50 Word Stories: From the Special Issue Editor

For the last few months I read submissions for this special Stamp Stories edition of [PANK], and with each new submission, the realization came louder: writing stories in 50 words or less is not about condensing beginning, middle, and end into an amuse-bouche. It is not about taking a larger body of work and cutting until a smaller frame emerges. Writing Stamp Stories is about finding the heart in words.

Years ago Mud Luscious Press began our Stamp Stories venture, which, in short, was an attempt to connect authors and presses from around the widest indie lit swath by printing complete texts on postage stamp-sized cardstock and freely distributing them to one and all. Each new press that distributed Stamp Stories also sent us new authors to solicit, until, in the end, we connected forty presses and one-hundred stories, all of which are now collected in the newly released [ C. ] An MLP Stamp Stories Anthology.

So when I set to reading Stamp Story submissions for [PANK], I was looking for, and found, what I had sought previously in the one-hundred texts of [ C. ], stories willing to expose their hearts. Lindsay Stern, xTx, Ben Mirov, Shane Jones-all of the authors whose work made it into this final tiny-sized version of [PANK] understand the importance of flaying open their lines, holding ribcage and muscle apart to reveal the bleating within. They didn’t attempt to shrink or shortly recreate the heart, they simply showed it. What happens in all of these pieces is the need to tell the heart of the story, only the most crucial elements with the most indefatigable words, in the tightest of all spaces. In these texts, we are allowed to read the way it all works, underneath the underneath, where the heart is. In these texts, magic lies.