Flash fiction: feeding a demographic composed of people without much time to read but with plenty of time to think. I used to think of flash fiction as a pompous intellectual commercial; there is something buried in there, but more often than not it doesn't want you to know what it is. The burden lay with the critic. But then I happened upon a little thing called the internet, where flash fiction has been allow to flourish outside—and even influence—academe. Amy Hempel, an author who writes in a very flash-fiction, minimalist style uses the following lines in her story "The Man in Bogotá," which textualizes my eventual change nicely: "It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive [...] He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good." The internet has without a doubt promoted the art of…
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Any form of expression is arguably one committed "under the influence." What we eat, what we say, how we walk—hell, human beings simply walking is really just a biological influence. But historically, for writers, one of the most iconic influences of all time is Absinthe—The Green Muse; a devastating liquor. Everyone from Ernest Hemmingway (his short story "Hills Like White Elephants" comes to mind) to Joey Goebel (with his novel Torture the Artist) has capitalized on the image of Absinthe. What better way to weave my own way into this cultural icon than by way of a lit mag called The Green Muse, with "Refill," a story about a man governed by substance? I suppose a better way would have been for me to actually use the word "Absinthe" somewhere in the story. But I didn't. One of my writing heroes, Denis Johnson, has a few pertinent words on…
Online literary magazines seemed to me for the longest time some form of blasphemy. Not much compares to the tactile and aesthetic appeal of a printed, bound journal. Maybe that sounds a little creepy, but I'm a creepy guy. So when writer and friend Christopher Dwyer posted over at Write Club about this online lit-mag called Dogmatika I wasn't exactly crushing keys to get over there. But call me a convert.Dogmatika was the eye opener. It stands as not only the first online lit-mag that I read with regularity, but also the first I loved so much that I felt compelled to submit my own fiction. Head over to Dogmatika now to read my short-short, "Petty Injuries." Maybe I was a literary snob. Maybe I yearned too much for the prestige that comes with a printed journal. Maybe I was too focused on the canvas, not the art. I think…
It happened sooner than I expected, sooner than I wanted, and sooner than necessary, to be sure, but it's here. And to be honest, the idea of a personal homepage still seems a bit arrogant to me. "Who cares?" right? But we all must accept the times, I suppose; must accept our technological evolutionary tendencies. As Mrs. Rose, a character in one of my current projects says, "only when you accept control can you really be free." I don't know if I agree with that, but it justifies this ego-trip homepage swimmingly. This is the Caleb Ross Official Homepage (call it CROH because the acronym sounds really urban). I've held off contributing to the already brackish stagnancy that is the majority of personal online fiction sites, writing instead for me, for lit mags, for friends, but now anyone can be charged as an accomplice. For those of you who arrived…