Hear ye! hear ye! I'm on the lookout for some writers to contribute to the Up in Ontario blog. It's busting out. You don't have to be an ace at the keyboard, you don't have to deconstruct A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, you just have to tell a good story.
If you're shy, you can write from a pen name. If you're not sure if you want to have a story online, send it to me and we'll figure out what to do together. Be brave! Tell the stories that bounce around in your head while you're waiting in traffic, while you're walking along the street, while you're savouring a fine toasted sandwich. If we don't have stories to share with each other, how do we make sense of the world? All you closet storytellers out there, it's time to fish or cut bait.
Our first contributor, a friend of mine, required a little prompting to contribute at first. He and I were talking the other day and he said he had written a bunch of short-short stories that just collected on his hard drive. I told him that the genre he was working in was recognized, that contests existed dedicated to it. They call it variously microfiction, postcard fiction and matchbook fiction. In fact, the book nominated for the Giller Prize from Turnstone Press, Kilter 55, is a book of microfictions. I asked my friend to send me one of his stories, and finally he complied. The story comes next.
Posted by James Sherrett at November 17, 2003 09:22 PM