Sehr Flash: Fiction Becomes Music

(from “sehr Rasch,” a German tempo marking for very fast music)
Good flash makes us think for longer than the time we’re reading it. In a perfect moment, we take in a story and consider its parts by line, allow the intricacies of a piece to settle, simmer on why those baby shoes were for sale, ask ourselves what lies between the words, what could grow from the page. Flash as a form allows and even leads to this pleasure, but due to the shortness of the pieces, we sometimes risk forgetting what can be done, or quickly move on.
Sehr Flash: Fiction Becomes Music is a collaboration between flash writers—Callie Collins, Kelly Luce, Michael McGriff, Vincent Scarpa, Jessica Richardson, and Matthew Salesses—and classical music composers—Russell Podgorsek and Hermes Camacho—that seeks to explore and expand the spaces created by written works by using fiction as prompts for the music writing process, to blend the two story telling forms.
The resulting collaborative works are published here, as well as on our website at nanofiction.org/music.
As you read through the following stories, we ask that you create an experience that transcends the margins we have created here. Open your web-browser or phone and listen to the works as you read, or before you read, or even after. Consider the sheet music that follows each story—how the music in its written and auditory forms serve as a translation, an addition, or response to the written pieces, how it gives or takes away meaning from the written word. Carve a space for yourself between each of the collaboration’s forms—the written text, the sheet music, the actual music—and exist in that space for a while before leaving the work. Explore how the pieces work, move, and breathe together, or apart.
And most importantly, enjoy.