
The Hand of Bruce Holland Rogers
If you look closely at issue six of The Los Angeles Review, you won’t find Bruce Holland Rogers’ name anywhere. You will see his hand, however, on every page. Rogers, a talented and generous author, is the literary godfather of LAR’s editorial staff. As one of the founding faculty at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts on Whidbey Island, he has been a major influence on the development of our storytelling aesthetic. We each reveled in Rogers’ must-take class on the short form–some of us more than once–examining each selected piece like a pickpocket searching a stolen purse for treasure. Not only did we discover tricks and techniques for use in our own writing, we honed an appreciation for the quirkiness of flash. Lydia Davis, Barry Yourgrau, Russell Edson, WS Merwin and collections like In Brief and Short Takestaught us what can be accomplished in fewer than 1,000 words.
Long-time fans of the journal may have noticed a recent proliferation of fiction and prose poetry that fits neatly on one page. Issue seven will feature even more shorties in nonfiction. Not to worry; we still love the well-developed story, full of rich setting and complex characters. We still long for essays that dazzle us with compelling arguments spun across many, many paragraphs. Our poetry editors still swoon over a perfectly-chosen line break. But give us a piece, in any genre, that delivers an experience with as much implied between the lines as we see on the page, with an ending that is surprising and inevitable, with a fresh hit on being human, and we will follow you anywhere.
You can give the credit for that kind of devotion to Rogers. For years he trained us with a steady supply of flash fiction through his email subscription service shortshortshort. Three times every month a gem plunked into our in baskets, brief enough to read on an iPhone or between work assignments (without getting caught). Given the demands on Rogers’ time and the rigor of his in-house editor, Holly Arrow, you never knew when the little jewels might appear—some months even grew extra days to accommodate his schedule. Now, learning Hungarian for an upcoming Fulbright in Budapest, teaching short forms to another crop of Whidbey-ites, and finishing a novel, Rogers has put shortshortshort on temporary hiatus. He promises it will reappear in the new year.
For those of us with lonely in baskets, Rogers has made his novel-in-progress, Steam, available by subscription. Steam is a novel of 135 chapters and an epilogue, patterned after Moby Dick. The story sets out to demonstrate through three generations of the Clark family that bipolar disorder, steam locomotives, and the futures market are all the same thing.
We don’t have to wait on the wharf for the next installment like New Yorkers desperate for their Dickens—we just need to remain in the halo of the nearest wifi. Rogers has completed 124 chapters and will write the final eleven in late November and December, emailing chapters as they come off his screen. Subscribers who join now will receive one file containing all the chapters to date. Subscriptions cost $10 and are available by emailingBruce@sff.net. Patron subscribers, $35, will receive a signed copy of the “best first edition” of Steam when (if?) it is published.
Last year, when Kate and Mark at Red Hen Press entrusted issue #6 to the Whidbey grads, Rogers stepped up to serve as our guide, sensei, and advisor—literary and otherwise. We each picked our favorite Bruce stories, previously only available to his subscribers, and asked for permission to put them in LAR. He told us it would be unseemly to be advisor and author for the same issue. Now we are groveling for at least one to put in issue #7! We are a tenacious lot.
To find out more about Bruce and/or buy a collection of his fabulous short stories, go to www.shortshortshort.com orhttp://www.sff.net/people/bruce/ .
We always recommend you support authors and small presses directly whenever possible. For the other times, please find Amazon links below.
Thirteen Ways To Water And Other Stories
The Keyhole Opera
Word Work: Surviving and Thriving As a Writer
Wind Over Heaven