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Brevity
Edited by Dinty W. Moore
Reviewed by Tom Hartman

	Brevity Edited by Dinty W. Moore dinty@creativenonfiction.org

In The Art of Creative Nonfiction, his how-to book on the subject, Lee Gutkind describes this emerging genre as "the literature of reality." One might also think of it as literary journalism – journalism that makes use of many of the conventions/devices normally reserved for the writing of fiction – or, less euphemistically speaking, as a version of the kind of feature writing that, since the 1980s, has come to dominate the pages of big-name glossies like GQ, Cosmo and The New Yorker. Call it what you will, there's no denying that the term creative non-fiction has entered the literary/creative writing lexicon to stay. (Indeed, the University of Pittsburgh and Goucher College now offer MFA's with a concentration in creative non-fiction.)

The appropriately named Brevity serves up a slight variation on the genre. Edited by Dinty W. Moore, this newish 'zine seeks to publish "extremely brief literary nonfiction of a crisp, concise 750 words or less, [which focuses] on detail and scene over thought and opinion." The current Brevity (no. 7) offers an intriguing sampler of the sort of work being produced by contemporary practitioners.

Although all are at least presumably fact-based, some of the pieces here read very much like microfiction, particularly Trish Harris's "Hive," which describes the dilemma of a customer service operator as she comes to the end of her shift, and Susan Kushner Resnick's "Melting," which records an encounter with a crowd of Hassidic men on a city street. Other pieces, however, such as Kathryn Hughes's poignant "When Ellie Ironed" are perhaps more accurately described as vignettes, or – perhaps more precisely still – as snapshots-in-text of a particular figure or fleeting moment in time.

When the pieces in Brevity fail, they do so because they read and feel more like excerpts than self-contained wholes. On the other hand, the most successful pieces, like Gary Scott's "Using the Fate of Insects as Lineage" (reproduced in its entirety below), achieve a density and compression normally associated with poetry. Scott has excised from his narrative all but what is absolutely necessary to convey the desired effect:

Using the Fate of Insects as Lineage

My father said honey ran down the wall in his boyhood home. It came around the metal plate covering the kitchen hole where the winter's bellied stove attached to the chimney. He told me how when the air was cool and instinct inactive, he and my grandfather hunted with sure sticks and burlap bags.

From their squatted view they made quick, quiet scrapes in the inner chimney. The heavy catch stirred strangeness and warmed fear; it did not know there were hands at the neck of the bag. The bag was tied and held away from the body. My father was alone in the basement when he placed it in the furnace. The door was shut; the coal and its castle closed. When the sack burned, it opened. It rotted like a kitchen blossom. There was the burning of flight, and nothing but the flame to fly into

More so than in any other piece, we witness – in not only the compression, but in the alliteration, the sheer music of Scott's sentences – the line between prose and poetry dissolving. Indeed, "Using the Fate of Insects as Lineage" would not be at all out of place in the pages of Peter Johnson's The Prose Poem.

Clearly, Brevity stakes out some fairly uncharted territory; it's not at all unkind to describe this 'zine as something of an experiment in progress. It should be noted, however, that Moore has suspended reading submissions until January 2001, a clear indication that more than a just a handful of contemporary writers are busy plowing this particular sub-generic field – and that's good news. The only outlet devoted exclusively to this sort of writing, Brevity should be around for some time.

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A graduate of Columbia University and The University of Pennsylvania, life-long New Jerseyan and New York Mets fan, Tom Hartman now lives in Philadelphia where he's an Associate Poetry Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. Over the years his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Photo Review, City Paper (Philadelphia), and Philadelphia Weekly. When he's not writing he spends far too much time hating the Atlanta Braves.