"The Flatlander" by Courtney Pasko / Grist Journal
- Short Story Shoutout
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
Are you capitalizing on the power of voice in your short fiction?
The first thing that struck me while reading Courtney Pasko’s “The Flatlander” (2,000 words) in Grist Journal is the piece’s voice. I read a lot of published stories for Shoutout, and I’m surprised by how many of them are hyper focused on things like setting description or pacing or character development, dialogue, without giving the voice that carries the whole its due. Seeing as it’s the pack mule that gets you up into the mountains of story, voice is pretty important.
And to be clear, by voice I mean the particular disposition or personality of the whole, no matter who is doing the telling. Things like word choice and sentence structure bear that out. “The Flatlander” is first-person narrated, so voice is especially important. More so, seeing as this is also a cautionary tale.
Maybe like me, you’re still tortured by the memory of the head-on collisions that befell the less vigilant in High School Driver’s Education films of yore. Or the equally cautionary and similarly gruesome teen slasher film equation [(attractiveness + promiscuity) x narcotics / remote location = blood loss] that sent the best minds of my generation screaming into the 90’s.
The required beats in a cautionary tale are crisp and clear, and Courtney Pasko hits them all. But as is the case with most exceptional stories, she tinkers around the edges of the form, and in doing so, elevates her story above it.
Our unnamed narrator’s feathers are ruffled by the story’s main character—a brash out-of-towner who makes himself and his family at home-on-the-weekends without acknowledging the locals in a rural location—from the very start. And we get a crystal-clear indication of where these two are headed right from paragraph one (“If that had been the beginning and end of it, it wouldn’t have gone the way it did—”), so anyone expecting level heads sharing and caring over tea and scones should know they’re paddling up the wrong river immediately.
The main character I mentioned is also not named, which is wise…for the same reason you don’t name them eatin’ hens.
In the second paragraph, the narrator takes his foot off the gas some and is more conciliatory. We get a “neighborly”, a “coulda told him,” a “their money’s as good as any of ours”. But the snarky anger is still there. This reasonable / furious push-pull is way more intriguing than one or the other alone.
Paragraph three takes an interesting turn. The narrator drops the story of the Weekend Warrior and, instead, details the first few steps in what sounds like a gnarly procedure that transforms the divide between narrator (who is Mountain, it’s safe to say) and Flatlander into a chasm. Here’s the gist of it:
A good skill to keep in your back pocket: the first thing what you can do is take a log, dried and split and all that and ready for the fire, and drill it narrow down the middle to make a cozy little channel. […] Use a funnel and—gentle now—pour some black powder into the hole. Most of the folks around here do muzzle-loading and will keep a tin of Goex or some such handy. […] And don’t be smoking when you’re working with black powder unless you got a death wish.
As you can practically hear, voice helps to define the particulars behind that growing split—like class or caste—by word choice alone (“the first thing what you can do is,” “some such”). It’s the best kind of showing-not-telling.
Pasko uses this gnarly procedure like a subplot. By dicing up and slow-revealing what the narrator intends to do with the fire wood, she keeps the tension ratcheted up on both story lines. By going the subplot route, she takes advantage of the writer’s best friend in that second story line—she’s created a plot “out” when she needs it. Instead of stringing together one ill-advised Flatlander infraction after another (which could get boring), she’s able to jump out of the A-line to detail more about that B-line (the gnarly procedure); another reason to consider using subplots to help keep your stories moving.
But the big reveal in this story comes near the close. And since we’ve been primed from the start for something ugly, getting an ironic twist is a welcomed development.
It would have made Ray Bradbury (he of Fahrenheit 451) proud.
Founded in 2007 by graduate students in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Tennessee, Grist is a nationally distributed journal of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews, and craft essays.
Published annually every spring, each issue is accompanied by Grist Online, which features some of the best work they’ve received during their reading period. In addition to general submissions, Grist holds the Pro Forma Contest every spring, recognizing unpublished creative work that explores the relationship between content and form.
The editors at Grist seek work of high literary quality from both emerging and established writers. They welcome all styles and aesthetic approaches. Grist is committed to diversity, inclusivity, cultural interchange, and respect for all individuals who are part of the literary community. They welcome submissions from writers in every stage of their career and are especially interested in considering work from emerging writers. More than 90% of the content of their most recent issues has come from unsolicited submissions. They love discovering new voices.
Their submission fee is $3 for one work of fiction up to 7,000 words (they are also open to considering flash pieces as long as they are submitted in one document and do not total over 7000 words). The bulk of their reading fee goes to paying writers; the rest covers their Submittable fees and a portion of their publishing costs.
While not yet announced for this year, their submission window has been from 8/1 through 10/31 in the past. Average response time is six months. Submissions will be considered for publication in either the print issue or online. Payment is 1 cent per word for prose (up to $50), as well as a contributor copy.
Read more of Courtney Pasko’s great work at her website.
Many thanks to Courtney Pasko and Grist for inviting us to sit beside the roaring fire that is “The Flatlander.”
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