overlooked and passed over by traditional publishing houses and literary journals and magazines-is surprising its writers as much as its readers. Supposedly, our attention spans have been weakened by television and by the Internet itself, and many of us find ourselves unable to read long works of fiction-the novels of the past. According to this theory, a glitch in our collective brains suddenly attracts us to flash fiction’s brevity and wit. Our interest in it is evolutionary and environmental. There is ongoing debate-for some people interested in definition, it is more like a meditation-about the differences between flash fiction and prose poetry. As with poetry, in flash fiction, it becomes less important to know, at the outset, whether a given story is true (”It happened,” as Mary Karr would have it) or the author invented it (”lied”).

Many of the 88 stories that make up Meg Pokrass’s debut collection of stories, Damn Sure Right (Press 53, 2011, 174 pages) appeared in journals on the Internet before their collection as a paperback. I had read many of them there, as each appeared, one at a time, one surprising turn of phrase at a time, turning each over as I held it like a dime or shiny nickel. I had considered their place in literary time, their linguistically joyful yet thematically sorrowful insistence on original response. I had read them vertically, scrolling down a page, slowly, incrementally, my hand on a mouse, as if their power were shared between writer and reader, as if in reading, I had had something to do with their creation, if reception is needed for artistic completion.

I have read in interviews on the Internet that Pokrass trained in acting and practiced in poetry before discovering her unique vision, voice, and form in flash fiction a few years ago. Perhaps no other writer of flash fiction has found her métier as certainly as Pokrass has. Each story and its inner units-inflection, dialogue, image, word choice, tone-deliver what her readers by now have come to expect from her: a whipping, sad humor that challenges not only our understanding of what “fiction” is meant to achieve in a compact space, but of how we feel, now, in this year past the millennium, to be living in America, to be writers on the Internet, to be connected to one another as purveyors of writing, small packages of words nowhere created more succinctly and brilliantly than in Pokrass’s neat and quirky parables.

This is how many words I need to write to fill out the review to equal 500 words for publication. What words would I add at this moment? Damn Sure Right.

Ann Bogle has been a member at Fictionaut since July 2009. She is fiction reader at Drunken Boat, creative nonfiction and book reviews editor at Mad Hatters’ Review, and served formerly as fiction editor at Women Writers: a Zine. She earned her M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Houston in 1994. Her stories have appeared in journals including Blip, Wigleaf, Metazen, Istanbul Literary Review, The Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Fiction International, Big Bridge, Thrice Fiction, fwriction : review, THIS Literary Magazine, and others. Her short collections of stories, Solzhenitsyn Jukebox and Country Without a Name, were published by Argotist Ebooks in 2010 and 2011. Books at Fictionaut will run the first Thursday of each month and feature reviews of books published by Fictionaut contributors.

30 day prompt program

Meg Pokrass — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:26:56 +0000

$40

for 30 days – PROMPTS SENT to you daily

for 30 days. feedback at completion

e-mail me at megpokrass (at) gmail (dot) com to let me know you are interested.

Meg Pokrass is an associate editor for Frederick Barthelme’s BLIP MAGAZINE (formerly Mississippi Review), and director of the Fictionaut Five author interview series (Fictionaut). She is the author of “Damn Sure Right” (88 flash fiction stories) 2011, Press 53. Meg has judged many flash fiction competitions recently including The Newport Review Flash Fiction Contest, NYC Midnight, and the Press 53 Open Awards. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, Meg has served a panelist for the National Book Critics Circle Award panels on new writing.

“Damn Sure Right” blurbs and reviews: “Wonderful, dark, unforgiving. “Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body” (Frederick Barthelme) debut by Meg Pokrass, “conveys entire worlds that are touching, haunting, funny, moving, and strange in the most beautiful ways” (Jessica Anya Blau). “The brew master of flash” (Sean Lovelace), making her the “new monarch of the delightful and enigmatic tiny kingdom of micro- and flash fiction” (Brad Watson). This collection of eighty-four tales is sure to “ruin your waking hours the way you’ll want them ruined” (Kyle Minor).

Excerpt from New Pages Review by Tessa Mellas

Meg Pokrass’s collection Damn Sure Right packs in a whopping eighty-eight stories. Short-shorts. Flash fiction. Whatever you call them, Meg Pokrass is their queen. She’s made a career out of flash fiction. She teaches flash fiction workshops nationally and has published over a hundred pieces in journals. In a market that goads short story writers to crank out novels, she’s firm in her commitment to keep it tight. But while most of us literature lovers have enjoyed a brilliant short-short in our time, few of us have read a whole book of them or even know how.

In Mid-American Review’s “What We’re Reading”… a lovely review of “Damn Sure Right”

Meg Pokrass — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:57:50 +0000

Mid-American Review Volume XXXl Number 2

Damn Sure Right by Meg Pokrass.

Winston-Salem, N.C.: Press 53, 2011.

184 pages. $14.95, paper.

Eighty-eight burning fictions constitute the ambitious Press 53 debut, Damn Sure Right, by author Meg Pokrass, and they range anywhere from one to four pages in length—sometimes little more than a paragraph.

Fictions detailing Renaissance fairs, Burning Man, and personified sex drives, Pokrass’ writing fully displays the exciting versatility of flash. Her words are expertly crafted, lean, and thoroughly enjoyable; every sentence bucks and kicks and is alive. The language in this collection throttles the reader. Take, for instance, the opening sentence from “Team,” one fiction by Pokrass which spans only a single paragraph. The fiction finds a narrator musing over a person who recently changd her profession and her life, but not a thing appears reformed to any distinguishable degree:

Because people are used to getting what they want from her, the dogs have become a team, she is their leader and even that is a lie.

In this sentence, one finds the narrator of the fiction not believing there ever was a team, or that “she” (whoever she really is) was ever a part. It is said that she “trots after” the dogs when “nobody’s around”—both the dogs, those who need her, getting what they want. Sentences that follow further dispel a darker history, but she magnitudes of Pokrass’ words never overshadow any sort of semblance of story. One story which comes to mind, having this sort of prowess, is “The Big Dipper,” wherein a girl’s mom buys a four foot pool, lets the girl invite some friends over for a swim, but only one friend makes it. The story explores such themes as jealousy and sexual curiosity. The narrator is jealous of her friend’s “womanly breasts,” and they discuss the similarities of the Big Dipper to a crooked penis.

Think: a story, the history of the character, in only a sentence. It is here, in Damn Sure Right, and we are certain of the circumstance. Length is irrelevant. Pokrass’ flash is capable of unpacking its every moment. Throughout Damn Sure Right, one can be certain there is no sacrifice of character, setting, or any other generic structure of story. Even in the smallest fictions by Pokrass, those like “Team,” there exists a character, a history.

With every word, Damn Sure Right builds momentum. It is an engaging debut engorged with many voices. This book and its contained fictions prove Pokrass knows her words.

–Jason Teal, MAR

My new McSweeney’s Holiday Beer List is up!

Meg Pokrass — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:38:20 +0000

and… here it is!

“best read”, a review, a story…

Meg Pokrass — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:48:22 +0000

C4 Literary Review Best Read and a review…

“Nights” a flash fiction story is up at Superstition Review. I’m thrilled to be in a magazine which is also running work by brilliant Dorianne Laux. A dream come true for me.

“Damn Sure Right” spotted for sale at City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco…

Meg Pokrass — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 07:36:29 +0000

Buy "Damn Sure Right" at City Lights Bookstore, SF,

My lovely friend, co-founder of 826 D.C., holds a copy of “Damn Sure Right” at City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco…

An interview with me at THIS magazine

Meg Pokrass — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 06:44:32 +0000

My interview at THIS Magazine

4 micros at “Menacing Hedge” magazine

Meg Pokrass — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:50:57 +0000

4 of my micros -

please check out the wonderful “Menacing Hedge” – a wonderful journal

Meg Pokrass — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:01:30 +0000

Superstition Review video -

I was asked to talk about the creative process and how I wrote my story “Nights” – coming soon to Superstition Review. And so… I do! Thank you to Bob Hicok who was my inspiration for this story.

at elimae…

Meg Pokrass — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:23:55 +0000