I look at the newspaper photo of the latest invader of the Pacific Northwest, where I live. The yellow ruler with its black calibration documents the two-inch “Murder Hornet.” A thing of nightmares, the Asian Giant Hornet sports huge, black, demon eyes set in an orange mask like a super villain. Its amber lacquer wings produce a drone as loud as a model airplane. The orange and black barred body flashes “Danger, Danger.” What brought back memories of past horror was not the bug but the ruler. “Write an essay about a ruler,” scribed Mrs. Towson across the blackboard in my high school English class.
Now in a MFA program, let me protest that writing a traditional formal essay about flash nonfiction is like putting gills on an ant. Not only is it painful but it is useless. Don’t do it. Forget the structure of the formal essay. Instead “Float like butterfly, sting like a bee.” First, I have to dance with my lyricism, grab your attention like a peacock spider flashing his abdomen with its abstract design and iridescent colors to court his female.
My web of words needs to be tightly woven. If not, the fly, who is the reader, will escape and go buzzing “I’m lost, I’m lost.” Readers are like that. Capture your reader with a fascinating opening. Lure them in with metaphors and subtext. Fascinate them with rhythm and meter. Vary sentence length. Use long sentences to cause the reader to wander, wail, and wound, or soothe, salvage, or speculate. Let a simple sentence shiver. Both styles can pinch like a pisant. Remember alliteration can be as over used as cliches.
In the eighteenth-century Calvinist sermon, an angry God dangles a spider over the fires of hell, saying “Repent, repent.” I have learned that to write effective flash nonfiction, I dangle over the same fires as I cry out “Revise, Revise.” Personally, I think Dante forgot to list revision as the eighth level of hell.
Writing flash nonfiction doesn’t have to sting like a hornet or haunt like a demon. For the present-me it involves finding a topic that is fascinating—something about which I can’t wait to tell a friend or a select readership. When I was a young pupa, I believed breaking rules might result in, horrors, a poor grade or, worse, rejection. Now that I’ve hatched, my challenge is to better learn how to swat those set-in-stone rules of the essay. Annie Dillard strives for “a structure that arises from the materials and best contains them,” rather like Japanese honey bees have learned how to kill an invading Asian Giant Hornet by swarming it and cooking it to death with the heat generated by their wings.
In Greek mythology, Pegasus was the horse of the Muses. Why can’t a horse be a muse for a modern writer? P. S. Nolf’s passion is writing about horses, history, and humor—often featuring her Icelandic horse Blessi—in publications such as Equus and Les Crinieres Islandaises. Other articles have appeared in Fourth River (Chatham University), Page & Spine, and Scarlet Leaf. While earning her MFA at Lindenwood University, she is writing a narrative nonfiction book Rough Riding Through the White House: Archie and Quentin Roosevelt and their Pony Algonquin.
