Finding a Format for Very Short Fiction
Wigleaf is an online literary journal that publishes flash fiction under 1,000 words, and they post 1-2 stories a week, compiling a Top 50 list at the end of the year. Before I'd been assigned the magazine for review, I’d visited the site and heard about it via other literary magazines. It seems to have a pretty solid reputation, and will publish both unknown writers and previously-published writers. I do enjoy flash fiction and was excited to spend some time with a magazine dedicated to it beyond my previously brief exploration.
The writing in Wigleaf is pretty well varied. There are stories in all kinds of P.O.V.s, narrative distances, sentence lengths, themes, and forms, and the editors do a good job of making sure that similar narrative structures aren’t placed next to each other to give the magazine a more varied tone. For example, the piece "Aviation" by Sarah Tourjee, which has short sentences and a rather far narrative distance, is placed right next to "Clyde Frazier" by Salvator Pane, which has longer sentences and a much more straight-forward structure, as well as a closer narrative distance.
There doesn't seem to be an interest in genre fiction here, but that may be a result of the form--flash fiction tends to be more literary--rather than an editorial choice. Also, although there is no minimum on word count, I didn’t see any, say, 25 word stories. All of the pieces seemed to be at least 100 words long, with the exception of one, "The First Sign of Holes" by Lucas Southworth, which was 57. Again, this may be a result of the type of submissions they’re getting rather than an editorial choice, but something to keep in mind.
Overall, the largest disappointment I found in reading Wigleaf was not so much the content as the form of the magazine itself. Wigleaf feels resoundingly casual but uninviting. The layout of their website is spare, full of white space, and appears outdated in comparison to other online journals.
Allow me a rant, because I find this important: this is an online magazine, thus all the more important that their site is functional and encouraging for readers to experience. (The point of having a story published is so that people will read it, right?) Instead, we have a single page of frames. There are a list of stories – all interrupted by “Dear Wigleaf” posts, which I will get to later – in descending order. Each time you click on a story, rather than being able to move onto the next story by the next author (as in, say, turning a page in a physical magazine to view the next story or poem), one must go back to the home page. It’s one extra click that feels like a punishment and interrupts the flow of the reading. In fact, one can’t even click-through to the same author’s “Dear Wigleaf” submission. The only time there is the option of a click-through is when a writer has submitted two stories for that post, and in that case the only way to get to the second story is to click through the first one. Imagine if every time you wanted to read the next story in a magazine you had to close the magazine, go to the index, and then flip open to that exact page. There are websites in which Wigleaf’s format is acceptable, but considering it takes approximately 3 minutes to read the average piece, I spent way too much time hitting the back button. It felt like I should just be getting a weekly e-mail rather than trying to read it as a journal itself.
So that’s a frustration on the part of a reader, but here’s another one as a writer: each piece doesn’t have its own unique URL. Well, that’s a lie – they do, but they’re hidden behind Wigleaf’s frames. If you don’t know what those are, well, that’s exactly the point. This means that in order for the authors – or just fans of the authors – to share their pieces on Wigleaf, someone has to go to the Wigleaf home page and find the author on the front page. This isn’t so huge of a deal on the front page, but eventually the pieces get moved to the archives, and then, well, good luck. You can search authors by last name, but the whole thing would be simplified if the writer could post a link directly to their piece to promote it. Currently Wigleaf is asking readers to take an extra step at the author’s expense.
Wigleaf also does a repeated column called “Dear Wigleaf” for every author (there are a few exceptions) on the site and, under a separate link from their piece of flash fiction, that author starts off a paragraph or so with “Dear Wigleaf.” I question their purpose. They interrupt the space between each story and are a kind of introduction to the author… except that they’re not. Rather, they’re additional pieces of flash fiction that are “addressed,” mostly arbitrarily, to Wigleaf. There are a few exceptions in which, say, postcards are posted, and once in a while there is some kind of musing on art or the process of writing, such as with Jon Steinhagen’s Dear Wigleaf piece, who says: “We create this Art and we want it to go well and we want it to reach Strangers as well as Friends and hope we won't have Enemies.” These few exceptions manage to be interesting, but for the most part the Dear Wigleaf section shows off wordplay while potentially distracting from the journal's true gems--its stories.
Wigleaf is decidedly minimalist, extending to their about page where they explain their submissions process and joke, “Simultaneous subs are fine, as long as... You know all this, right?”
Still, despite my frustrations with the incredibly awkward movement through the magazine, the questions raised by the Dear Wigleaf pieces, and the lack of unique URLs, Wigleaf is worth reading if only because of their ability to choose strong pieces of flash fiction. “The Siamese Twins” by Megan Kruse is a piece about the narrator and her sister who are Siamese twins and the narrator experiences loneliness for the first time. There are also pieces with incredible senses of voice, such as Jon Steinhagen’s flash fiction called “Alabama vs. Chengdu” which starts off “Caster learning to meander like the canals. Feet killing me. R.F. saying yes, hers too.”
Lucas Southworth’s piece “The First Signs of Holes” makes great use of wordplay, the language fun and yet telling of the character: “Your jeans predict the future, I said. If you ever have holes in them then there must be holes in everything.”
In “Photograph—Abu Ghraib Spring Dance, 2004” Joe Kapitan gets inside the head of the picture takers at Abu Ghraib, infusing violence and sorrow into a space only 300 words long. He writes, "I looked around the room and all I saw were Iraqis worn down to weeks left, and all of us good guys who feasted daily on our own damage..."
Additionally, Mary Miller’s story “Break” considers a man whose life has been filled with more tragedy than joy and wonders if he’s going anywhere, who calls himself a dishwasher although he’s training to be a doctor. “He missed the place he used to wash dishes, the Four Leaf Clover or something, how all he'd had to do was make dirty things clean. How, at the end of each shift, he'd been too tired to think.”
These are stories that stick with you because you can imagine the world beyond them despite their brevity. I only wish that Wigleaf would find a way of making each piece stand out as individual rather than make us fight so hard to get to them.
