Thank You For Your Sperm

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Thank You For Your Sperm

Collected serious flash fiction 2009-2011 (excerpts). Absurd, Germanic, and Existentialist.

Other Works

The Serious Writer Occupies Wall Street [Flash Fiction] 1 year ago (Published)
100 Days And Nights 1000 Years Ago 1 year ago (Published)

Marcus Speh

Sample stories from my first short fiction collection, consisting of 80 stories altogether, written during 2009-2011—writing that has helped me find my voice. Also includes a long interview first published at Red Lemonade. Of these samples, "Rites of Spring" was nominated for a Million Writers award; "Cahier du Cinema" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best Of The Net award; "Four Fundamentalist Teenagers In Front Of A Metropolitan Railway Car" won a contest at Metazen; and "In The Nude" was also nominated for a Best Of The Net award. — To be published by MadHat Press in October 2012. Updates and details at http://bit.ly/TYFYS

Comments

Lucien Quincy Senna 5 October 2011 - 6:52am

Marcus, I have posted my interview questions on my site as Interview with Marcus Speh. I can do a call and response with you (as they say in gospel) since we are close in time zone. Let me know what you think of the questions and we can play with them.

Marcus Speh 8 October 2011 - 4:05pm

thank you, lucien...as i'm working away on my answers, can i say that i'm a little daunted by the (i suppose rather brilliant) interview with tsaurah litzky that i just read. i must admit that i understand very little of it. my inference is that i come (and write) from a very different background (evidence:

the houses in the photo stand from where the house of my ancestors stood for 520 years & 5 min from the house of the original Doctor Faustus, who was in 1507 headmaster in this town). ... i remember reading an interview with a writer once thinking: "gosh, what a bland guy. who's ever going to want to read these replies..." alas, it even changed my reading of his work (not to the positive). i could never get over what to me was an incredible flatness of expression when asked personal and professional questions. now, my fear is that compared to tsaurah, i will come across just like that: flat, bland and somehow out of it, but not in a good, not in a at-swim-two-birds kind of way. i'm just not a sexy new york city based writer of sexy stuff. instead, if anything i'm just stuffy...anyway, i'm used to dealing with my fears by plunging headlong into a loaf of bread (i don't recommend that one) so i'm going to go for it & thank you in advance. but don't expect a high litzky quotient. i will drop different names that few if any have heard of, and a few classical ones that everybody has heard of but wouldn't expect to ever hear of them again after harold bloom. or after high school. i read stefan zweig when i go to bed, and a little dostoyevsky when i feel despondent, and camus when i feel existential. i re-read the same books all over again (in addition to a gazillion other books which, in the age of the ebook, i don't even read anymore but skip and own only in the most fleeting, pixellated manner of owning). back to the typewriter now: the iron machine that still smells of something.

Luisa Brenta 4 October 2011 - 3:57pm

I am honored to have seen (or sometimes only sensed) the birth of some of these flashes of yours. Your voice is, indeed unique - and the voice of one of my favorite writers.

Marcus Speh 4 October 2011 - 6:35pm

thank you so much for your kind words, luisa, it's good to meet a fellow berlin writer here!

Michael Vagnetti 2 October 2011 - 1:29pm

I found myself interested in reading about your personal vision of the form of flash fiction: why you chose it, or how it chose you, other models, etc. Some sense of its vistas, and horizons - even though the works themselves, of course, delimit all these things. I'm not sure why I wanted some more critical, "detached" language like one usually finds in a collected edition. (You are always "on" here, right from the start; at the same time, I do actually believe in the work just beginning, like a concert does.) Is there a place for that in this collection? Would that be like a frame, or should you just paint right on the walls? Perhaps, someone else's words, in a foreword, or in the persona of F. Flaunt (?)

Marcus Speh 2 October 2011 - 4:12pm

...the other way to achieve that critical/detached language is perhaps via the author's annotations, which you can find e.g. at the end of Rites Of Spring, and The Schmock. I will eventually write such multiply bifurcated notes on genesis and ramifications for every piece of the collection. Does that give you some of what you're talking about? Otherwise I'm not a critic, and I don't even consider myself a flash fiction writer—this is just the way I began. Thanks for listening!

Michael Vagnetti 2 October 2011 - 8:24pm

Sure, you should carry on...I need to learn more about the form; I like to bring to the forefront how the art and its subject are about the form, you know? And I can't do that because I don't get the form vs a prose poem or longer fiction. My problem, really...for another thread...

Marcus Speh 3 October 2011 - 4:21am

do start that other thread and i'll be happy to engage! most of my earlier flash work could just as well be called "prose poem", it's only in the last year or so that the narrative quality of the story, written as it were on the palm of a hand or the back of a butterfly wing, has come to forefront for me. this made me realize once and for all that i'm not cut out to hone and do this art form for the rest of my life, which is why i've stopped writing flash. however, in my novel, i proceed from page to page very much in flash fashion using a "pointillistic" style as gardner called it. an example with a link to the longer gardner statement is here. i've thought about the change of form from flash to longer pieces almost as much as i thought, a while ago, about the change from one research area in particle physics to another: it is like looking for a bridge between worlds, but they're still part of a larger world, and when i found the bridge then i realized (in a field beyond art) that I could just as well let the bridge have found me.

— a more recent practical rather than theoretical comparison was made by ben loory in an interview with the new yorker. loory is a new star on the flash fiction sky. i don't agree with his assessment though...he praises "intensity, clarity and truth" of very short pieces. now, this does not lend itself to a critical perspective (since it's true for prose poems and poetry, too) but his point, if i get it, is that these three perspectives can get lost in longer fiction (which i don't think is true at all for good longer fiction).

Michael Vagnetti 3 October 2011 - 2:46pm

[new conversation here to discuss flash fiction.]

Marcus Speh 2 October 2011 - 2:21pm

Thank you, Michael, for the suggestion. In response to a publisher's inquiry what the "outline" of the collection is, I have actually written such a framing piece. Too early to say if it will work. I'm afraid it may appear too precious...Alfau, Borges, Cortazar do this (it almost sounds as if it was a specific quirk of Hispanic authors) but I will definitely run it by the publisher & perhaps put it up at Red Lemonade when I'm done. Thanks again for the interesting suggestion! (Also on behalf of my push alter ego, Finnegan Flawnt). ...

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