You Know What We Need? A Politically Oriented Literary Journal, That's What

But wait! We already have one: The Potomac, published by Web del Sol. Phew. I was starting to get worried there.

The Potomac's July 2010 issue just came out, and it's a heady mix of poetry, essays, reviews, and flash fiction. I don't know about you, but I seem to be getting busier with each passing moment, which is one reason why I love flash fiction so much. Good flash gives you all the high literary quality you could want, but in a very short time frame. A writing professor of mine once said that she thought the short story was a higher form of art than the novel, and I agree. (Then again, I've written lots of short stories, but I failed abjectly the two times I tried to write a novel, so perhaps I'm biased.) By that token, it might be the case that the flash piece is a higher form of art than the regular short story. And The Potomac has flash aplenty, including a really good flash-fiction piece titled "The Incident," by Wendy Skinner.

I'm not sure exactly why I like "The Incident" so much. It's not a character-oriented piece in which someone changes, or fails to change. It doesn't have a plot-oriented climax or payoff at the end. I'm not even entirely sure what the piece is really about, although my guess would be something about U.S. car culture, as hinted at by the opening paragraph (which deserves to be quoted in its entirety):

The gas station attendant on the corner was the first to realize a connection between the car accidents and later deaths. Two of his regulars, Mr. O’Leary and Mrs. Gonzales, had been involved in a rear-ender the month before, really just a honk and a scratch hardly worth mentioning. He’d witnessed the accident while checking a taillight. Both of his customers had emerged from their vehicles and exchanged driver’s licenses with no apparent discomfort. However, a day or so afterwards, the attendant ran across their obituaries in the paper: one “suddenly with the Lord” and the other “unexpectedly taken from loved ones.”

There you have it: a solid opening sentence, straightforward prose, and clear description of events; yet these workmanlike tools of the trade are married to a subtly ominous tone. The feeling of ill portent grows as the piece continues, and the story partially disregards the rules of realism as it concludes--not with an epiphany or an event, but with an image. You come away from it with that unmistakable feeling of having just participated in a good piece of literature.

I want to point out one other feature on The Potomac, and it's weird of me to even mention this piece: it's Ryn Gargulinski's review of the book The Second Elizabeth, by Karen Lillis. In other words, I'm doing a review of a review. But I really enjoyed the review because it's written in the style of the book that it reviews, and apparently the book is pretty strange:

This is a review of a book. This is a review of a book and the book reads like this. This review, and the book, both read like the ocean. They read like the swirls in an eddy. They read like the overlapping waves.

I mean, geez, what's not to like about that? "Overlapping waves." Beautiful. The whole review does indeed read that way, and it really, really made me want to read the book. Another brief excerpt:

At first it made me mad. Not mad but annoyed, like the first time I read Shakespeare or my first bout with Clockwork Orange. It was hard for me to follow. Shakespeare made me cry. But then I embraced it.

And now I want to embrace it as well, and I bet you will too if you get on over to The Potomac and see what's on offer this month.