Flytrap #6 is the latest issue of this little jewel of a ‘zine published twice a year by Tropism Press.
As usual, this issue of Flytrap includes the quirky combination of personal newsletter and literary magazine that gives it so much of its personality. In addition, this particular issue offers four short poems and a nonfiction critique on the art of reading poetry aloud, which makes it highly recommended for those who enjoy science fiction and fantasy poetry.
“419 Memoirs,” by Michael Canfield is the first story in the chapbook and one of the strongest pieces in this issue. Through a bizarre but believable collection of emails, the story questions the idea that email and other modes of instant communication have made us more connected and less isolated. The emails are from a loosely connected group of people who experience, either in real-time or through virtual means, each others’ attempts at communication. The subjects of the emails range from the pleas of an abandoned husband for his runaway wife to return home, to an Internet fraud racket being perpetrated by one of his employees, to the histrionics of a young woman who insists that the fictionalized autobiographies that she posts online qualify her as a professional writer. Most poignant of all are the emails of a Justice Department employee whose job it is to snoop through these emails in the name of “security,” and it is she who expresses the gestalt of all the would-be communicators when she says that all these communications represent the desperate need to “. . .feel connected . . . like something is going on here, something tangible, meaningful.”
Featured poet Jon Hansen provides four short poems, “Seven Songs the Fantasy Writer Sings to His Newborn Baby,” “The Goblin Party,” “Universal Language,” and “The Laundromat Advances the Plot.” The first and last of these are particularly delightful, as they both play with the link between the question of “where do writers get their ideas?” and the often whimsical but ephemeral scraps of stories we share with one another every day.
Jed Hartman provides a nice complement to the poetry in the issue in his nonfiction piece “Words and Stuff: Overstressed, Understressed,” in which he critiques what he refers to as the “poetry voice,” or that often stilted unnatural speaking voice people — including poets — use to pronounce poetry aloud. Hartman offers some very useful advice for those who wish to perform poetry, either their own or someone else’s.
In the short story “When We Slew Dragons,” Jennifer Schwabach pokes gentle fun at attempts to “rehabilitate” the politically incorrect elements of sword and sorcery stories as three aging adventurers attempt to go home again by going on a quest to kill a dragon. The dialogue is witty and wonderfully wacky, as in this exchange:
“Goblins are people, too,” Gorbag said. “Just because they’re shorter and greener doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings.”
“See what I mean?” Stik said. “Things just aren’t what they used to be.”
The story provides a funny and sweetly nostalgic look at the guilty pleasures of the sword and sorcery genre.
One of my favorite regular Flytrap features is Nick Mamatas’s column on writing, “Life Among the Obliterati,” and this issue is no exception as Mamatas takes a long hard (and ironic) look at what he calls the “MFA Cliché,” in which he discusses his experiences participating in a Master of Fine Arts program. It was alternately funny and terrifying as it highlighted the discrepancies between the kind of writing advice we have all received in formal classrooms and the often more pragmatic advice on writing which comes from actual experience. (Warning: the description of the snarky comments that other students contribute during the passive-aggressive and sometimes sado-masochistic exercise of the class workshop “critique” may cause flashbacks in those who have spent any amount of time in university writing programs.)
(Tropism Press, 2006)
