Flash Gardens, and Other Short Fiction

This first volume of Flash Gardens compiles short fictional pieces by the author, written over a span of years and mostly all published in journal and magazines in both America and abroad. The author contends that all poetry and fiction is autobiographical in the sense that experience filters through an individual mind and must therefore reflect the wisdom or ignorance of that mind as well as temperamental quirks, psychological issues, philosophical biases and breadth of knowledge....
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This first volume of Flash Gardens compiles short fictional pieces by the author, written over a span of years and mostly all published in journal and magazines in both America and abroad. The author contends that all poetry and fiction is autobiographical in the sense that experience filters through an individual mind and must therefore reflect the wisdom or ignorance of that mind as well as temperamental quirks, psychological issues, philosophical biases and breadth of knowledge. This is nothing new-the so-called New Journalism of the sixties and seventies made a similar point: because reportage is interpreted by individual minds, "objectivity" is an illusion (example-the work of Hunter Thompson). Hence, in some way, whatever the occasion or subject matter, the fiction in Flash Gardens represents the impressions and "takes" of the author, whether the subject matter involves genuine physical experiences or musings upon science or psychological dilemmas.The locale of the stories shifts mostly between places the author has known well either by living within or visiting-mainly New Orleans and southwest Virginia. The characters are almost inevitably people the author knows and has known, with proper fictional alterations. The tone of the stories varies wildly, from acute sentimentality to the aforementioned illusion of objectivity. But their overwhelming climate seems melancholy (tempered often by dashes of humor) that involves an aching sense of loss and nostalgia for the past. And why not? Our sense of the "present moment" lasts about only two hundred milliseconds, which means that the past constitutes our entire identities, while the "future" is too diffuse to fathom.