The essay is expansive. The essay meanders. To essay is to reflect, to wander, to search. The essay demands room to stretch and grow, the genre deriving power and purpose from broadening.
But some stories leave us frozen to a fixed position. Some stories tether us to trauma. Some stories are simply too big to expand any further. What do we do with what is already all-encompassing? Where do we go when painful memories already take up too much space in our imagination?
My latest essay collection, Abbreviate, is a book that examines themes that seemed “too big” to tackle in longform prose. I wanted to write about the trauma, violence, and misogyny I experienced as a child, teenage girl, and young woman, all of which marked me indefinitely, some of which left me unable to make my way freely in life. I wanted to write about how my uncle ran over his ex-wife when I was a young girl and how my middle school principal ran off with a student. I wanted to write about how my high school friend openly dated a teacher and how my first boyfriend counted my calories on a slip of paper he kept inside his pocket. I wanted to write about being sexually assaulted in college and sexually harassed in the workplace as an adult. Each of these stories was so big it became overwhelming. So I made them small.
A small collection of small essays, Abbreviate examines how the injustice and violence of girlhood leads women to accept—and even claim—small spaces and stories. Through flash, I share a girlhood shaped by neglect and abuse from adults and saved through the communal care of fierce female friends. The essays in this collection probe the girlhood play of Polly Pocket and planetariums, strobe with a sleepover blacklight illuminating teenage magic, and ricochet with the regret and rage of adult women whose lives have been constellated by harm.
Through writing this collection, I was reminded that an essay does not have to be big in order to be expansive. An essay does not have to take up many pages in order to broaden. Many times, we equate size with intellectual rigor, but it is a feminist act of reclamation to resist male-dominated trends in literature and the world. It is an act of resistance to claim forms that others deem insignificant.
The flash essay, which can range from as little as a few hundred words to around a thousand words, is a form derived from necessity. Flash is a form that revises the traditional essay in favor of another kind of exploration and expansion. By embracing brevity, writers reflect not only on their subject matter, but on the genre of creative nonfiction itself. Often used by those for whom traditional forms are inaccessible and insufficient, flash is a stark rejection of elitist literature, a bold rebranding of the essay to create a home for those the canon has long sought to exclude. Many writers of flash are those unable to spend long hours laboring over longform prose, those whose daily lives are filled with navigating sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism, for the innovative form creates safe space unafforded by a cruel world, while also critiquing this power dynamic through an overt play on size. As such, flash is a reclamation for writers who have been told their stories—and by extension, their lives—are insignificant.
Flash essays are particularly useful for serving as entry point to difficult subject matter. It is challenging enough to write about painful experiences in our lives, more so when we are expected to do so over many pages. The thought of tackling complex material over many hours writing can leave us feeling exposed and raw, overwhelmed by our painful pasts and sometimes unwilling to write about the subjects as a result. But flash reduces this burden considerably by distilling distressing memories into a shorter space. This does not mean that writing these essays is any easier, but rather that writers do not need to relive trauma as extensively as they would in longform prose. Instead, they can mine their memories for the strongest sets of images, the most important details, using reflection to succinctly render the experience for readers. Much like the use of second person, which puts a barrier between writers and the experiences they describe, flash can serve as a protective measure, encouraging writers to tackle subjects they might ordinarily avoid. The flash essay acts as a small container for a big story, providing the shelter and safety a writer might need to tell their story at all.
Because it subverts expectations about the essay, flash also offers writers unique ways to illustrate themes through form. Writers might use the essay size to mirror their content, calling attention to the significance of brief moments in their lives. Mirroring form and content allows writers to unify their attention, readers engaging with themes in several ways, thereby reinforcing them. In contrast, writers might juxtapose content with essay size, compressing many years into the span of a few paragraphs or tackling a weighty subject typically reserved for many pages. By juxtaposing form and content, writers create narrative tension, amplifying the stakes. Readers who engage with the form, surprised or relieved by the brevity, will undoubtedly turn their attention to the ways size signifies meaning, a deliberate command of their attention that speaks not only to the careful craft of the writer, but also to thematic weight of the work.
One example of the power of the flash essay to offer access into complex material is Jamaica Kincaid’s 1978 “Girl.” A mere 690 words, this essay examines a young girl’s relationship with her mother, community, and culture, as well as her burgeoning sense of self. It is also an essay that tackles complex subject matter, including the increasing demands of domestic labor, the subservient roles women are expected to keep for their community standing, romance and domestic violence, menstruation and abortion. “Wash the white clothes on Monday,” the essay begins, but quickly turns to advice like “Try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming” and “This is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child.” Written as a litany of instructions from a mother to her child about how to be a good group that’s a good woman, all occasionally interspersed with uncertain questions from the young girl meant to be absorbing this careful instruction, Kincaid’s essay derives power from its diminutive size. A single paragraph comprised of a single sentence, the essay falsely sets readers up for a quick, easy read, but what follows is an in-depth reflection on the ways we raise young girls and how this rewards silence and compliance but does not always guarantee safety.
Yet while this essay is slim, it is not without substance. While it certainly details the supposed mundanity of the domestic, the essay expands just as readers have come to expect from the genre, reflecting on larger universal truths like obedience, sexuality, gender performance, and power structures. Kincaid takes readers on a meandering journey through the constructs and confines of girlhood, until both the child in question and readers themselves are left wondering what it means to be a good girl, who these many requirements reward, and if success is even possible. These complex themes are carefully threaded, layered with image and characterization, readers compelled by a clear, resonant voice. Both mother and girl are represented in this essay, dual visions of life, the mother a representation of who the girl must eventually become, similarly expected to pass on this set of burdensome guidelines for the next generation. “This is how to bully a man,” she instructs the girl who cannot yet understand, quickly followed by, “This is how a man bullies you.” While the mother is seemingly at odds with her daughter, she seeks to provide her with the things she needs to keep herself safe through both compliance and deviance, and perhaps it is the mother’s own trauma that leads to the litany, desperate to save her daughter from her own struggles through a rigid dedication to rules. Ultimately, however, it is the juxtaposition of these broader themes with the small size of the work that makes this essay successful.
Kincaid’s work also deftly demonstrates the power of flash to unify form with content. Readers are offered Kincaid’s essay in the same fashion as adults offer advice to young girls—as a series of instructions, a list of rules girls are expected to follow without explanation or questioning, the list growing longer and longer until a child learns to live a good life, though the essay is clear to end with the girl’s failure. After reminding her daughter repeatedly to be a good girl in order to become a good woman, the mother asks in the final line, “You mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?” implying that all their work will be in vain. By presenting the essay in this form, Kincaid puts readers directly into the position of the child, overwhelmed by the litany, the increasing demands, the relentless syntax, readers desperate for relief, but finding none, growing tired and restless, burdened and breathless, as they search for a momentary pause, for a place to make sense of the guidance, which the child questions in the essay, the reader even more so, their adult perspective offering clarity on the confusing expectations adults placed on young girls. The size of the essay makes us all small children in need of instruction and constant correction, trying our best to understand the many complexities of a cruel world.
“Girl” firmly rejects the traditional confines of the essay yet still claims space in the canon. Her use of flash reinvents the essay, commanding readers pay attention to the often overlooked subject of the domestic space, woman and girl, mother and child, firmly at the forefront. Kincaid’s work also places Caribbean culture at the center, creating a new form to reflect this experience, rather than trying to fit this experience into traditional forms that have long sought to exclude marginalized writers. It is Kincaid’s deliberate use of flash to claim space for stories and writers traditionally silenced and erased, that places this piece in textbooks alongside the lengthy works of straight white male writers. Originally published as a prose poem, but also often categorized as essay or fiction, “Girl” is a work whose hybridity resists easy definition. It is precisely this blurring of boundaries that make space for fluid lives that not easily fit into the prescriptive ways of living or writing.
Encountering “Girl” as a student years ago is what gave me permission not only to write about the small stories of my girlhood, but also to embrace the power of flash. This work was one of the few pieces I encountered that spoke of the confusing expectations society demands of girls, and the ways women are expected to dole out these instructions even as they harm their daughters and themselves. It was one of the only pieces that blurred genre in a way that felt familiar to me as a queer, disabled writer. And Kincaid’s use of flash deviated so starkly from what I encountered in textbooks and anthologies that I was immediately intrigued by the ways a writer could subvert expectation while still fulfilling the expansive exploration of the essay.
Writing Abbreviate as a very short collection of very short essays allowed me to access the large struggles of my life. Without the flash form, I might not have written about these experiences at all, so overwhelmed by the task that it overshadowed me entirely. But the flash form shrunk the burden of sharing these stories while also expanding the possibility of what they might represent for me and for readers. No longer was I consumed by the challenges of writing about the painful realities of being a woman in America—growing up pressured to conceal my queer identity, expected to tolerate being belittled by a friend’s husband, and being physically assaulted by a man in a red trucker hat just after the 2016 election. Instead, flash offered a tidy container for sprawling stories, an endpoint to the telling, which was a relief from the relentlessness of trauma.
The flash essay also allowed me to write the stories of my life that others deemed too small to be important but that were nonetheless essential for me. Growing up, I was told girls should be seen and not heard, which made me feel small and encouraged my silence about not only my pain, but also my joy. I believed the things that were important to me did not matter, when really these were things girls are taught to ignore or conceal in favor of following adult convention and demonstrating obedience. But these were the stories that were essential to my girlhood—childhood games and school projects, teenage sleepovers and the first love of female friendships. These domestic tales were stories society deems too small, but they were able to claim metaphorical space and expand due to the genre fluidity of flash.
If I had believed about flash what I believed about myself, I would have thought it incapable of being expansive, of searching, stretching, growing. I would have believed it incapable of taking up space in the imagination and commanding attention. But there is purpose and power in subverting expectation, in resisting conventional modes in favor of forging new ways of knowing and being. If the essay is about reflecting the reality of our lives, flash is fitting for those of us who have been made to feel small, for those of us looking to resist the traditional ways others who sought to write stories of our lives in favor of the fluid forms we might write for ourselves.
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Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of the flash essay collection Abbreviate. She is also the author of Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice, Halfway from Home, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.
