Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence

Edited by Robert Alexander, Eric Braun, & Debra Marquart

White Pine Press $20.00

Reviewed by Glen Young

Trying to teach writing to high school students is often fraught with contradictions. While an understanding of familiar paradigms of construction is useful for new writers, such paradigms can also limit or stifle creative impulse. Some writers thrive under the guidance of rules, while others strain to move outside the lines. 

These contradictions are on full display in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (White Pine Press, 2016), a compilation of flash prose sequences from writers familiar and new, all of whom are navigating the regions between form and invention. 

Edited by Northern Michigan poet and writer Robert Alexander, as well contributors Eric Braun and Debra Marquart, the collection features more than fifty short bursts that demonstrate the form’s many possibilities.

The twentieth volume in The Marie Alexander Poetry Series, founded in 1996 by Robert Alexander and Nickole Brown, the pieces here all include an accumulation of two or more prose pieces, with no segment longer than 500 words.

In her introductory note on the collection, Brown explains the value here is “what happens between the segments,” as the “white space often crackles with its own energy, acting sometimes as connective tissue” (12).

There is an abundance of such connective tissue throughout.

In “Little Signs,” for example, Leah Browning pieces together three segments plumbing the divide she experiences. She is caught between her aging and unfiltered mother, and the uncertainty of what comes next, whether immediately or beyond. Browning’s arrangement is at once familiar yet jarring; she conveys, both in the narration and the omission, how aging exacts a toll on both the caregiver and the cared for.

In “Hospital,” Jim Harrison amplifies his white space between several short bursts that begin with a dream where he finds he is “chest-high in the wheat field with wind blowing in shimmering circles,” before spotting the hospital, where he imagines “the surgeons in the basement sharpening their knives” (158). 

When Harrison’s recovery from an unspecified malady does not go well, his doctors ship him to the Mayo Clinic, “an immense Pentagon of health machinery,” where he laments, “There was no red wine and no cigarettes—only the sick who tore at the heart” (158).

Through several other memories and moves, Harrison admits, “I need my place in the Upper Peninsula near Lake Superior”—what he knows as his “grace on earth, [his] only church” (160). This recollection on the reverent is nothing new for Harrison, though it still serves well here, suggesting a route through the unwelcome territory of pain.

There are plenty of other examples here too, from the explosive to the subtle, that cross genres and blend narrative styles, as Nothing to Declare pushes at the idea of genre and form, illustrating how the notion of limitation is quickly shed in these combinations of linked flash prose.

Glen Young is a teacher, writer, kayak guide, and house painter. His poetry has appeared in The Walloon Writers Review and the anthologies Beneath the Lilac Canopy and Thoreau at Mackinac. He is a founding member of the Foundation for Teaching and Learning as well as the Little Traverse Literary Guild. He serves on the board of the Harbor Springs Festival of the Book and the Mackinac Arts Council. He divides his time between Petoskey and Mackinac Island in northern Michigan.