Quiet Pine Trees Microfiction

September 15, 2016 6:19 AM

Quiet Pine Trees is a twitter based stream of haunting and provocative micro-fiction by T.R. Darling. "Being brief isn’t enough. You can boil down a story to a sentence or two, but often you need context. If you need to convey a setting, like a fascist dystopia, or characterization, like a reluctant soldier, suddenly one or two sentences won’t fit. I often must resist the temptation to omit punctuation or fall back on abbreviation, like some kind of barbarian." Full Interview.

The choice selection of stories that made me look.

posted by srboisvert (6 comments total)

Oooooh, so lovely.
posted by Kitteh at 6:26 AM on September 15, 2016

Earlier generations called writers of "micro-fiction" "prose poets" or "Imagists." Félix Fénéon made a career out of writing his "faits-divers" or "novels in three lines."
posted by octobersurprise at 6:40 AM on September 15, 2016 [2 favorites]

If it's a twitter account why am I looking at a tumblr page with screenshots of a twitter post and then the entirety of the tweet reproduced in text underneath?

[the twitter account itself if you had the same thoughts]
posted by komara at 6:48 AM on September 15, 2016 [6 favorites]

If it's a twitter account why am I looking at a tumblr page with screenshots of a twitter post and then the entirety of the tweet reproduced in text underneath?

Fascist dystopias all begin with a single careless ctrl-c ctrl-v.

On the plus side you can cut and paste from the reproduced text underneath on the tumblr while the twitter hates you and anything you try to do.
posted by srboisvert at 7:02 AM on September 15, 2016

I enjoyed these. One minor drawback for me was that the succession of pieces of a roughly-similar length and oftentimes similar rhythm had a slightly numbing repetitive effect the more I read on. I see the author is planning a short book mixing new microfiction with expanded versions of some of these pieces: I can imagine a mixture like that working very well.
posted by misteraitch at 7:14 AM on September 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've been reading these for a while, and subjecting my twitter account to too-many retweets. I'll definitely buy that book when it comes out.
posted by Canageek at 9:04 AM on September 15, 2016