Love this, both the story and the exegesis. Brevity--and suggesting a far larger story within a few sentences--is always a challenge for me. Funny, though: I dropped a wins-his-wife-in-a-card-game tale into an essay in TriQuarterly once, though not nearly as economically told as yours. Nonfiction piece--a cop ex-con in Russia's Far North, whom we hired as a bodyguard in a reporting trip to a gulag-era gold mine, claimed he'd hit the jackpot in a night of gambling.
Love the microstory form you carry off so well. Your approach reminds me of some choice haiku advice a friend recently conveyed from Cor van den Heuvel, taking the already condensed form a step further (or back): "Write 1/2 the poem."
Love this, both the story and the exegesis. Brevity--and suggesting a far larger story within a few sentences--is always a challenge for me. Funny, though: I dropped a wins-his-wife-in-a-card-game tale into an essay in TriQuarterly once, though not nearly as economically told as yours. Nonfiction piece--a cop ex-con in Russia's Far North, whom we hired as a bodyguard in a reporting trip to a gulag-era gold mine, claimed he'd hit the jackpot in a night of gambling.
Love the microstory form you carry off so well. Your approach reminds me of some choice haiku advice a friend recently conveyed from Cor van den Heuvel, taking the already condensed form a step further (or back): "Write 1/2 the poem."