So often we look back at the arts wondering, “If I only could’ve been part of that clique when Monet, Picasso or Ginsburg, Kerouac or Hemingway and Fitzgerald all hung out, before they were who they are.” Today in Colorado a band of writers are doing just that—a clique building literary history.
You might not know Nancy Stohlman, Leah Roper, Kona Morris, Bryan Jansing, Johnathan Montgomery or Rob Geisen, but one day, you might. This eclectic group of writer’s has been building a platform for the arts in literature for many years. They didn’t invent flash fiction, but they are creating it. Never heard of it? Maybe not, but you’ve read it; you just didn’t know it. Also known as sudden fiction, postcard fiction and micro fiction, flash fiction has been around since the beginning of literature. Not a vignette, but about the same length, flash fiction is different in that it has all the elements of a fiction story: plot, character, tension.
Where it all began
In 1986 two great writers, Robert Sharparo and James Tomas published a book called Sudden Fiction, American Short-Short Stories. Here were stories, all under 1,000 words with plot structure, characters and all the great things that make fiction, but all in a tight little package that packed a wallop. House on Mango Street by Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros published in 1984 became the definitive flash fiction book. 
Today, flash fiction still isn’t mainstream, but it’s not forgotten — on the contrary, it’s been blossoming here in Colorado. A small writer’s group started by Bryan Jansing called Write Club became the launching pad for the movement.
After graduating from the Naropa University’s MFA writer’s program, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, started by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman (she still teaches at Naropa) in 1974, Stohlman, Roper and Morris began a publication called Fast Forward. Fast Forward would be the first, all flash fiction journal. In 2010 Fast Forward’s The Mixed Tape was the finalist for the Colorado Literary Fiction Award—never before had a journal of flash fiction been recognized. A few years later, Stohlman went on to create the Fbomb readings.
A literary movement happening in our backyard
Each month, at the Mercury Café you can meet and even sign up to read amongst this group of greats at the Fbomb reading. August 13th Jansing will be hosting “The Return of the Spaghetti Western” featuring the great and local mystery writer Benjamin Whitmer. Find out what Flash Fiction is all about. Be a witness or throw in your hat by reading something of your own and become part of a great art movement happening here in Colorado. It’s your chance to truly become part of a flash in literary history.
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