This Will Only Take a Minute: 100 Canadian Flashes by Bruce Meyer and Michael Mirolla (Editors)

What characterizes the 100 Canadian “flashes” is not simply their brevity, but their mystery, whether in the form of an epiphany or an enigma that has to be solved by the reader. For every writer’s flash, a reader’s flash to complement or supplement the story, often no longer than a couple of pages.

Editors Bruce Meyer and Michael Mirolla offer their own takes at the end of the volume. Meyer distills much in his single-page “Family,” where as much is left unsaid as said. Unique and universal, Meyer’s minimalism has a maximalist effect, for the family in question is not just a mistaken family, but also many families whose lives were destroyed by war. In a case of mistaken identity, the narrator meets his sister Clara in New York City after the war. If Clara’s name is meant to signify clarity through the light in her smiling green eyes, then the war darkens these features into forms of obscurity. History is foreshortened: the Germans come to the narrator’s village and destroy his family. After the war, the Red Cross locates his sister, but she is the wrong Clara with brown eyes and black hair. Over the years details blur, and the story concludes with a questioning: “Strife chews up families but time swallows them. So what is a family? Can anyone say? My sister, Clara, if she survived as the other Clara had, she probably lost the light in her green eyes.”

Meyer’s spare prose reappears in “The Boiling Point,” as catastrophe strikes another displaced family in a remote Canadian community. During a blizzard Gwen waits for a delivery of her daughter Maggie’s insulin medication. In the meantime her husband, Dave, has fallen from a repeater station, and lines of communication are down. While waiting, Gwen wants to show her daughter a magic trick involving a boiling pot that when tossed into the cold turns to snow. Her own mother had taught her this miracle, but when she tries to repeat it for her daughter, a different result occurs: “Mags gasped and Gwen dropped the empty pot as Dave’s pale shadow appeared in the sudden whir of snowflakes, his hands empty and reaching out to them.” Double emptiness, apparitions, sublimation, and boiling points evoke an atmosphere where few words cover distances.

Michael Mirolla’s “The Main Road” covers a more labyrinthine, Kafkaesque enclosure. In a single paragraph the first-person narrator finds himself lost, going up and down an escalator, emerging onto unfamiliar streets, looking for the main road to get home. When he asks a stranger for directions, the answer gestures towards Kafka: “He shrugs and begins to tell me about the land and those who own it and the others who could show me the main road because he can’t, not knowing a main road from a muddy path.”

Mirolla’s second piece, “Again at the Ministry,” is equally Kafkaesque, with its mysterious bureaucrats and unknown paths of meaning. “A pale, thin, tubercular-looking young man wearing rimless glasses sits in the corner taking notes.” He seems “strangely familiar,” and it is the quality of the uncanny atmosphere that underpins the “flashes” in This Will Only Take a Minute. Short flashes and timeless time frames of memory recur: “I finally remember who that young clerk-agent in the corner is.” The identity of the note-taker cannot be revealed, for he is both reader and writer, the unresolved enigma and epiphany.

At the very centre of the book, the editors’ choice is featured: Lynn Hutchinson Lee’s “My Heart Alive As a Sand Fly in the Towering Wave.” Lee’s best flash is poetic in nature, with a refrain “I was made to” at the beginning of several paragraphs. Refrain is a Janus word that means itself and its opposite – stop and repeat. “I was made to” conveys a double meaning of I was forced to and I was created to. Either way, the phrase highlights the stark contrast between the minuscule sand fly and the immensity of the towering wave. “I was made to stand at the bottom of a cliff.” From her vantage point she witnesses the detritus of the beach, but debris turns liquid in its next iteration: “I was made to look at the place where the ocean and sky flowed into each other, the place where a wave swelled lightly.”

Lee’s flash revolves around the cosmic force of an advancing, crashing wave. From these apocalyptic moments, “I was made to know that after what may have been seconds or hours or days, something moved.” If the outer frame suspends time in moments of fantasy or science fiction, then the inner form shrinks to the least of insects. “My skin palpated by salt air. My heart alive as a sand fly.” Her prose poem concludes with similes of connectivity, epiphany, and release. “Alive as a beetle, a root, as the cedars on the cliff. As the net of fibres connecting, merging, humming under cedars, under the trees behind the cedars, the ones I couldn’t see but knew were there, the fibres pushing themselves into my feet on the shale beach, the connective tissues entering all bodies, each a part of the other.” Her flash of connectivity and connectivity of flesh make this the editors’ and reader’s choice.

Like Meyer’s “Family” and Lee’s “towering waves,” Ayelet Tsabari’s “Moonstruck” is set on a beach and implicates the German past. “Once, on a sandy beach in southern India, I met a German woman whose name I can’t recall.” The failure of memory, the surreal moon, and dead fathers haunt her story. Cynthia Flood’s “At the Drugstore” also focuses on family and concludes with “I’d have loved more detail.” Which is the crux of a flash: how much detail to include and how much to exclude.

Kristjana Gunnars’s “the miracles don’t show up” meditates lyrically on love and absence. “Walking in the sunset that had a sudden glow to it made him remember this was not the only time a light like that would form, but it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings.” This sudden glow that highlights the flash of a moment contrasts with an infinite number set in italics to convey the continuity between evanescence and eternity. The second sentence shifts from the third-person pronoun to the first and second, a change that universalizes the vision. “When I have looked at you, such a light could be there and all I can think is the many years, decades, we did not know each other and how those aeons of time without borders are a gulf that cannot be bridged, like dream interpretation. From seconds to centuries, minutes to millennia, the liminal flash phenomenon pinpoints the sudden glow and extends it to aeons. The flash is a dream interpretation that calls for further interpretation. Meyer’s and Mirolla’s clocks keep on ticking.

Bruce Meyer is the author of more than sixty books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, literary journalism, and literary criticism. He has had two national bestsellers, The Golden Thread: A Reader’s Journey Through the Great Books (2000) and Portraits of Canadian Authors (2016). He is twice winner of the E.J. Pratt Gold Medal and Prize for Poetry and the Gwendolyn MacEwen Prize for best poem. He was the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Barrie. He is professor of Poetry at Victoria College in the University of Toronto and professor of Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at Georgian College in Barrie.

The author of a clutch of novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections, Michael Mirolla describes his writing as a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home in Hamilton.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Guernica Editions (Nov. 1 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771837519
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771837514

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.